To go into a disquisition on the Sex-rites of the various pre-Christian religions would be 'a large order'--larger than I could attempt to fill; but the general facts in this connection are fairly patent. We know, of course, from the Bible that the Syrians in Palestine were given to sexual worships. There were erect images (phallic) and "groves" (sexual symbols) on every high hill and under every green tree; (1) and these same images and the rites connected with them crept into the Jewish Temple and were popular enough to maintain their footing there for a long period from King Rehoboam onwards, notwithstanding the efforts of Josiah (2) and other reformers to extirpate them. Moreover there were girls and men (hierodouloi) regularly attached during this period to the Jewish Temple as to the heathen Temples, for the rendering of sexual services, which were recognized in many cases as part of the ritual. Women were persuaded that it was an honor and a privilege to be fertilized by a 'holy man' (a priest or other man connected with the rites), and children resulting from such unions were often called "Children of God"--an appellation which no doubt sometimes led to a legend of miraculous birth! Girls who took their place as hierodouloi in the Temple or Temple-precincts were expected to surrender themselves to men-worshipers in the Temple, much in the same way, probably, as Herodotus describes in the temple of the Babylonian Venus Mylitta, where every native woman, once in her life, was supposed to sit in the Temple and have intercourse with some stranger. (3) Indeed the Syrian and Jewish rites dated largely from Babylonia. "The Hebrews entering Syria," says Richard Burton (4) "found it religionized by Assyria and Babylonia, when the Accadian Ishtar had passed West, and had become Ashtoreth, Ashtaroth, or Ashirah, the Anaitis of Armenia, the Phoenician Astarte, and the Greek Aphrodite, the great Moon-goddess who is queen of Heaven and Love." The word translated "grove" as above, in our Bible, is in fact Asherah, which connects it pretty clearly with the Babylonian Queen of Heaven. (1) 1 Kings xiv. 22-24. (2) 2 Kings xxiii. (3) See Herodotus i. 199; also a reference to this custom in the apocryphal Baruch, vi. 42, 43. (4) The Thousand Nights and a Night (1886 edn.), vol. x, p. 229.