The identity of religious and sexual perceptions explains the frequent transformation of one into the other, and the continuous association between the two. A sexual emotion will often function vicariously for a religious emotion, in part or wholly. The unusually interesting history of the complicated and remarkable religio-sexual phenomena renders clear to us individual processes of this kind and certain peculiarities of racial psychology; and thereby we are led to understand the powerful after-effects of these phenomena in the customs, the morals, and the conventions of our time, and we are enlightened as to the rôle still played by the religio-sexual factor in the life of many men even of our own day. One of the oldest, if not the oldest, of religio-sexual phenomena is =religious prostitution=--the “lust-sacrifice,” as Eduard von Mayer happily expresses it--since therein the sexual act is regarded as a sacrifice made to the deity. We have here the unrestricted offering by a woman of her body to every chance comer without love, =as an act of simple sensuality, and for payment=, and thus we find all the characteristics of what at the present day we term “prostitution.” According to the researches I have myself previously published regarding religious prostitution, this may be divided into two great groups: 1. =A single act of prostitution in honour of the deity.= 2. =Permanent religious prostitution.= A single act of religious prostitution mostly consists in the offering of virginity; sometimes also in the single, not repeated, offering of an already deflowered woman. In the single act of religious prostitution, the woman either offers herself =directly to the deity=, the bodily act of defloration being effected by a divine physical symbol--as, for instance, by a penis made of stone, ivory, or wood--or by direct intercourse with the statue of the god; or else the woman gives herself to a =human representative= of the deity--for instance, to the king, to a priest, to a blood-relative (not seldom to her own father, this being a variety of religious incest), and sometimes to a passing stranger.[39]