Sacred Prostitutes: a jaw-dropping story

Naiara Leão
4 min readJan 9, 2018
Barbie Aphrodite

“The most shameful of the customs among the Babylonians is this: It is necessary for every local woman to sit in the sanctuary of Aphrodite once in life to “mingle” with a foreign man.”

The sentence above, from Herodotus, leaped out to my eyes in the middle of a reading in a way that it was impossible to move on without thinking about it. Is Herodotus saying that women were forced into…

Naiara Leão

Nomad. PhD student of Religion, early Christianity and Women's and Gender Studies. Follow my IG @academicanomad