This is a pretty interesting but pretty extremist article I found a while back about the history of sex and marriage and prostitution in relation to ancient religious traditions. There’s a lot of stuff about how Mary Magdalene was a goddess temple prostitute, and how the term virgin archaically was used to denote a woman who was not attached to a man, ie a husband. some of this stuff I’ve seen before in other research and some of it is new. Also, in relation to this kind of romanticized angle of all this, here’s an article from the BBC about the outlawed but still practiced Hindu tradition of devadasis, girls who are pledged to a temple, and are basically temple prostitutes, through which the goddess Yellamma is said to be worshipped.