HIEROS GAMOS, Greek for "sacred marriage," "sacred wedding feast," or "sacred sexual intercourse," is the technical term of a mythical or ritual union between a god and a goddess, more generally a divine and a human being, and most especially a king and a goddess. The term has had its widest use in the study of kingship in the city cultures of the ancient Near East. The fundamental symbolism however is that of the union of man and woman, a set of opposites as general and as readily available as the opposites east and west, north and south, sky and earth. The latter, sky and earth, are often presented as endowed with sexual characteristics and are therefore inseparable from this subject.

It is useful to state in this introductory orientation that a lingering Victorian prudishness in twentieth-century scholarship, embarrassed and at the same time fascinated by...