light goes out, the orgy can begin.
The orgy unfolds on the darker side of culture. Humanity, true to its nature, with a heterosexually and monogamously oriented sexuality, supported by personal love, and subject to the taboos of incest, uses the orgy to violate all prohibitions, overcome all controls, and to allow full rein to all desires and wishes.
The consumption of intoxicating beverages and disinhibiting drugs are often components of an orgy. Men and women overcome the inhibitions placed on them by shame and morals, marriage and personal love. The couple expands into a threesome, foursome, eightsome; and there is even a tendency to form an impersonal group. The amalgamation of all bodies results in one body. Lines and boundaries between heterosexuality and homosexuality become blurred and are left behind, as well as divisions between one generation and another, despite incest taboos. Erotic literature has sufficient examples, which even suggest that differences between man and animal are now defunct. All psychological checks and balances are dissolved: anything goes.
Orgies prove the following: the typical sexuality of normal adults cannot clarify the erotic cravings of humanity as a whole. The immensity of cravings also frightens. That is the reason why erotic literature attaches orgies to the following attributes: a wild orgy, a licentious, ravaging, enormous, extravagant, unbelievable, obscene, outrageous orgy. The orgy is the non plus ultra of erotic imagination.
In ancient Roman times, such wild celebrations as the Saturnalia allowed people an outlet for their urges and thus limited the consequences of repression. These types of festival were connected with fertility and religions rooted in mysticism. Their experience culminated in full ecstasy. “People are besides themselves to completely merge with the divine and be enraptured,” explained Proclus, a Neoplatonist philosopher. This rapture seemed to resemble a trance or take on orgiastic forms – something Plato calls “divine madness”. The word orgy refers to such madness.
While the Christian church tried to repress and almost completely suppress sexuality, the Dionysus cult chose the path of catharsis. As a result, these periodic celebrations relaxed and satisfied people. Dionysus does not observe any limits. He overflows. He is without restraints. He represents what psychoanalysts calls the id: the reality of drives and urges that is Dionysian intoxication.
The Roman Empire, by contrast, suffocated the Dionysian gods with rules of ethical behaviour and moral constraints. “Where Rome is in command,” writes Walter Schubart in his study Religion and Eros, “there is no matriarchy, no religion based on feminine values, no deification of nature, and no experiencing the joys of creation. If Dionysian cults strayed into this world, they had to degenerate from religious celebrations to outbursts of vulgar lust. Cult-based orgiasticism turned into sexually offensive behaviour. The orgiastic celebrations reveal the basic religious idea. Nothing remained but slave labour for the desires of the flesh… This is how Dionysus took revenge on the Roman Empire.”
Promises of the Orient.
Paul Avril, illustration for De Figuris Veneris, 1906. Coloured lithograph.
Paul Avril, illustration for De Figuris Veneris, 1906. Coloured lithograph.
Louis Philippe, The Dream of the Orgy, from a series of engraved lithographs.
Louis Philippe, The Dream of the Orgy, from a series of engraved lithographs.
Louis Philippe, The Dream of the Orgy, from a series of engraved lithographs.
Louis Philippe, The Dream of the Orgy, from a series of engraved lithographs.
The revenge of Dionysus on the Eros-hostile Christian world was manifested in the obsessive belief in witches and sorcery during the 16th and 17th centuries. It provided the “pornography of the joy of creation” (Schubart). Just like the myths of natural religions, this obsession with witches was directed towards the supernatural as well but also emphasised the darker side of the divine, the satanic. “Dionysus rose again as the devil. The devil is the sexual god of Christianity and witches are his courtesans.” The devil himself has horns, phallic shapes, and the body of a billy goat, just like the satyrs, which surrounded the Thracian god. All sexuality now carries the stamp of sin and yet it has powers that are impossible to resist. Chroniclers reported to have seen 6000 devils and witches fornicate with one another in an open field. This is somewhat reminiscent of mass unions, which were the culmination of the orgiasticism of fertility cults. “The witch spectre,” opines Schubart, “is a Dionysus cult with a negative portent.”
Goethe’s Faust experienced such a Witches’ Sabbath during the Walpurgis Night:
See and observe! You cannot see its end.
Hundreds of fires burning in a row;
They love, and drink, and dance, and chat
Tell me if you can, where to find better than that?
The mystery of fertility was defended by witches during the 16th and 17th centuries but they did this in the night realm of hell. “Alone old Baubo is coming now, / She rides astride a sow,” are lines from Faust. Christian men and women of those times barred eroticism from heaven. The infamous writings called the Witch Hammer report one of the accused women as claiming that the lust of the devil’s love is as enormous as the lust of 1000 men combined.
The celebration of carnival is one of the main vestiges of such orgiastic cults in Christian Europe. Even after Christianity triumphed, such stress-relieving festivals were a necessity, if adherence to and compliance with the puritanical morals of everyday life was to be ensured. Today, carnival is an especially lively celebration in towns and cities that are predominantly Catholic. “The Catholic church,” writes Schubart, “never did reject the needs stemming from the joy of creation as brusquely and with such finality as Protestantism did with its stern and severe realism and its male gravity.”
Love positions from the Kamasutra. Wood relief, from the district of Madras, India.
Indian temple relief, 18th century. Wood.
Fertility and creational bliss cults are always celebrations of fraternisation. That is the reason that the celebration of carnival – just like all other Dionysian celebrations – is based on the demand for general equality, which tears down the artificial societal barriers between participants. The custom of cross-dressing also has its origin in ancient beliefs. The exchange of clothing was practised during some of the Aphrodite festivals. Plutarch describes the wild celebration of the Festival of Impudence (Hybristika) where women wore men’s clothing and coats and the men donned women’s clothing and veils. What these customs shared was the desire to come to resemble an androgynous deity.
Love outside the rules seemed to have been a monopoly of the ruling class in western culture for a long time, as Jaques Solé in his study Love in Western Culture has shown. Between 1500 and 1800 particularly, the aristocracy knew how to remove themselves from the sexual order and oppression as propagated by Christendom. Such sexual anarchy often took the shape of festive promiscuity.
The imagination and fantasy of the Occident was ruled for a long time by the excesses of the Borgias. During the pontificate of Alexander VI, a true Renaissance prince with a strongly sensual temperament, surrounded by bastards and many of his minions, dozens of amorous ladies of the night often gathered in the Vatican. On the eve of All Saints’ Day 1501, the pope, who prayed to the powers of desire much as he did to the powers of Jesus Christ, presided over a famous feast. At the end of the celebration, fifty chosen nude courtesans crawled around on all fours and picked up the sweet chestnuts thrown to