The caution this doctrine's first article ends on has its own history, and it is a story of a field correcting itself. Early twentieth-century comparative religion, working in the wake of Frazer's The Golden Bough, treated sacred marriage as a near-universal fertility mechanism and reconstructed elaborate ritual calendars for the ancient Near East on thin textual evidence, reading gaps in one culture's record from another's. Much of the ancient Near Eastern "pattern" literature of the 1930s built on that assumption.
Later Assyriologists reopened the Sumerian evidence directly rather than through the earlier synthesis, and the field's confidence receded. Whether the Inanna-Dumuzi poetry corresponds to an enacted royal rite at all, rather than existing purely as literary and liturgical composition, is now treated as genuinely open, and claims of literal royal intercourse before witnesses are regarded as considerably less secure than mid-century summaries suggested.
The term has a separate afterlife in living practice that the ancient evidence does not bear on directly. Some strands of modern Wicca, from Gerald Gardner's mid-twentieth-century formulation onward, use "the Great Rite" for a ritual enactment of the god and goddess's union, performed symbolically or, in some lineages, literally between initiates. This is a modern religious innovation drawing on the older comparative category rather than a continuation of any ancient rite, and the two should not be read as one continuous tradition merely because they share a name.