In many archaic and traditional societies, sexuality is imbued with religious significance. Myths and rituals exhibiting overt sexual symbolism are often concerned with fertility, both on a cosmic and human level; they are associated with certain religious conceptions, such as divine androgyny, or with the reintegration of the primordial, beatific state that existed before the creation of the world and its social institutions and moral order.

Female sexuality and fertility were important concepts even in the earliest sedentary agricultural societies, which appeared in the Mediterranean region around 7000 BCE. With the development of agriculture, gender roles were differentiated and became more specialized. The question of whether preliterate cultures were aware of the causal relationship between sexual intercourse and pregnancy is still controversial. However, one finds a recurrent identification between woman and furrow (soil), man (phallus) and plow, and intercourse and the act of...