The Sex Cult of Venus

Today the name ‘Venus’ conjures images of the little planet you can see in the clear night’s sky. You might even get the vision of a Botticelli-hewn beauty breezing in atop a seashell, or any other renaissance renderings – Titian, Velasquez et al. Yet the ancient Roman goddess was once much more than a mere picture of prettiness. An incarnation of earlier eastern and Hellenic deities, Venus was reprised in so many roles that during her heyday she would’ve been visiting the heavens’ psychiatrist for hourly sessions. Yet it was during the tenure of Julius Caesar that this theologically schizophrenic image met her own renaissance; the subject of a huge number of temples, statues and cults. Caesar even believed she was his natural ancestor, and built part of his famous Roman Forum in her honour. So who was Venus, where did she come from – and how did she spark one of the most feverish cults in ancient Rome?

An Incarnation of an Incarnation

Venus was far from an original concept when Caesar began his infatuation. Some form of the goddess had been swimming around in the ancient world as far back as 4000 BC, in the dusty city-states of the 'cradle of civilization', Mesopotamia. During the Uruk Period (Circa 4000 – 3100 BC), Inanna became one of the most important focal points for the Sumerian people. Representing sexual love, fertility and war, Inanna played a vital role in many of the famous Sumerian epics – most notably in that of Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, in which she transfers her favour and hegemony from the courts of Aratta to those of Uruk.

Inanna would then be more famously incarnated as the Akkadian deity Ishtar; a barely-clothed symbol for sex and war. As well as bloodthirsty calls for violence in the underworld, Ishtar was famed for her many lovers, several of whom met a fatal end as a result of their dalliances with her.

Indeed, the prominent 19th century writer Donald A. Mackenzie equated Ishtar, and her Semitic equivalent Astarte, with their Greek incarnation Aphrodite – noting that both women were ‘as cruel as they were wayward.’ Mackenzie believes there is a direct link between Tammuz, the unfortunate god who succumbed to Ishtar’s charms, and Adonis, the famous Greek god who died following his affair with Aphrodite. Aphrodite was one of Greece’s most popular deities – yet she was not even the direct forebear of Rome’s Venus. That honour fell to the Etruscans, the forebears of the Roman civilization, who appropriated their own version of Aphrodite in Turan, a goddess of love and vitality who is constantly partnered with her young lover Atunis.

Practices

Worship of these ancient goddesses involved a lot more than just offering up prayers and thoughts. Entire cults and daily routines abounded in their honour, with many civilizations forming the basis of their family units around them. Inanna and Ishtar’s influence in the Mesopotamian world was particularly enveloping: Uruk was known as the ‘town of the courtesans’, and the high priestess at a temple dedicated to either of the two deities would choose a young man with whom to celebrate the Akitu, or new year, which fell every spring Equinox.

This would involve a Hieros Gamos – later known as ritual prostitution – where a child would be conceived in Ishtar or Inanna’s glory. This would later become a ceremony in which all couples would attempt to achieve a mass conception on the same day – useful to the unborn child, as it would be born in the height of winter, when both parents would traditionally be in the home much more often.

Historians of antiquity like Herodotus (484 – 425 BC) and Strabo (63 BC – 21 AD) would later try to distance their Hellenistic cultures from the perceived barbarian acts of the Near East, and cited a myriad occasions of ritual prostitution from Assyria, to the Levant and even to the north African Carthaginian Empire. However this can be dismissed as nothing more than cultural jingoism, as the Greek world took to the practice with as much, if not more, zeal than any other ancient culture. Cotytto was a goddess of Thracian, Illyrian and Dacian origin whose calling was the safeguard of prostitutes, many of whom surrounded the empire’s hundreds of temples to Aphrodite known as her ‘priestesses’. In fact, Aphrodite was very openly known as the goddess of prostitutes, and her priestesses were famed for their work in all corners of ancient Greece, with evidence for such acts having been found in Cyprus, Corinth and Cnidus – the latter of which's temple acted as a kind of ancient red light district for sailors weary from travelling the Mediterranean.

Caesar's Venus

It was Rome, however, who really took to Aphrodite’s image and ran with it. Like most other Roman deities, Venus had a number of epithets with which she carried out a wide variety of roles. Among these were the mundane, such as Venus Felix – ‘Lucky Venus’ – who occupied the areas around Rome’s Via Sacra; its main road.

Yet many more incarnations found themselves on the racier side of religion, for example the mildly ludicrous Venus Kallipygos – ‘Venus of the Pretty Bottom’ – whose image of a woman looking sultrily at her bare behind was hugely popular initially in Syracuse, but eventually throughout the empire. Venus Erycina – ‘Venus from Eryx’ – who represented impure love, and had a temple dedicated to her on Capitoline Hill. She was the goddess of prostitutes, and she was worshipped through her priestesses in ritual sex inside the temple. Strangely, Venus Verticordia – ‘Venus the Changer of Hearts’ – was supposed to dissuade from vice, and she was conversely worshipped through via virgin priestesses; her followers abstaining from sexual activity.

Yet by 46 BC, Julius Caesar had announced the cult of Venus Genetrix, ‘Mother Venus’, who was worshipped via a temple in Caesar’s grand forum complex in Rome. Genetrix was originally a sculpture by the 5th century BC Athenian sculptor Callimachus, and stood in a pose by which her robe fell just enough to expose her left breast whilst simultaneously retaining her feminine figure. She also held the apple won in the Judgement of Paris, an important episode in the Greek Trojan War myth. Caesar would then revamp this much-replicated image by declaring Venus Genetrix the mother of his Julia gens; being as he believed the mother of the Trojan hero Aeneas. Her temple was a lavish marble affair, with eight columns on the façade, on a raised podium reached via two lateral staircases. It was burnished with gems, statues and famous paintings, many of which featured himself and Cleopatra, the Egyptian queen with whom Caesar conducted a grand affair – which would eventually lead to Egypt’s subjugation. There is little evidence of the style of worship at Caesar’s temple, but many scholars believe ritual prostitution to have been commonplace.

Thus, thanks to Caesar, the cult of Venus/Aphrodite/Inanna had come round full circle – from the sandy cities of the Middle East to the temperate temples of Rome. And despite what Roman chroniclers may have said about the proliferation of religious prostitution in their empire, a goddess of sexual love, worshipped through ritual sex, is one of the many constants of the ancient world. The advent of Christianity and its relatively puritanical views on sex all but killed off the sex cult, but during the world's polytheistic zenith it was one of the firmest pillars of society. Indeed, Venus' image of sexual beauty, in reposed demur and partially exposed eroticism, is as popular as ever - with hundreds of classical and renaissance depictions, such as Lely's Venus, the Capitoline Venus and the Venus de Milo (pictured, right) drawing throngs of admirers from all over the world.

Images by (from top) Paul Mannix, David Paul Ohmer and Roberto Berna.
 

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About The Author

Sean Williams

Last three pieces by this author:

Join Heritage Key Live from Stonehenge Spring Equinox | Celebrate St. Patrick's by Visiting Loughcrew for Spring Equinox | What can you Expect from Stonehenge Spring Equinox 2010?

Sean is an English Literature graduate, who currently works as a writer and journalist in London. He enjoys ancient history, theatre and sport. He does not enjoy Big Brother.