The history of the Temple of Ishtar

In Her Temples in many lands from Egypt to Assyria to Babylon to Crete to India, in Rome and Greece and many Celtic lands, Her Temples had Sacred Priestesses who were also called Prostitutes by those of body denial religions. Her worship was in the arms of the Priestess who embodied and represented The Goddess(s). These worshipers are sometimes known as pagans.

A fundamental difference in the concept of worship is important to note: 

In the Temples of the old ways people would go to the temple TO BE WORSHIPPED not to worship. 

Women would go to the temple to serve the Goddess to embody Her, to represent Her, to be worshipped as Her. Women would spend a day, or a week, or a year serving at the Temple as a priestess, as a sacred Prostitute, as a whore in service to the Goddess. 

There they would be worshipped as the incarnation of the Goddess, as The Goddess Herself.

Men would come to Her Temple TO BE WORSHIPPED. Men would be welcomed and served by the Priestesses and men would represent the divine male principal, the Horned One, the Sacred Bull, The God. Men would come to the temple to give their love and passion to The Goddess, and would receive the passion, love, and affection of The Goddess.

But some three millennia ago there came monotheists who refused Her Worship preferring instead to be diminished in body and spirit. They called Her, "The Whore of Babylon, who leads men into fornication." They called our sacred sexuality "sin," and cast shame on Her sacred Priestesses. They held up a "virgin" as the ideal that women should imitate instead of the sacred Goddess that they had always held as the most sacred image of Woman. This is essentially the state of things in the modern world.

The two principal deities of ancient Babylon were Baal and Ishtar. Baal was the god of war and the elements and Ishtar the goddess of fertility - both human and agricultural. These two deities have roots going back before Babylon to Nimrod at Babel and to Assyria. Through the ages they were imported into other nations and under different names but always retaining the same basic characteristics. 

Baal was also called Bel, Baalat, Molech, Merodach, Mars and Jupiter, and was frequently represented as a bull. Ishtar was also called Aphrodite, Astarte, Ashtoreth, Cybele or Sybil, Diana, Europa, Isis, Semiramis and Venus. The two main elements in the worship of Baal were fire and human sacrifice, usually children.

Ishtar was worshipped via offerings of produce and money as well as though fornication with temple prostitutes. It is this last characteristic that helps make the tie between religious Babylon and kings and merchants. 

In his book The Secret of Crete, H.G. Wunderlich reports that before marriage, every woman in Babylon was required to go to the temple of Ishtar and lie with a stranger. We have a similar report from Gerhard Herm in his book, The Phoenicians (1) , where women in the Canaanite cities of Tyre, Sidon and Byblos were required to become prostitutes for a day and give themselves to foreign guests during the spring festival. This festival survives today in the name of "Easter", which is derived from the word "Ishtar". Note that the women were to prostitute themselves with strangers or foreigners. In ancient times, the foreigners in these cities were mostly composed of traveling merchants and political dignitaries. In the third century A.D. the historian Eusebius described the patrons of these temples in this way: "It was a school of godlessness for those dissipated men, who had ruined their bodies in the pursuit of luxuriousness. The men were soft and effeminate, were no longer men; they had betrayed the honor of their sex; they believed they must worship their god with impure lust."