To labour the proof is unnecessary. It is abundantly clear that a stranger may be far more than mortal, and that this possibility has deeply affected the evolution of hospitality. The stranger must be conciliated. He must be bound by sacred ties to the host--ties which he cannot break so long as he remains under the host’s protection. Among the rites of aggregation--the rites effecting this union--M. van Gennep reckons the use of the women frequently accorded to visitors in the lower culture; and he suggests that the rite at the temple of Mylitta was such a rite of aggregation. It may have been so. It may have been expected of all masculine strangers at Babylon to unite themselves with the natives by means {288} of this homage to the goddess. All that can be said is that Herodotus gives no hint of it. According to him it was only on the women that the duty lay--and that no more than once in their lives--of submitting to the rite. The mystery attaching to a stranger and involving the expectation of divine blessing is a sufficient reason for the performance of the rite with one who might be a god in person, and in any event must have been held to be divinely sent; for chance is the servant of the gods. Thence it is but a step (and the step was taken elsewhere, if not at Babylon) to the substitution of the priest for the stranger or the god; and the way is opened to the abuses of the _jus primæ noctis_.[288.1] Before dismissing the subject reference may be made to Professor Cumont’s note on the subject of religious prostitution in _Les Religions Orientales dans le Paganisme Romain_ (Paris, 1907), pp. 143, 286, as showing the facility with which a learned and highly distinguished scholar may fail to appreciate the complexity of the problem. He makes no distinction between the three customs of sacrifice of virginity, prostitution to earn a dowry, and a life of religious prostitution in the service of the goddess. He refers them all to the primitive constitution of the Semitic tribe, and explains them as a modified form, become utilitarian, of an ancient exogamy. Mating with a virgin, he holds, resulted in defilement; therefore she was given first to a stranger; only after that could she be married to a man of her own race. I pass by the confusion between the three customs in question, to all of which his explanation will not equally {289} apply. But if the explanation be correct for any of them, either the ancient exogamy of the Semites must have been quite different from exogamy as generally understood, or it must have been not merely modified but transformed. Exogamy, as generally understood, has nothing to do with race or nationality. It is simply the savage rule corresponding to our table of prohibited degrees.[289.1] A man may not marry or have sexual relations with one who is akin to him; every member of his clan (not of his tribe or his race) is akin to him; therefore, he cannot marry or have sexual relations with any member of his clan.