The Orgy

Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 by Havelock Ellis is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here. The Orgy

I. The Orgy.

Traditional morality, religion, and established convention combine to promote not only the extreme of rigid abstinence but also that of reckless license. They preach and idealize the one extreme; they drive those who cannot accept it to adopt the opposite extreme. In the great ages of religion it even happens that the severity of the rule of abstinence is more or less deliberately tempered by the permission for occasional outbursts of license. We thus have the orgy, which flourished in mediæval days and is, indeed, in its largest sense, a universal manifestation, having a function to fulfil in every orderly and laborious civilization, built up on natural energies that are bound by more or less inevitable restraints.

The consideration of the orgy, it may be said, lifts us beyond the merely sexual sphere, into a higher and wider region which belongs to religion. The Greek orgeia referred originally to ritual things done with a religious purpose, though later, when dances of Bacchanals and the like lost their sacred and inspiring character, the idea was fostered by Christianity that such things were immoral.[107] Yet Christianity was itself in its origin an orgy of the higher spiritual activities released from the uncongenial servitude of classic civilization, a great festival of the poor and the humble, of the slave and the sinner. And when, with the necessity for orderly social organization, Christianity had ceased to be this it still recognized, as Paganism had done, the need for an occasional orgy. It appears that in 743 at a Synod held in Hainault reference was made to the February debauch (de Spurcalibus in februario) as a pagan practice; yet it was precisely this pagan festival which was embodied in the accepted customs of the Christian Church as the chief orgy of the ecclesiastical year, the great Carnival prefixed to the long fast of Lent. The celebration on Shrove Tuesday and the previous Sunday constituted a Christian Bacchanalian festival in which all classes joined. The greatest freedom and activity of physical movement was encouraged; "some go about naked without shame, some crawl on all fours, some on stilts, some imitate animals."[108] As time went on the Carnival lost its most strongly marked Bacchanalian features, but it still retains its essential character as a permitted and temporary relaxation of the tension of customary restraints and conventions. The Mediæval Feast of Fools—a New Year's Revel well established by the twelfth century, mainly in France—presented an expressive picture of a Christian orgy in its extreme form, for here the most sacred ceremonies of the Church became the subject of fantastic parody. The Church, according to Nietzsche's saying, like all wise legislators, recognized that where great impulses and habits have to be cultivated, intercalary days must be appointed in which these impulses and habits may be denied, and so learn to hunger anew.[109] The clergy took the leading part in these folk-festivals, for to the men of that age, as Méray remarks, "the temple offered the complete notes of the human gamut; they found there the teaching of all duties, the consolation of all sorrows, the satisfaction of all joys. The sacred festivals of mediæval Christianity were not a survival from Roman times; they leapt from the very heart of Christian society."[110] But, as Méray admits, all great and vigorous peoples, of the East and the West, have found it necessary sometimes to play with their sacred things.

Among the Greeks and Romans this need is everywhere visible, not only in their comedy and their literature generally, but in everyday life. As Nietzsche truly remarks (in his Geburt der Tragödie) the Greeks recognized all natural impulses, even those that are seemingly unworthy, and safeguarded them from working mischief by providing channels into which, on special days and in special rites, the surplus of wild energy might harmlessly flow. Plutarch, the last and most influential of the Greek moralists, well says, when advocating festivals (in his essay "On the Training of Children"), that "even in bows and harps we loosen their strings that we may bend and wind them up again." Seneca, perhaps the most influential of Roman if not of European moralists, even recommended occasional drunkenness. "Sometimes," he wrote in his De Tranquillilate, "we ought to come even to the point of intoxication, not for the purpose of drowning ourselves but of sinking ourselves deep in wine. For it washes away cares and raises our spirits from the lowest depths. The inventor of wine is called Liber because he frees the soul from the servitude of care, releases it from slavery, quickens it, and makes it bolder for all undertakings." The Romans were a sterner and more serious people than the Greeks, but on that very account they recognized the necessity of occasionally relaxing their moral fibres in order to preserve their tone, and encouraged the prevalence of festivals which were marked by much more abandonment than those of Greece. When these festivals began to lose their moral sanction and to fall into decay the decadence of Rome had begun.

All over the world, and not excepting the most primitive savages—for even savage life is built up on systematic constraints which sometimes need relaxation—the principle of the orgy is recognized and accepted. Thus Spencer and Gillen describe[111] the Nathagura or fire-ceremony of the Warramunga tribe of Central Australia, a festival taken part in by both sexes, in which all the ordinary rules of social life are broken, a kind of Saturnalia in which, however, there is no sexual license, for sexual license is, it need scarcely be said, no essential part of the orgy, even when the orgy lightens the burden of sexual constraints. In a widely different part of the world, in British Columbia, the Salish Indians, according to Hill Tout,[112] believed that, long before the whites came, their ancestors observed a Sabbath or seventh day ceremony for dancing and praying, assembling at sunrise and dancing till noon. The Sabbath, or periodically recurring orgy,—not a day of tension and constraint but a festival of joy, a rest from all the duties of everyday life,—has, as we know, formed an essential part of many of the orderly ancient civilizations on which our own has been built;[113] it is highly probable that the stability of these ancient civilizations was intimately associated with their recognition of the need of a Sabbath orgy. Such festivals are, indeed, as Crawley observes, processes of purification and reinvigoration, the effort to put off "the old man" and put on "the new man," to enter with fresh energy on the path of everyday life.[114]

The orgy is an institution which by no means has its significance only for the past. On the contrary, the high tension, the rigid routine, the gray monotony of modern life insistently call for moments of organic relief, though the precise form that that orgiastic relief takes must necessarily change with other social changes. As Wilhelm von Humboldt said, "just as men need suffering in order to become strong so they need joy in order to become good." Charles Wagner, insisting more recently (in his Jeunesse) on the same need of joy in our modern life, regrets that dancing in the old, free, and natural manner has gone out of fashion or become unwholesome. Dancing is indeed the most fundamental and primitive form of the orgy, and that which most completely and healthfully fulfils its object. For while it is undoubtedly, as we see even among animals, a process by which sexual tumescence is accomplished,[115] it by no means necessarily becomes focused in sexual detumescence but it may itself become a detumescent discharge of accumulated energy. It was on this account that, at all events in former days, the clergy in Spain, on moral grounds, openly encouraged the national passion for dancing. Among cultured people in modern times, the orgy tends to take on a purely cerebral form, which is less wholesome because it fails to lead to harmonious discharge along motor channels. In these comparatively passive forms, however, the orgy tends to become more and more pronounced under the conditions of civilization. Aristotle's famous statement concerning the function of tragedy as "purgation" seems to be a recognition of the beneficial effects of the orgy.[116] Wagner's music-dramas appeal powerfully to this need; the theatre, now as ever, fulfils a great function of the same kind, inherited from the ancient days when it was the ordered expression of a sexual festival.[117] The theatre, indeed, tends at the present time to assume a larger importance and to approximate to the more serious dramatic performances of classic days by being transferred to the day-time and the open-air. France has especially taken the initiative in these performances, analogous to the Dionysiac festivals of antiquity and the Mysteries and Moralities of the Middle Ages. The movement began some years ago at Orange. In 1907 there were, in France, as many as thirty open-air theatres ("Théâtres de la Nature," "Théâtres du Soleil," etc.,) while it is in Marseilles that the first formal open-air theatre has been erected since classic days.[118] In England, likewise, there has been a great extension of popular interest in dramatic performances, and the newly instituted Pageants, carried out and taken part in by the population of the region commemorated in the Pageant, are festivals of the same character. In England, however, at the present time, the real popular orgiastic festivals are the Bank holidays, with which may be associated the more occasional celebrations, "Maffekings," etc., often called out by comparatively insignificant national events but still adequate to arouse orgiastic emotions as genuine as those of antiquity, though they are lacking in beauty and religious consecration. It is easy indeed for the narrowly austere person to view such manifestations with a supercilious smile, but in the eyes of the moralist and the philosopher these orgiastic festivals exert a salutary and preservative function. In every age of dull and monotonous routine—and all civilization involves such routine—many natural impulses and functions tend to become suppressed, atrophied, or perverted. They need these moments of joyous exercise and expression, moments in which they may not necessarily attain their full activity but in which they will at all events be able, as Cyples expresses it, to rehearse their great possibilities.

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