Note 3 — KASBI

The dedication of girls to temples and religious prostitution was by no means confined to India but is a common feature of ancient civilisation. The subject has been mentioned by Dr. Westermarck in The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, and fully discussed by Sir James Frazer in Attis, Adonis, Osiris. The best known and most peculiar instance is that of the temple of Istar in Babylonia. “Herodotus says that every woman born in that country was obliged once in her life to go and sit down in the precinct of Aphrodite and there consort with a stranger. A woman who had once taken her seat was not allowed to return home till one of the strangers threw a silver coin into her lap and took her with him beyond the holy ground. The silver coin could not be refused because, since once thrown, it was sacred. The woman went with the first man who threw her money, rejecting no one. When she had gone with him and so satisfied the goddess, she returned home, and from that time forth no gift, however great, would prevail with her. In the Canaanitish cults there were women called kedēshōth, who were consecrated to the deity with whose temple they were associated, and who at the same time acted as prostitutes.”3 Other instances are given from Africa, Egypt and ancient Greece. The principal explanation of these practices was that the act of intercourse, according to the principle of sympathetic magic, produced fertility, usually of the crops, though in the Babylonian case, Dr. Westermarck thinks, of the woman herself. Several instances have been recorded of people who perform the sexual act as a preliminary or accompaniment to sowing the crops,4 and there seems little doubt that this explanation is correct. A secondary idea of religious prostitution may have been to afford to the god the same sexual pleasures as delighted an earthly king. Thus the Skanda Purāna relates that Kārtikeya, the Hindu god of war, was sent by his father to frustrate the sacrifice of Daksha, and at the instigation of the latter was delayed on his way by beautiful damsels, who entertained him with song and dance. Hence it is the practice still for dancing-girls who serve in the pagodas to be betrothed and married to him, after which they may prostitute themselves but cannot marry a man.5 Similarly the Murlis or dancing-girls in Marātha temples are married to Khandoba, the Marātha god of war. Sometimes the practice of prostitution might begin by the priests of the temple as representatives of the god having intercourse with the women. This is stated to have been the custom at the temple of Jagannāth in Orissa, where the officiating Brāhmans had adulterous connection with the women who danced and sang before the god.6