Sacred Prostitution: The Whore and the Holy One
Autor: Magia | Publicado: 2013-07-15T17:49:00+01:00







Sacred Prostitution: The Whore and the 
                  Holy One

                  


I was sent forth from the power,
and I have 
                  come to those who reflect upon me,
and I have been found 
                  among those who seek after me,
Look upon me, you who 
                  reflect upon me,
and you hearers, hear me.
You who are 
                  waiting for me, take me to yourselves
And do not banish me 
                  from your sight…


For I am the first and the last
I am the 
                  honored one and the scorned one,
I am the whore and the 
                  holy one…

I am the silence that is 
                  incomprehensible
and the idea whose remembrance is 
                  frequent.
I am the voice whose sound is manifold
and the 
                  word whose appearance is multiple.
I am the utterance of my 
                  name…

Excerpts from "The Thunder, Perfect 
                  Mind",THE NAG HAMMADI LIBRARY.Download HERE

So opens "The 
                  Thunder, Perfect Mind." This short tractate is part of the 
                  Nag Hammadi Library, a collection of mostly Gnostic 
                  writings from the third century CE, discovered in Egypt in 
                  1945. Scholar George W. MacRae calls "The Thunder, Perfect 
                  Mind" a revelation discourse. It is the proclamation of the 
                  great female I-Am. Throughout the piece this powerful voice 
                  utters apparent paradoxes in what seems more like a hymn or a 
                  poem than a discourse. In his introduction, MacRae comments 
                  that "in terms of religious tradition "The Thunder, Perfect 
                  Mind" is difficult to classify as it presents no distinctly 
                  Jewish, Gnostic, or Christian themes."

I believe "The 
                  Thunder, Perfect Mind" may represent or contain fragments of a 
                  religious tradition older than Judaism, far older than the 
                  classical period of Greek civilization, certainly older than 
                  Christianity and Gnosticism, a tradition that was no longer 
                  intact at the time "The Thunder, Perfect Mind" was written 
                  down. MacRae compares the tone of "The Thunder, Perfect Mind" 
                  to the Isis aretalogies, but he notes that "The Thunder, 
                  Perfect Mind" differs from the aretalogies in its insistent 
                  use of paradox and contradiction. 
I invite you to consider this possibility: If the 
                  voice of "The Thunder, Perfect Mind" echoes the voices of 
                  Isis, Ishtar and Inanna, goddesses who were once all powerful, 
                  who contained all paradox in a magnificent wholeness, then at 
                  the time that this voice lifted itself up she had to 
                  speak in paradox. The voice of "The Thunder, Perfect Mind" is 
                  the voice of a divine female power asserting her importance to 
                  a people who were already deeply ambivalent about her and 
                  their attraction to her, whose ancestors had been torn for 
                  centuries between honoring and scorning her. Even more, this 
                  female I-am knows that she is pleading with a people on the 
                  verge of forgetting who she is, becoming deaf to her wisdom, 
                  silencing her. Some 1,800 years have passed since the writing 
                  of "The Thunder, Perfect Mind", and our own time. We are only 
                  just beginning to hear again "this voice whose sound is 
                  manifold."

                  Once upon a time, so long ago that we only have 
                  fragments of 
     
     Sumerain and 
     Babylonian tablets, myths and our 
                  own dreams to tell us this story, the assertion "I am the 
                  whore and the holy one" would not have been a paradox at all. 
                  In ancient Sumer and Babylon, temple priestess/prostitutes of 
                  the goddess received the god-bearing stranger. Their sexual 
                  union was, for both participants, communion with the divine. 
                  In many ancient cultures, in order for the land to prosper and 
                  for a king to have legitimacy in the eyes of the people, he 
                  had to celebrate the hieros gamos (sacred marriage) 
                  with a priestess who represented the goddess. In Sumer, the 
                  people sang ecstatic, erotic hymns to encourage and celebrate 
                  the marriage of the shepherd-king Dumuzi with the goddess 
                  Inanna. Here’s a passage from the Sacred Marriage Rite 
                  translated by Samuel Kramer from the Gudea Cylinders written 
                  in Sumer around 3,000 BCE.

                  The King goes with lifted head to the holy lapHe goes 
                  with lifted head to the holy lap of Inanna,The King coming 
                  with lifted head,Coming to my queen with lifted 
                  headEmbraces the Hierdoule.

                  According to Jungian analyst Nancy 
                  Qualls-Corbett, author of 
     
     The Sacred Prostitute, the 
                  term hierdoule literally means sacred servant. It 
                  refers specifically to the priestess whose functions included 
                  sexual rites. 

                  Over time the enactment of the king’s symbolic 
                  marriage with the goddess probably became mere form and 
                  finally obsolete as Babylon and other societies became more 
                  stratified and war-like. Then military might, instead of 
                  mystical union with the goddess, conferred legitimacy on a 
                  ruler. In Babylon there was also a hierarchy of prostitutes 
                  from the high-ranking temple priestesses, the  entu and 
                  naditu, to the tavern or street whore called 
                  harimtu. It’s worth noting that in Babylonian religious 
                  texts, the goddess Ishtar identifies herself with the lower 
                  ranks of the street prostitutes, saying "When I sit in the 
                  entrance of a tavern, I, Ishtar, am a loving harimtu." 
                  In another Babylonian text Ishtar proclaims, "A prostitute 
                  compassionate am I." 

                  Isis began her long, illustrious life as a 
                  goddess in Egypt around 2,500 BCE. Worship of Isis spread all 
                  over the Mediterranean world and beyond. There was even a 
                  temple to Isis on the Thames River. In Rome, though she was 
                  regarded by the ruling class as an exotic (and suspect) 
                  Oriental import, she was worshipped well into Christian times. 
                  Like Jesus, Isis was a universal and merciful savior who paid 
                  no attention to social class or lineage. Like the Virgin Mary, 
                  she was a divine and devoted mother. She was also beloved by 
                  prostitutes. According to the wealth of lore surrounding her, 
                  during her long search for the body of her lover/brother 
                  Osiris, she was a prostitute in Tyre for ten years, perhaps a 
                  temple prostitute. She eventually found Osiris’ coffin in a 
                  pillar of a temple to Ashstarte in Byblos. Isis’s own temples 
                  were often located near brothels and had the reputation of 
                  being a meeting place for prostitutes. 

                  Isis, like Inanna and Ishtar, was all in one: 
                  whore, wife, mother, all holy. Apparently worshippers saw no 
                  contradiction, no need to exalt one aspect of the goddess (or 
                  divine feminine, if you prefer) and debase another. But 
                  something happens, some dis-integration. Listen again to the 
                  voice of "The Thunder, Perfect Mind."

                  I am the one whom they called Lifeand you have called 
                  Death.I am the one whom they call Lawand you have 
                  called Lawlessness.I am the one you have pursuedand I 
                  am the one whom you have seized.I am the one whom you have 
                  scatteredand you have gathered me together.

                  There are many theories about what might have 
                  caused the near total-eclipse of goddess worship (at least in 
                  the Western world) and I don’t want to address them today. I 
                  just want to observe that she (whoever, whatever she is) seems 
                  to be re-emerging. It is time to gather together her scattered 
                  archetypes. In her virgin mother aspect, she never completely 
                  disappeared, at least among Roman Catholics. I can’t help 
                  wonder if the tragic adulation/hounding of women like the late 
                  Princess of Wales doesn’t have something to do with the 
                  absence of a goddess to adore in the predominantly Protestant 
                  cultures of the United States and Britain. I believe that in 
                  order to heal our individual and collective psyches we need 
                  the divine feminine not only as the holy mother or the virgin 
                  or as a disembodied divine Wisdom, but as the holy whore, the 
                  "prostitute compassionate".

                  It is probably not practical or possible to 
                  reconstruct temples to the goddess for the practice of sacred 
                  prostitution (although some of us might like to). But we can 
                  begin to reclaim the archetype of the holy whore—or to put it 
                  more colorfully, we can embrace the sacred prostitute within. 
                  We can also examine our own and our culture’s attitude towards 
                  secular prostitutes, the descendants of the harimtu 
                  with whom Ishtar identified herself. The virgin/whore 
                  dichotomy, with all women implicitly forced to one side or the 
                  other of the good girl/bad girl divide, has harmed us all, 
                  women and men. If the virgin/whore dichotomy stands, then our 
                  souls and our bodies, our spirituality and our sexuality also 
                  remained divided, even at war.

                  As noted, Inanna, Ishtar, Isis and other great 
                  goddesses played all parts: wife, mother, lover, and in their 
                  completeness-in-themselves, also virgin. (As an aside, it is 
                  worth observing that the patriarchal classical Greeks divided 
                  these archetypal roles between many goddesses so that no one 
                  female deity had the kind of power Zeus wielded.) Though in 
                  Isis’s case, her lover is her brother, the goddess often bears 
                  a son-lover. The son begets himself as is technically the case 
                  in Christian doctrine, the son and the father being different 
                  aspects of one god. But in our culture we can’t quite grasp 
                  the concept of divine sexual passion. So Mary conceives 
                  mystically through an angelic messenger, and her virginity is 
                  taken literally as intactness of the hymen. We do not allow 
                  her to experience sexual ecstasy.

                  Although we profess to believe that Jesus became 
                  incarnate to share our human nature, in all its joy and 
                  sorrow, we do not allow him sexual expression or freedom. We 
                  know that a lot of women followed him (although they are not, 
                  officially, acknowledged as disciples), chief among them Mary Magdalen, the first witness of his resurrection. We are not 
                  supposed to speculate on the nature of his relationship with 
                  Mary Magdalen, although of course we have for centuries.

                  It is interesting, in terms of archetype, that so 
                  many women in the Gospel are named Mary, at least five, 
                  possibly six. No doubt Mary was an ubiquitous first century 
                  name. But it almost seems as if all those scattered parts of 
                  the goddess—virgin, wife, mother, sister, lover, whore—want to 
                  come back under the name Mary. The name Mary in Hebrew is 
                  Miriam (also the name of Moses’ sister) a name rich in 
                  meanings, among them bitterness, rebellion and the salty brine 
                  of tears, of the womb, of the sea.

                  The virgin/whore dichotomy demands that Mary Magdalen serve as the whore counterpart to 
     Mary the Virgin, 
                  although there is no scriptural evidence that Mary Magdalen 
                  was a prostitute. Also, according to the lore that has accrued 
                  to her over the ages, she was a repentant prostitute, 
                  turned from her sinful ways by Jesus who heals and forgives 
                  her. And so, ironically, despite her reputation (deserved or 
                  not) Mary Magdalen doesn’t get to experience sexual ecstasy 
                  either. Regarding Mary Magdalen as a repentant, redeemed 
                  prostitute does nothing to heal the split between spirituality 
                  and sexuality, for in that scenario she does not integrate her 
                  sexuality with her new found life of the spirit, she merely 
                  renounces it. 

                  Nickie Roberts, a former prostitute and 
                  prostitutes’ rights advocate writes in her book 
     
     Whores in 
                  History: "To this day the whore stigma affects all women, 
                  whether or not we subscribe to the good girl/bad girl 
                  dichotomy which can be traced back to the beginning of 
                  patriarchal thought. Any woman can be branded a whore if she 
                  steps out of line."

                  Until the holy whore archetype is honored, there 
                  will be a whore stigma. Women will be divided against each 
                  other and themselves, and we will all be at odds with our own 
                  human nature. As a practical counterpart to archetypal 
                  integration, I’d also suggest that we advocate for 
                  decriminalization of prostitution. However women (and men) 
                  enter what is called the oldest profession, whether as victims 
                  of circumstance or by choice, whether they practice in a 
                  manner that we view as sacred or profane (another aspect of 
                  the same dichotomy) they do not deserve to be persecuted or 
                  prosecuted.

                  I’d like to leave you today with this proposition 
                  (pun more or less intended): Maybe Mary Magdalen, whom 
                  according to Gnostic texts Jesus loved above all others, was a 
                  whore, a real and unrepentant whore. Though there is no 
                  scriptural evidence that she was, scripture also makes no 
                  mention of her father, brother, husband or son. Without male 
                  protection and support her options for livelihood were few. 
                  The Gospel (Luke 8) indicates that she (and other female 
                  followers) may have provided Jesus with financial support for 
                  his ministry. They had to have some source of income. Why not 
                  the oldest profession? (Thanks are due to Judith Marcus for 
                  helping me develop this line of thought.)

                  Maybe Jesus, who had no tolerance for hypocrites 
                  and who was not exactly a proponent of conventional family 
                  values, loved Mary Magdalen just as she was. Perhaps he had 
                  the wisdom and the greatness to recognize in her the 
                  prostitute compassionate, the whore and the holy one. 
                  

                  
Thank you all for listening today. If anyone 
                  is interested, I have a bibliography available.
May the compassion of the Holy Whore be with you 
                  and flow through you for the healing of us all. Amen and 
                  Blessed Be.

                  
Bibliography:

Cunningham, Elizabeth. Holy Whore, a 
                    novel-in-progress, Volume II of The Magdalen Trilogy. 
                    Research for the novel inspired this sermon. Volume I, 
                    Daughter of the Shining Isles, is complete. I am 
                    seeking a major publisher for the Trilogy. Watch for 
                    it!
                    
The Nag Hammadi Library. Robinson, James, M., 
                    General Editor. San Francisco: Harper and Row Publishers, 
                    1978.
                    
Pomeroy, Sarah B. Goddesses, Whores, Wives and 
                    Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity. New York: Schocken 
                    Books, 1975.
                    
Qualls-Corbett, Nancy. With a foreword by Marion 
                    Woodman. The Sacred Prostitute: Eternal Aspects of the 
                    Feminine. Toronto: Inner City Books, 1998.
                    
Roberts, Nickie. Whores in History: Prostitution in 
                    Western Society. London: Harper-Collins, 1993.
                    
Spector, Susan. The New Seminary Study Guide. 
                    Greenwich, CT: Marcus, 1997.
                    
Stone, Merlin. Ancient Mirrors of Womanhood: A 
                    Treasury of Goddess and Heroine Lore from Around the World. 
                    Boston: Beacon Press, 1984.&nbsp;


Fonte: http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/other_news/ishtar.htm