In the New Testament, too, there is frequent reference to harlots and debauchees and to a variety of ‘sinners.’ * * * * * Babylonian customs, in addition to the rites of temple prostitution, included both male and female sacred concubines. There was considerable pre-marital sexual freedom. But there was also monogamous marriage involving rigid fidelity. Trial marriage was acknowledged. Adultery was punished by drowning the guilty wife. In the degenerative days of Babylon, morality broke down. Male prostitutes rouged their cheeks and bedecked themselves with jewelry, while the poor exposed their daughters to prostitution. Sensuality and erotic libertinage became dominant and pervasive. * * * * * Among the Canaanites the most potent deities—Baal and El and Asherah—were the symbols of procreation and sexuality. Hence, all acts, all objects, all rituals associated with copulation, with the phallus, with fecundity were divinely inspired and inherently sacred. Ceremonials dedicated to the deities invariably included sexual activity, sacred and ecstatic orgies. The voluptuous and sensual character of the dedicatory rites was evidently so appealing that they lured the Israelites into acceptance and imitation, for the deity of the Israelites was one, supreme, without kin, without consort, without sexuality. * * * * * The New Testament attacks pagans, particularly Roman paganism, for unnatural sexual practices, lusts, and corrupt and degenerate mores. * * * * * In primitive Greek society, under a primal matriarchy, the male functioned as a kind of passive sexual partner, and virtually thereafter as a domestic drudge. But in the course of the centuries the male acquired dominance, in the divine pantheon, and equally on a mortal and earthly plane, politically, socially, and domestically. But the concept of the inter-relationship of the sexes grew into a concept of one primary harmonious principle of aesthetics, of essential perfection of beauty, irrespective of sex and hence irrespective of any compulsive admiration and appreciation of such beauty by one sex or the other. Beauty became an entity in itself, a sexless trait. In the Platonic dialogue, in fact, in the _Symposium_, the theory is postulated that man was at one time androgynous. The Greek hetaira or male companion was virtually a prostitute. Sometimes she acquired a more permanent status, when she was bought by a master and became a _pallakis_ or concubine. Homosexuality, on the other hand, brought no stigma to the boys or young men involved in the practice. Because homosexuality was a corollary, applied in practice, of the primary concept of aesthetic beauty irrespective of sex. In the case of women, there was the corresponding though possibly not so widespread cult of tribadism.