Sex in the Cities. Volume 2. Berlin. Hans-Jürgen Döpp

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      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 16^th and 17^th 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 16^th and 17^th centuries but they did this in the night realm of hell. “Alone СКАЧАТЬ