Such sacrifices took place either annually or on an appointed day, or before great enterprises, or on the occasion of public calamities, to appease the wrath of the god."[11127] In the worship of Astarte the prostitution of women, and of effeminate men, played the same part that child murder did in the worship of Baal.
"This practice," says Dr.Doellinger,[11128] "so widely spread in the world of old, the delusion that no service more acceptable could be rendered a deity than that of unchastity, was deeply rooted in the Asiatic mind.

Where the deity was in idea sexual, or where two deities in chief, one a male and the other a female, stood in juxtaposition, there the sexual relation appeared as founded upon the essence of the deity itself, and the instinct and its satisfaction as that in men which most corresponded with the deity.

Thus lust itself became a service of the gods; and, as the fundamental idea of sacrifice is that of the immediate or substitutive surrender of a man's self to the deity, so the woman could do the goddess no better service than by prostitution.

Hence it was the custom [in some places] that a maiden before her marriage should prostitute herself once in the temple of the goddess;[11129] and this was regarded as the same in kind with the offering of the first-fruits of the field." Lucian, a heathen and an eye-witness, tells us[11130]--"I saw at Byblus the grand temple of the Byblian Venus, in which are accomplished the orgies relating to Adonis; and I learnt the nature of the orgies.

For the Byblians say that the wounding of Adonis by the boar took place in their country; and, in memory of the accident, they year by year beat their breasts, and utter lamentations, and go through the orgies, and hold a great mourning throughout the land.