For as long as humans have asked questions of the divine, someone—often a woman—has had to give it voice. And that voice rarely came from stillness. It came from the body.
In the ancient world, prophecy wasn’t distant or clean. It was breath, tremor, moan—ecstasy made sacred. The gods didn’t whisper from on high; they entered. They filled. They moved through. And somewhere between the gasp and the silence, revelation arrived.
In Sumer, more than four thousand years ago, priestesses of the goddess Inanna enacted what the later Greeks would call the hieros gamos—the sacred marriage between goddess and king.
In this New Year’s ritual, the king stood for Inanna’s mortal lover, the shepherd god Dumuzi, and the high priestess embodied the goddess herself. Together—whether through actual lovemaking or a ritualized drama—they united heaven and earth. The hymns left behind are unmistakably erotic:
“Make your milk sweet and thick, my bridegroom.
In the bedchamber, honey flows; in the holy place, honey flows.”
Another describes Inanna preparing her bed, perfuming herself, and inviting the god to “plow her holy vulva.”
To the Sumerians, this wasn’t metaphor. Inanna's pleasure was believed to renew the land and ensure its fertility. Whether the act was physical or symbolic, its meaning was clear: the body was divine speech—its climax, a kind of prophecy.
Later, in Canaanite temples, the same connection endured. The qedesha—women consecrated to the goddess—spoke prophecy through touch and rhythm. Their ecstasy was an offering, a kind of living scripture. Centuries later, male chroniclers would call them prostitutes, twisting reverence into shame. It’s a pattern that repeats: when a woman’s pleasure carries authority, it gets rewritten as sin.
By the Hellenistic age, that authority had shifted but never disappeared. The followers of Dionysus and Cybele found revelation through trance, dance, and sometimes sex. Their ecstatic cries were recorded as divine speech. Euripides wrote:
“The god is in us! Our hearts are lifted, our bodies shudder;
the world blurs in his embrace.”
Each of these traditions shared the same grammar: possession, surrender, revelation. But when the Judeo-Christian patriarchy tightened its grip, the gods went quiet, and women’s voices went with them. The sacred moan of prophecy became something to fear—or erase.
Those were the themes that were in my mind as I wrote The Mouth of the Oracle.
It’s a story that begins in silence—an oracle who has spent her life being spoken through, her body a mouth for gods who never thanked her. I asked what would happen if wanted her own voice. The story ends when she finally speaks in that voice. Not as vessel, not as miracle, but as herself.
No ritual. No divine permission. Just a body remembering its voice—and using it.
- Eric