Holy “Hookers” To Stride Out?
Part One.
James Warwick
Guided by your rented driver, your Caddy glides through a new and elegant part of the city, doing its quiet big-tires flip-flop sound over the asphalt road-joints. Beyond the deep grass borders of the boulevard, a line of low white-columned buildings glisten in the street lights. Above, each has the neon sign of a goddess -“Venus”, “Ishtar”, “Kali”, with bright letters and a flashing, moving logo or figure to beckon customers. You see those customers come and go from their sedans. You haven’t been around for a year or two.
“They brought gambling here?” you ask your driver. “Heck, no,” he replies.”Them’s the new love temples. I’d call them whorehouses,” he laughs. Then you remember the news stories you read. And that it all started with a vision, a dream, propagated by rock bands, feminists, and internet brain-stormers. Some visions start that way. There could have been another vision….. like this one.
An American President is seen in the sleazy red-light district of Washington D.C. chatting casually to prostitutes. A curious news reporter relaxing off duty approaches a group surrounding the President and finds that Mr Bush is encouraging the ladies of the night to – follow Jesus Christ.
Hardly likely today? Certainly not in this present time of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr with his special investigation.
Yet more than one hundred years ago William Ewart Gladstone , Prime Minister of England, was preaching in the streets of London. In fact, Gladstone singled out these ladies-of-the-night in particular to approach with his message. Nor were his motives suspect.
Gladstone was following a Biblical precedent. The scriptures teach that a prostitute is a person who needs a change of heart and the chance to follow God, just like any one else. A Jericho prostitute named Rahab, the Bible tells us, was a long ago ancestor of Jesus Christ. Rahab, in choosing to hide Jewish spies planning to report back on the military situation in Jericho, opted for the side of right and changed her life.
Widow Tamar, in another Bible account, acting as a prostitute, shamed Judah, scion of the tribe that bore his name. Yet she only assumed the disguise and actions of a prostitute to pressure him into fulfilling strict social obligations to her as a widow.
Jesus himself referred kindly to prostitutes who repented and changed their lives at the preaching of his cousin John the Baptist. Self-righteous religious officials had failed to recognise their own need to repent.
Today’s fashionable world pays little attention to the idea of “saving” prostitutes. The smash-hit movie “Titanic” does not mention that a noted victim of the sinking was Reverend Bateman who had spent his life in Florida sharing the gospel and working with the “wayward girls” who were the prostitutes of Florida, as well as setting up a rescue home for them. A modern Hollywood movie would be quite likely to cast a slur on the work of such a man. (When the earthquake crash of falling buildings rumbles along the San Bernardino valley, Hollywood may remember that its moral attitude is not the only fault it embraces – the lips of the nearby San Andreas fault are sealed only for the moment. A recent earthquake in California destroyed several pornographic movie studios, giving producers of such movies cause to shiver. Divine judgement? Almost certainly.)
As the tocsin begins to sound for the close of time itself, sex-for-pay vice rides high with a neon glow in the minds of many of the public. That glow becomes a flashpoint of false virtue in the writings of a decadent group, among the artistic community, and among internet intellectuals.
Such are feminist writers who have “re-discovered” a few paintings on ancient walls, as well as some tiny feminine statues. With a brush more inventive than many evolution scientists, but with similar imaginative suppositions, they have re-invented the past to their own liking. In their fantasy of ancient feminist societies they claim women were grouped to control men. This control ensured, among other things, that children were never identified with any particular father.
Such a luminous feminist invention of once world-wide matriarchy gives off a strange glow in that it lacks any significant historical written evidence – that is, unless the recent spate of feminist invention is called ” historical written evidence”.
In fact, the alleged objectivity of the scientific age is no barrier to those who speak of a once matriarchal world. They also write lovingly of the motive force behind such an imagined golden age: the “Great Mother Goddess” who is known by many names (according to the geographic location of the worshippers) – Isis, Astarte, Ishtar, Kali, and Aphrodite. Further, modern followers of “the Goddess” see both ancient and modern feminine attractions and sex-for-hire as a way of controlling men.
Even anti-feminist writer Camille Paglia, touring strip clubs, agrees with them, and jubilantly notes the power over men that strippers exude, and the reverence they attract.
Ancient temple prostitution, as part of matriarchy, is now seen as a noble example for modern retail sex to follow. This tide of recent writing here contradicts old-line feminism, that usually sees sex-for-hire as a male plot to subordinate innocent and victimised women. An example of the “new angle” is work by internet writer “Bestia Mortale”. Her pen-name alone – Mortal Beast- attacks the Christian concept of the immortal soul of Man, who is higher than the animals. Her lush prose purrs ignorantly , but nostalgically, of a lost age. She sighs over a hard working labourer as he slides silver coins from his pay into a dish and consorts with a “sacred” prostitute in a luxurious temple,for pleasure- and as an act of worship.
Western writers like “Bestia Mortale” that praise the concept of “sacred prostitution” neglect today’s tragic reality of thousands upon thousands of young girls sold in to the sex trade in Asia, Africa, and even Eastern Europe. For such tortured children, often only Christian missions will provide an escape. A roundabout way for the sheltered scribes of sanctified lust to avoid the modern slur of the word “prostitute” is to employ the term “sex worker”. The next move on their part is to make the banal and demeaning act of retail sex into an act of worship; and to elevate the status of the “sex worker” to that of a priestess – or even priest – of sensuality devoted to serving the Goddess – and the customer. Even more importantly – the customer, by paying and participating, is also serving the Goddess.
A challenge remains for the sellers of sacred prostitution.. Spreading the word of the elevated status of prostitutes is difficult. A few steps can be taken in affecting the academically-inclined by discussions of the positive origins of the word “whore”. Some writing dwells on this, but it is not enough to sway the minds of the general population. One more potent method of promoting so-called “sacred prostitution” is to work through the arena of popular music. Sensuality must be given a touch of religious expression. Whether it’s the “mood of the age” or a conspiracy directed by top ranking gurus of the music industry, makes no difference.
The total drive is in the hands of those beings, earthly or spiritual, who would fight God. As if to counter scriptural mention of the Fall of Man, Canadian songstress Sarah McLauchlan murmurs, “We are born innocent.” On trash diva Madonna’s hand in close-up a clear black occultic dragon logo appears; and on the sweater of Natalie Imbruglia as she sings “Torn” a dragon moves in time with the singer. Behind the Spice girls in concert in Istanbul a giant logo depicting the face of an extra-terrestial grins and flickers behind the jerking sexuality of the British group. Is there a demonic force to account for their low-talent success?
All this musical insertion of occultism linked to sexuality is a likely stepping stone for the promotion of sacred prostitution. Any speculation that the celebrated British group the “Beatles” was so named to relate to Egyptian scarab symbols seems irrelevant by comparison.
In sum, the infiltration of popular music which will make sexuality a pagan religious topic is, and will continue to be, both dramatic and obvious. As teenage offspring view or listen to the rhythms of an ancient evil on modern electronic devices, untold numbers of parents may be unaware.
Ancient evil it is, to be sure. It comes from the civilizations of the Tigris-Euphrates area that loom now as vast scattered stone blocks and red dirt (and the source of mummified wickedness) in movies like “The Exorcist.” It comes from pre-Christian, pre-Exodus times, before God drew the Jews, an oppressed slave people, from the slime brick pits of Egypt. He commanded them, according to Biblical accounts, in no way to imitate the shrine prostitution of the people they would destroy, and then replace.Contrary to the feminist vision of a few old men with staffs in hand crushing ritual prostitution and its unvirginal “free spirits”, it was that army of empowered vagabonds, the Jews, which fulfilled the task – by divine commandment.
In today’s more “matriarchal” society there are spectacular personages who stand for the “free spirits” of cult sex. Even if less effective than popular music in representing the idea of sacred prostitution, a few eccentric figures – such as Margo St. James – are gluttons for publicity. Her organisation – COYOTE – short for “Call off Your Old Tired Ethics” presents ethics that are older and infinitely more tired than the vibrant offer of Christian re-birth.
The victory that she had in a sexual harassment suit against a Fortune 500 company which formerly employed her might never have happened had there been no legal framework – primarily a Christian one – to support her. Like many theoreticians of the sacred sex movement, she has a university education- yet she fails to recall that a movement that she promotes is not so modern. It is more a presentation of “the oldest profession”, with a tired range of sociological catch-phrases about victimhood, blended with a sinister occult phraseology that debases true womanhood.
In agreement with her theories one group in the United States promotes a course of sacred prostitution with training in erotic delights, through dance, music, and sumptuous food. They claim that in the ancient religions, sex was seen as a sacrament. They wish to lure men and women into a sacred priesthood. Apparently they neglect the well-known study done by the secular magazine “Redbook” which found that monogamous and evidently Christian women were among all women, the happiest with their sex lives. Nor, presumably, have they read the “Song of Songs”, the Bible’s own manual for true love and sexual affection.
Many impartial expert claim that sacred prostitution reflects the chaotic behaviour of ancient gods. Such gods behaved in the manner of humans without too much self-control; their view of events led them into wild acts of passion, envy, and revenge.
Surviving societies that still maintain some traditions of sacred prostitution – such as that of India – are certainly not beacons for feminine freedom, favourable treatment of women, or their marital or economic prosperity. Never mind, the trendy feminists who promote sacred prostitution are not looking their way.
Is Divine sanction letting the wickedness of sacred or ritual prostitution grow to a head in the West? Will an upsurge of ritualistic popular music combined with the actions of “sacred sex worker” groups ease an ancient moral evil into the mainstream of our society? The mysterious location of the Star of prostitution- goddess Ishtar in the city of Winnipeg at the centre of Canada seems to provide a focus for sexual sin, as that city is now ranks as Canadian number one in the area of sexual assaults. Will widespread ritual prostitution follow?
Will it and other North American cities have the temples of lust that feminist dreamers construct in the air, and on the world-wide web?
Once God waited for the sin of various Canaanite groups to grow before allowing the Israelites to destroy them. It may be that the sin of sacred prostitution will have a last gasp to fulfil itself and appear in its true nature in North America. Then destruction will flame out across its flickering tinsel blend of perfume, sensual colours, alluring tunes, and mortal flesh and whispers.
Not part of that destruction will be – the forgiven army of one-time “sex workers” who responded to a call from Jesus Christ.
They may be briefly reminded of their collective past and remember it – although their God forgot.