Today in Cyprus, Aphrodite's name is used to sell everything from car rentals to villas but in the pre-Christian era, she was called upon for a quite different reason: the hoards of pilgrims who came to her shrine would evoke her name before having intercourse with her temple maids. It was an ancient form of sex tourism.
‘No, no!’ you may cry. But yes, the multitudes came not only to worship and pay homage to the Goddess but to enjoy the riotous festivals (banned by the Roman emperor Constantine in 400 AD) in her name – where having sex with strangers was not only possible but obligatory. [...]
The same account is given in the monumental study of comparative religions The Golden Bough by James Frazer. "In Cyprus it appears that before marriage all women were formerly obliged by custom to prostitute themselves to strangers at the sanctuary of the goddess," he writes, adding that the same practices took place in Babylon, Byblos and Baalbek and in both Armenia and Turkey.
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