Religion has had at best an ambivalent attitude toward human sexuality. All religions recognize the value of sexual union between a man and a woman in a mutually committed relationship and ritually recognized through some sort of rite of marriage. Beyond that type of sexuality, most other forms have received more or less harsh condemnations and proscriptions. Thus, sacred prostitution, or providing sexual acts to strangers as a religious act or in exchange for a donation to a religious organization has had very limited acceptance and much more condemnation.
Where we have record of sacred prostitution it has occurred in association with the older pagan fertility goddesses of the ancient Near East. Since most of the commentators, especially those found in the Bible, have condemned the practice, the accuracy of their description of the practice should be taken with some skepticism. In the Hebrew Bible (Tanach), the term for a servant of a temple who would provide a sexual act to a...
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Bibliography
Apulius. (1962). The golden ass (W. Adlington, Trans.). New York: Collier Books. (Original work published 2nd century CE).
Budin, S. L. (2008). The myth of sacred prostitution in antiquity. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Greenberg, D. E. (1988). The construction of homosexuality. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
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Larson, P. (2010). Sacred Prostitution. In: Leeming, D.A., Madden, K., Marlan, S. (eds) Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-71802-6_600
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