gods, long before the time of Christ, which name signified the "tabernacle of the daughters," or of the young virgins, at whose temple they were inducted into the rites and mysteries practiced in the worship of these obscenely formed images, by the prostitution of their persons.
Herodotus gives the following account of the Succoth-Benoth rites. Every young woman of the country, where the image was adored, was obliged, while yet a virgin, to visit the temple once, where she was to be humbled, by the first man who should chance to fancy her.
From these accounts it does appear, that the black nations of those ages, waged a universal and a perpetual war upon chastity, seeming to have been determined to expel from the face of the earth, all ideas of such a thing. To effect this, they bent all the powers of civil and religious influence against it, making the possession thereof a crime, to be punished with death, inasmuch as they who refused or neglected to be thus humbled, at the temple, and in the presence of the idol, were counted guilty of heresy,' and were held as infidels and contemners of the gods.
Herodotus further says, that in his own time, B. C. 450, there was a city in Numidia, which was on the upper regions of the Nile, in Africa, that was called Siccavenia, a name signifying prostitution, to which the young women were compelled to resort by law, to earn their marriage dower. This custom, says Herodotus, was brought from Phœnicia, which was the country of old Canaan, peopled as we have often
