The agents who acted as intermediaries, as panders and procurers and enticers in the furtive sexual commerce, in the seamy undercurrents of ancient life, were known under various descriptive designations. In Greece, there were the maulis and the draxon, the karbis and the proagogos, the mastropos, the prokyklis and the nymphagogos and the pornoboscos. Romans had their own counterparts: the professional procurer, the leno, the mercator meretricius, the admissarius and the institor, the lenonum minister, the perductor and the conductor: and, among the female operatives, the agaga and the stimulatrix, the conciliatrix and the stupri sequestra. * * * * * Phallic symbols enter into the Biblical context in I Kings, where Judah is described as building high places and pillars on every high hill. These pillars were actually phallic symbols, in the style of the abominations of the Canaanite cults. * * * * * In antiquity, in Biblical and post-Biblical times, the woman, in the widest sense, was the amatory slave of man. But with the woman’s increase of knowledge in erotic skills and practices, in the secrets of her potent physiological attractions, in the use of unguents and cosmetics, potions and concoctions, in corporeal and mechanistic allurements and seductions, the woman’s status gradually rose and extended and became all-embracing. Slowly, by virtue of these very artifices and techniques, by means of gyrations and gestures, provocative dances and tantalizing dress, silent invitations and ocular speech, she began to dominate man, to render him subservient and even obsequious, to control his habits and inclinations and tendencies in social and political directions: until woman, reaching the apogee of her power, based primarily on her erotic compulsiveness, became the woman behind the throne. She had attained her highest end, her ultimate destiny, as the implicit director of human activities. She usurped man’s status, and assumed the regal baton. She manipulated kings and sultans, and her endearments were bought at the price of nations. She decided the fate of empires by her mere brusque whims, or personal resentment, her unpredictable likes. Man exchanged realms and justice for her amatory acquiescence, her erotic beneficence. * * * * * In a formal religious-ceremonial sense, antiquity acknowledged participation of women in the sacred temples. In Asia Minor, in the cults of Baal-Peor, in the Egyptian cults of Isis and Osiris, in the Mediterranean Hellenic islands where the cult of Aphrodite in various forms and of analogous deities of passion and lust and procreation was prevalent, in the case of the Vestal guardians of the Roman state religion, priestesses took part in the hieratic rituals, in festive ceremonials, in sacrificial and processional rites.