The Etomology of the Words Prostitute and Whore

I have always found that the origin of a word reveals so much about a culture or the times of which it once lived. The words prostitute and whore in our culture today, as mentioned in Part I, are derogatory and have no relation to their origin.

 The adjective “sacred” is often used to describe something worthy of religious veneration, something declared or made holy.  Prophetic texts are called sacred, as are a variety of rituals and icons. 

The word prostitute has its origin in the Latin word prostituere which means to stand in for another.  This is one of the definitions and for my purposes here it states that a prostitute is someone who stands in for another, such as a wife or girlfriend, someone who uses the act of lovemaking to gain a deeper connection with the Divine, God/Goddess, and to attain enlightenment.

​The sacred prostitute stood in on behalf of the Goddess.  She was there to allow her body to be used as a sacred vessel of divine sexual energy and love in order to reconnect her partner with the Divine Feminine within himself.

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Queen Ishtar, also known as the Goddess Har, was the mother of the Harlots. These Harlots were not prostitutes as we know them today, but priestesses, sorceresses, prophets, and healers. The Hebrew word Zonah means both prostitute and prophet. The Hora, a dance done at Jewish weddings is said to have its origins in the circle dances that the holy harlots did as brides of God. In Egypt before clocks were actually invented, it is said that the holy whores or  the horae would come out and dance the hours of the day.
 
Sacred Whores were sometimes known as the “Holy Virgins” of Goddesses such as Ishtar, Asherah, or Aphrodite. The famous Vestal Virgins art thought to have practiced secret sex-magic rites in honor of the Vesta the Roman Goddess of hearth and home.
  
The word virgin did not mean  that the hymen was intact but rather that the woman was an unmarried woman who claimed ownership of herself. Again, you can see how the meaning of words are changed depending upon the culture in which they are being used. 
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“In Barbara Walker’s Dictionary of Woman’s Myths and Secrets, the Hebrew word hor means a cave, pit, or dark hole.  The Spanish word for whore is puta, derived from the Latin term for a well and pit. But the Latin term, for grave (a hole in the Earth) was puticuli, meaning womb of rebirth…"
"The Latin had its root in the Vedic wherein Puta is defined as pure and holy. The cave, the hole the bottomless black lake were metaphors synonymous with the Great Goddess—She who is unnamable, that darkness primordial from which all life (light) is born.” ~ Musings on the Sacred Whore by Diana Rose Heartwoman
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 Over time the meanings of these words changed to reflect the culture that they were being used in and to reflect its views of women.  Once the Goddess cultures were overtaken by the hordes of nomadic tribes of the Middle East that worshipped a warring God and the doctrine of the Christian Patriarchs was established as law, the world that once was, was turned upside down and on its head.

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