In a formal religious-ceremonial sense, antiquity acknowledged participation of women in the sacred temples. In Asia Minor, in the cults of Baal-Peor, in the Egyptian cults of Isis and Osiris, in the Mediterranean Hellenic islands where the cult of Aphrodite in various forms and of analogous deities of passion and lust and procreation was prevalent, in the case of the Vestal guardians of the Roman state religion, priestesses took part in the hieratic rituals, in festive ceremonials, in sacrificial and processional rites.
Even with the advent of Christianity the Greek church in the East had its female votaries, while deaconesses were normally attached to the Church in the West. In the course of time, however, this acquiescence in a female priesthood turned into resentment, into hate, and finally into bitter and continuous official condemnation. Woman became the evil daemon, the essence of every malefic, licentious, forbidden, obscene practice, the sink of turpitude, the scourge of men, the destruction of humanity. Thus many early Fathers of the Church, Tertullian and Arnobius and Clement of Alexandria, inveigh against the serpentine machinations of woman. Hence this view and these attitudes were transmitted into the Middle Ages. In these middle centuries woman is depicted as the ally of Satanic forces, powerful on account of her very femininity, her presumed innocent frailty. She is essentially guileful and treacherous, amoral and immoral, and bent on the spiritual subjugation and desecration of perplexed man. Woman became the symbol of all sin, the prototype of every sacrilegious concept. She was stripped of a soul. She was in league with the demoniac tenebrous forces, the Satanic legions that furtively and thaumaturgically work their evil spells on man. She became, in short, the Anti-Christ incarnate, the Abominable Witch, consort of horned and hoofed Satan. And her attractions, her feminine beauty, were merely distorted and insidious forms of her fundamental iniquities.
Woman was conceived as attaining her sanguinary or lustful purposes by means of feminine stratagems or conspiratorial schemes, by personal ruthlessness that swept aside all frustrations, all moralities, and stopped neither at poisoning nor at murder. The roster of such women, in the stream of universal history, is long and challenging. It includes, among many others equally notorious, equally branded, Lilith and Cleopatra, Claudia and Messalina, Antonina and Theodora, Catherine of Russia and Elizabeth Bathory, Madame de Montespan and Lady Kyteler, the Borgias and Isobel Gowdie, Jeannette Biscar: and, in goetic contexts, Sagana, Canidia, and Oenothea.