"It was his chief pleasure to go every morning to the
place where the women bathe, and, in concealment, to
take advantage of their unguarded exposure. Then he
rushed amongst them, took possession of their clothes,
and gave a loose to the indecencies of language and of
gesture. He maintained sixteen wives, who had the title
of queens, and sixteen thousand concubines.... In
obscenity there is nothing that can be compared with
the _Bhagavata_. It is, nevertheless, the delight of
the Hindu, and the first book they put into the hands
of their children, when learning to read."

Brahmin temples are little more than brothels, in each of which a
dozen or more young Bayadères are kept for the purpose of increasing
the revenues of the gods and their priests. Religious prostitution and
theological licentiousness prevailed also in Persia, Babylonia, Egypt,
and other ancient civilized countries. Commenting on a series of
obscene pictures found in an Egyptian tomb, Erman says (154): "We are
shocked at the morality of a nation which could supply the deceased
with such literature for the eternal journey." Professor Robertson
Smith says that "in Arabia and elsewhere unrestricted prostitution was
practised at the temples and defended on the analogy of the license
allowed to herself by the unmarried mother goddess." Nor were the
early Greeks much better. Some of their religious festivals were
sensual orgies, some of their gods nearly as licentious as those of
the Hindoos. Their supreme god, Zeus, is an Olympian Don Juan, and the
legend of the birth of Aphrodite, their goddess of love, is in its
original form unutterably obscene.