Venus Erycina and her shrine
The fires of Venus Erycina temple’s flame were an important mark for navigators from and to Africa since the earliest times. The highest peak of Erice was the first Sicilian land which all the daring sailors would see after crossing the Channel of Sicily.
They would watch the top of the mountain. If a blue sky surrounded the top of the mountain the Venus Erycina was propitious. If fog would hid the top, to propitiate the angry goddess was necessary.
The temple of Venus Erycina was first built on a cylindrical rock whose slopes are steep and inaccessible. At the present there is the Norman Castle in that place.
The ancient Eryx
The ancient Eryx developed around the site of the altar and the sanctuary to the Goddess of the Sicans (the Bronze Age population of Sicily ).
Sicans were the founders of naturalistic worship. On the highest peak they built a small altar open to the sky, in the centre of a “themenos”, the holy enclosure of the goddess.
Later, Elymnians, Phoenicians and Carthaginians increased the fame of the shrine which became important in all the Mediterranean area.
Punics and their rites
In the same temple, Punics venerated their Astarte. A bowl inscribed by “a servant of Astarte Erycina” found in Carthage bears witness to the widespread reaches of her honouring.
Phoenicians and Carthaginians introduced in Sicily tipically oriental customs and rites, such as sacred prostitution. Perhaps, Cretans introduced these rites before, together with the keeping of flocks of doves and all the complicated symbology of the oriental forms of worship.
The mountain became the scene of pilgrimages of Phoenician and Carthaginian seafarers and later also of Greek and Roman travellers. Greeks venerated Aphrodite there. The shrine was enriched remarkably and the worship of the goddess spread to many areas of the Mediterranean.
In 415 B.C. Segestans, who had asked Athens for help against Selinus, showed the Athenian ambassadors the shrine and its treasure. Athenians were impressed by the riches kept there.
The shrine had been fortified to make it unconquerable. The whole outline of the rock had been surrounded by an ashlar wall. At the present time only a short stretch of this very ancient wall is left. It is in the western fissure of the rock, the “Daedalus’s bridge“.
The shrine had also a military importance to oppose the Greek expansion in the west Sicily.
Rituals at the Venus Erycina temple
The treasure of the shrine grew richer and richer thanks to the donations of the believers. They were votive offerings of any kind, such as sacred vases or statues. The ceremonies in honour of the goddess, celebrated by some virgins consacrated to her, grew more and more important. They attracted large crowds of pilgrims of every race and language.
Anagogic and Katagogic
The ram, symbol of fertility, and the doves were sacred to Astarte. Large flocks of doves, bred inside the sacred enclosure of the shrine, flew around its wall all around. By mid Agoust they flew away towards Lybia, Carthage, or probably towards Trapani dovecote. So started the Anagogic celebrations. This was as offering for safe navigation and thanks for safe journeys.
Nine days after their departure, the doves would come back to the shrine in Erice. The white doves were led by a red one, symbolizing the same Astarte. Fluttering around, they would arrive to the high walls of the shrine. So the Katagogic feasts started in a magic atmosphere and scent of incense. We can still see doves flying over the walls of the castle.
Why doves?
From pagan times dove has been widely a symbol of conjugal affection and constancy, because of the affectionate mating habits and constancy of the species. On ancient monuments, gems, and coins of Assyria, Libya, Mycenae, and Phoenicia representations of two doves have been recognized. They probably had some religious significance in the symbolism of the worship to the great goddess of nature, venerated by the Phoenician population under the name of Astarte.
Dove represents the embodiment of a divinity, a representation of a goddess in a bird.
Also the Greek goddess Aphrodite and the Roman goddess Venus Erycina were both symbolically represented by doves. The doves represented feminine fertility and procreation. In Rome and throughout the Empire, Venus was often in statues with a dove resting in her hand or on her head.
Plus, the Dove was, by far, one of the most important birds in the Bible. It is usually the symbol of the Holy Spirit.
Sacred love at the temple of Venus Erycina
The temple of the Goddess of Love named as Astarte, Aphrodite or Venus Erycina, had sacred sexual priestesses serving her and performing her rites, the hierodule.
In ancient Greece and Anatolia the term hierodule meant “temple or female slave”. The temple slave in the service of a specific deity has often been misinterpreted as implying religious prostitution, which was excused on the basis that the sexual service provided was in honour of the deity.
By the way, they were not slaves but empowered priestesses choosing to serve their Goddess as sacred sexual vessel through which to fully experience the physical and emotional Love of Goddess.
A task of the Jerodule was also to keep the fire of the altar constantly lit, which was to serve as a signal for the ships of passage and as a reminder for the sailors; for this reason the Venus Ericina was also called Euploia, that is, a tutelary deity of good navigation.
The Ierodule had the obligation to practice sex with all the wayfarers who climbed up there. From an early age, they came from all over Sicily.
They had a great value. They said that the sacred sexual priestess could stop the warring between people with her presence and with her love-making. None entering into the full experience of Love with Goddess could ever be in a place of violence within themselves and with another.
Someone experiencing such a profound and changing experience would honour all women as her mirror and all men as the reflection of her Beloved.
The sacred marriage
In the ancient Near East sacred prostitution, which is most likely a misnomer, was common as a form of sacred marriage.
In Sumer and later in Babylon, religious rituals involved sacred sexuality in the form of the Sacred Marriage or hieros gamos.
The symbolic marriage took place between the fertility goddess Inanna/Ishtar and the shepherd god, Dumuzi. In this act, the high priestess of Inanna would have intercourse with either the high priest or the king of the city.
Through the sexual act, divine fertile energy was released on the land ensuring good crops and productive herds.
Sacred prostitution involved temple priestesses of Inanna/Ishtar having ritual sex with male visitors to the temple, again releasing the divine fertile energy.
For a long period of time the Sacred Marriage was an important fertility ritual in ancient Mesopotamia.
The ritual became widespread in other societies including Babylon and Greece.
For millennia, numerous cultures across the Mediterranean performed such ritual.
The sacred priestnesses
Inanna, who later transformed into the Akkadian goddess Ishtar, the Phoenician Astarte and later still as the Greek goddess Aphrodite, was the goddess of love, sex, beauty and fertility.
The temple priestesses were the representatives in physical form of the Goddess. They embodied the very essence of the Goddess in sexual union with those who came to pay for the privilege.
Even if ancient priestesses were involved in ritual sexuality, even if they received offerings for their temples they were not prostitutes, and cannot be considered as such, but devotees worshipping their goddess, by embodying them.
The Greek historian Herodotus wrote about a form of worship of the goddess in the ancient Babylonia that compelled a woman, once in her lifetime, to offer herself up to a stranger.
The ritual would proceed as follows: the woman would arrive at the temple and wait for the first man to cast any coin into her lap and speak the sacred words. Whoever the man was, whether King or Shepherd, young or old, she had to have sex with him. Refusing was a sin. The money given to her was holy and remitted to the temple.
An attempt to interpret the ancient rites
The meaning of the rites is hard to figure today in the light of two millennia of Christianity.
In the pre-Christian view, sex is sacred simply because it’s part of life, or the origin of life.
The divine energy released during the sexual rituals in ancient Babylon is similar to Tantra.
Tantra indeed is concerned with elevating sexual energy within the body as a means of communion with the divine. In Tantra the most powerful energy is sexual.
If we bring the energy up, sex opens the heart.
The sex organs symbolise cosmic powers. The sexual union of male and female may simbolyze the union of a goddess and a god, or god and the soul. It is the union of masculine and feminine, earth and sky, body and spirit.
Moreover, gravity is the name we give to the force of mutual attraction that holds the cosmos together. Spiritual teachers throughout the ages have pointed out that magnetic pull is just another name for cosmic Love.
The Hieros gamos or sacred marriage, when enacted in a symbolic rite, allows the human participants to assume the identity of the deities.
When sex allows to access peak experiences of love, oneness, and healing, then is sacred. If through sex it is possible a reunion of body and spirit, a reunion with the Divine, it is sacred. When sexual union catapults us into higher consciousness and wholeness it is sacred.
Source Wikipedia