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What Our Tears Are Trying to Tell Us

Man welling up

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Who never ate his bread with tears doesn’t know what life tastes like.
—after Goethe

In many cultures, especially for men, crying is considered to be undignified and infantile behaviour, except in certain specific circumstances such as mourning the loss of a relative. After childhood, men shed tears much less frequently than women. The reasons for this are partly biological, but mainly sociocultural.

‘Crying’, or ‘tearing up’, is not just one thing. There are in fact three types of tear, two of which are rather uninteresting: basal tears that lubricate and protect the eye, and reflex tears that flush out irritants such as smoke particles or onion vapours. The third type of tear is, of course, shed in response to emotion.

Crocodile Tears

Whereas many animals have basal and reflex tears, emotional tears appear to be uniquely human. Although other animals, of course, vocalise and express distress, there is no convincing evidence that they shed tears for emotional reasons. So, presumably, if women cry more often than men, it is because they are more human? Elephants and chimpanzees are sometimes said to ‘weep’, but it has not been conclusively demonstrated that these are indeed emotional tears. On the other hand, we can be pretty sure that crocodiles don’t sob. The expression ‘to shed crocodile tears’ has its roots in an ancient legend, according to which crocodiles pretend to weep to either lure or mourn their prey.

What I Remember from Med School

Reflex and emotional tears are produced by the lacrimal gland and drained through the nasolacrimal duct into the nose, which is why we also sniff when we cry. Any excess fluid spills out of the eyelid and trickles along the side of the nose or surface of the cheek, forming teardrops. Damage to the ophthalmic branch of the trigeminal nerve desensitises the cornea, impairing the production of reflex tears. However, it is the parasympathetic division of the facial nerve that is responsible for making tears, and damage to the facial nerve, as in Bell’s palsy, can lead to a decrease in tear production.

Existential Tears

When we think of crying emotional tears, we think of sadness and grief. But we also shed emotional tears in response to a range of other, sometimes positive, emotions and feelings, including elation, laughter, love, frustration, pain, anger, and surprise. We may also cry in response to music, beauty, kindness, yearning, reunion, or anything that strikes us as poignant. What all these instances of crying have in common is not sadness, but significance.

Social Tears

Crying is not merely a private affair. Tears may serve a number of social functions. In particular, they may serve to convey our emotions while emphasising their depth and sincerity; draw attention, sympathy, and assistance at a time of danger, distress, or need; and serve as a signal of appeasement, dependency, or attachment. If someone cries in our presence, it is almost impossible not to be moved, even changed, by that. No surprise, then, that tears can also be used to manipulate and deceive. The younger you are, the better you know this.

Healthy Tears

In ancient and mediaeval times, physicians believed that crying purged excess humours from the body. This idea survives in the modern scientific notion that emotional tears serve to excrete stress-related substances such as ACTH. But the more important purgation is, of course, psychological.

Crying may help us to feel better, in particular, by enabling us to experience, express, and ‘process’ our emotions. In the Poetics, Aristotle argues that tragedy, by arousing emotions such as pity and fear, brings about a catharsis—a purgation or purification—of such emotions. After crying, we may feel not better exactly, but differently: calmer, clearer, more reconciled to life, or simply more certain of who we are and where we stand.

Crying as a Way of Knowing

Emotional tears signal moments that are of existential importance in our lives. They tell us that something matters deeply. Sometimes we know what that something is—the death of a parent, the birth of a child—but at other times our tears seem to know before we do, and to arrive bearing a message.

Imagine that a relationship or friendship has broken down. Three months later, or even three years later, you sit down on a park bench and unexpectedly begin to cry. Those tears tell you something that you may not have known, something that you may have been guarding against: that you still miss the relationship, and that it mattered more than you realised. The tragedy is when the other person also has their park bench moment, but neither of you acts upon it.

Thirty years, gone like that.

We do not always cry because we know what matters to us. Sometimes we know what matters to us because we cry. In this sense, crying can be a way of knowing, revealing deeper truths that reason, thought, and language cannot reach. It sometimes happens that we cry without quite knowing why. When that happens, we should ask ourselves: What does this mean? What is the more refined part of me trying to tell me?

What brings us to tears changes as we change. A child might cry because they are underwhelmed by their Christmas presents. The sadness is real because, at that age, the presents really do matter. As we mature, the objects of our tears change along with our hierarchy of values. We cry less at the frustration of our immediate desires, and more at an unexpected kindness, a beautiful landscape, a piece of music, an abstract value like dignity or freedom, or the human condition.

We cry for our ex not merely because we can’t have them, but because they can’t have us.

Because without us, how on earth will they cope?

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If this essay spoke to you, you might look into Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions.

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The Psychology and Philosophy of Scapegoating

The Scapegoat, by William Holman Hunt (1854).
The Scapegoat, by William Holman Hunt (1854).

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

The ego defence of displacement plays an important part in scapegoating, in which uncomfortable feelings such as anger, frustration, envy, guilt, shame, and insecurity are displaced or redirected onto another, often more vulnerable, person or group.

The scapegoats—often outsiders, immigrants, minorities, ‘deviants’, or other vulnerable groups—are then persecuted, enabling the scapegoaters to discharge and distract from their uncomfortable feelings, which are replaced or overtaken by a crude but consoling sense of affirmation and self-righteous indignation. The creation of a villain necessarily implies that of a hero, even if both are purely fictional.

Sometimes it is the villain, or villains, who are in need of an even greater villain. Especially in a time of crisis, unscrupulous leaders and politicians can cynically exploit the ancient and deep-rooted impulse to scapegoat to deflect and distract from their own inadequacies and evade, or seek to evade, their burden of blame and responsibility.

The Ideal Scapegoat

An ideal scapegoat, whether a person or group, is sufficiently different to be blamed, sufficiently conspicuous to be noticed, and sufficiently vulnerable to be attacked.

A historical example of a scapegoat is Marie Antoinette, queen of Louis XVI of France, whom the people called l’Autre-chienne—a pun playing on Autrichienne [Austrian woman] and autre chienne [other bitch]—and accused of being profligate and promiscuous. When the 14-year-old Marie Antoinette arrived in France to marry the then heir to the throne, the country had already been near-bankrupted by the reckless spending of Louis XV, and the naïve foreign princess soon became the unwitting target of the people’s mounting ire.

A scapegoat, such as Marie Antoinette, need not be entirely innocent. Indeed, some impression of guilt may make for a better scapegoat, providing a hook on which to hang greater grievances.

A scapegoat is often a person or group, but can also be an object, animal, or spirit. In fact, even human scapegoats are no longer regarded as fully human but are to varying degrees dehumanised and objectified. Some, such as witches and midwives in mediaeval Europe, are quite literally demonised. The dehumanisation of the scapegoat—which might, in the process, be transformed into a sacred or ritual object—makes the scapegoating both more potent and more palatable, and can even lend it a sense of pre-ordained, cosmic inevitability.

The Madness of the Crowds

According to the philosopher René Girard (d. 2015), owing to our crooked nature, envy gradually builds up in a society until it reaches a tipping point, at which order and reason cede to mob rule, chaos, and violence. To quell this ‘madness of the crowds’ which poses an existential threat to the society, an exposed or vulnerable person or group is singled out as a sink for all the bad feeling, and the bad feeling bred from the bad feeling. The scapegoat does not merely absorb aggression, but unites the aggressors and reduces their diffuse problems to a single, visible face.

After the defeat of the Thirty Tyrants of Athens in 403 BCE, Socrates, with his close links to prominent oligarchs such as Critias, who had been the first and worst among the Thirty, no longer seemed like the harmless eccentric of old, but like a dangerous and corrupting influence, a breeder of tyrants and the enemy of the common man. In the febrile atmosphere that had taken hold over the city, any accusation made against him, however false or fanciful, could be seized upon as a pretext to punish him and scapegoat him for the sufferings of the tyranny. The trial and death of Socrates, as related in Plato’s Apology, Crito, and Phaedo, still makes for compelling reading.

Once he is no more, a scapegoat may be totemised—and all the more so if he is also a martyr, that is, one who opposes or resists a belief or system of beliefs that is being imposed upon him. Today, Socrates is chiefly remembered by his death, with the Stoic Seneca going so far as to opine that ‘it was the hemlock that made Socrates great’ (cicuta magnum Socratem fecit). Socrates himself seems to have anticipated his totemisation, which is one reason he accepted the death sentence even though he could have avoided it, or later escaped. In Plato’s Apology, he seems almost to court death.

The Ultimate Scapegoat

The term ‘scapegoat’ is rooted in the Old Testament, more specifically, in Chapter 16 of the Book of Leviticus, according to which God instructed Moses and Aaron to sacrifice two goats every year. The first goat was to be sacrificed and its blood sprinkled upon the Ark of the Covenant. The High Priest was then to lay his hands upon the head of the second goat and confess the sins of the people. Unlike the first goat, this second goat was not to be killed but released into the wilderness together with its burden of sin, which is why it came to be known as a, or the, scapegoat.

The altar that stands in the sanctuary of every church is a symbolic remnant and reminder of this sacrificial practice, with the ultimate object of sacrifice being, of course, Jesus himself. Upon seeing Jesus for the first time, John the Baptist is said to have exclaimed, ‘Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world!’ (John 1:29). In Christian iconography, Christ is often depicted as the victorious Lamb of God of the Book of Revelation, with one leg hooked around a banner with a red cross—whence the name of one of Oxford’s most famous public houses, the Lamb & Flag.

The sacrifice prescribed in the Book of Leviticus prefigures that of Jesus, who played the role of the first goat in his human crucifixion, and the role of the second goat, the scapegoat, in his divine resurrection.

Scapegoating is so ingrained in our nature that we scapegoated God himself.

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If this essay spoke to you, you might look into Hide and Seek: The Psychology and Self-Deception and Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions.

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Pain Is a Feeling but not an Emotion. Love Can Be Both.

Woman looking at herself in a mirror

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

In brief, an emotion is an enduring psychological state, while a feeling is a conscious experience. An emotion such as love can give rise to many different feelings, while some feelings, such as pain, are not emotions at all.

‘Emotions’ and ‘feelings’ are often confused and assimilated. Even when they are distinguished, psychologists disagree about what they are. This is more than a quarrel over words. Unless we get the distinction right, we cannot meaningfully discuss our emotional lives.

What Emotions and Feelings Are Not

Many people use ‘emotions’ and ‘feelings’ as if they were exact synonyms. But this obscures an important distinction between an emotion and the conscious experience, or ‘feeling’, of that emotion.

Some experts go almost to the opposite extreme, defining an emotion as an automatic bodily response and a feeling as the conscious experience or interpretation of that response. But this is to confuse an emotion with its physiological manifestations. A racing heart is no more an emotion than tears are grief. The same bodily changes can accompany very different emotions, or no emotion at all, as during exercise or illness. Conversely, it is not clear that every emotion need involve appreciable bodily changes.

Other experts distinguish emotions from feelings chiefly on the basis of consciousness, treating an emotion as unconscious and a feeling as its conscious counterpart. This is much closer to the mark, but still conflates an emotion with the experience of that emotion—and leaves unexplained the many feelings, such as hunger and pain, that are not emotions at all.

Much of the confusion arises because behind these two words lie not two concepts but four: emotional experiences, emotions or sentiments, traits, and feelings. If you’re a philosopher and didn’t want to get hung up on words, you could just call them A, B, C, and D.

The Example of Pride

If I say, ‘I am grateful’, I could mean one of three things: that I am currently feeling grateful for something; that I generally feel grateful for that thing; or that I am a grateful kind of person.

Similarly, if I say, ‘I am proud’, I could mean that I am currently feeling proud about something, that I generally feel proud about that thing, or that I am a proud kind of person. 

Let’s agree to call the first instance (currently feeling proud about something) an emotional experience, the second instance (generally feeling proud about that thing) an emotion or sentiment, and the third instance (being a proud kind of person), a trait.

It is common to confuse these three instances, especially the first and the second. But whereas an emotional experience is brief and episodic, an emotion—which may or may not result from accreted emotional experiences—can perdure for many years, and, in that time, predispose to a variety of emotional experiences, as well as thoughts, beliefs, desires, and actions. For instance, love can give rise not only to amorous feelings, but also to joy, grief, rage, longing, and jealousy, among others.

That’s why we can tell someone that we love them even while we are furious with them. In fact, the fury, which is the emotional experience, may arise out of the love, which is the enduring emotion. Whereas if love existed solely when we were consciously feeling it, we would fall in and out of love many times a day.

So What Is the Difference Between a Feeling and an Emotion?

Now that we have our terminology in place, we are in a much better position to distinguish between an emotion and a feeling. 

An emotional experience, by virtue of being a conscious experience, is necessarily a feeling, as are physical sensations such as hunger, fullness, or pain.

Notice, however, that not all conscious experiences are also feelings, not, for example, believing or seeing—presumably because they lack a somatic, or bodily, dimension.

In contrast, an emotion, being in some sense latent, can only ever be felt, sensu stricto, through the emotional experiences to which it gives rise, even though it may also be discovered through its associated thoughts, beliefs, desires, and actions.

Thus, every emotional experience is a feeling, but not every feeling is an emotional experience. Pain is a feeling but not an emotion. Love can be both: we can be feeling love in the moment as a conscious emotional experience, while more enduringly being ‘in love’.

This is also why a feeling cannot simply be an interpretation of bodily changes: we do not have to interpret pain for it to hurt.

Now Let’s Start Talking

Now that we are conceptually clear about emotions, emotional experiences, feelings, and traits, we can start talking about our emotional lives without contradicting ourselves at every turn.

For example, because emotions need not themselves be conscious, some emotions, such as hating one’s mother or coveting one’s same-sex friend, might only be recognised after several years in psychotherapy.

If an emotion remains unconscious, this is often by repression or some more elaborate form of self-deception which builds upon repression.

Self-deception can also take place at the level of an emotional experience, commonly by misrepresenting the type or intensity of the emotional experience or misattributing its object or cause. Thus, envy is often construed as indignation, and Schadenfreude (pleasure derived from the misfortune of others) as sympathy. Fear of ghosts or ‘the dark’ is almost certainly fear of death, since people who have come to terms with death are hardly afraid of such things.

Thus, we can feel something without knowing quite what we are feeling, why we are feeling it, or even whom or what we are really feeling it about.

Emotions as Ways of Seeing

Beyond this, it could be argued that even the purest and most accurate of emotions is inherently self-deceptive in so far as it lends weight in our experience to one thing, or some things, over others, thereby clouding our perspective and the ‘bigger picture’. In that much, emotions are not objective or neutral perceptions, but subjective ‘ways of seeing’ that reflect our particular, contingent needs and preoccupations.

The lover notices what every other overlooks; the coward sees danger where another finds opportunity. To understand our emotions—and the relations between A, B, C, and D—is not merely to understand how we feel, but how we see the world—and ourselves in it.

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The Psychology and Philosophy of Polyamory

Nietzsche, Salomé, and Rée
Friedrich Nietzsche, Lou Salomé, and Paul Rée in Lucerne, 1882.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

In 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche, Lou Salomé, and Paul Rée had themselves photographed in a studio in Lucerne. Salomé stands behind a small cart, brandishing a whip, while the two philosophers are harnessed in front of her. It is the most famous photograph in all philosophy.

The photograph arose out of an extraordinary love triangle. Nietzsche and Rée had both proposed marriage to the 21-year-old Salomé, who rejected them both. Instead, she suggested that the three form a platonic ‘intellectual trinity’ and wander in search of a place in which to establish a commune of free spirits.

It did not end well. Within months, Salomé and Rée had vanished from Nietzsche’s life, leaving him devastated. But perhaps the most interesting thing about their failed experiment is not that it failed. It is that the arrangement Salomé proposed still strikes us as so strange.

We readily accept that a person can love several friends, several siblings, and several children. Why, when it comes to romantic love, must there be only one?

Why Romantic Love Is Exclusive

The answer has much more to do with paternity than with love. A man who wished to pass his name, status, and property to his own children needed some assurance that those children were indeed his. This created a powerful incentive to control female sexuality, and helps to explain two things: why polygamy is almost always polygyny, and why, historically, adultery and promiscuity have been judged much more severely in women than in men.

Romantic love, when it eventually arrived, became entangled in an older system of marriage and monogamy established to regulate sex and reproduction. This chronology raises the intriguing possibility that we have confused a precondition of marriage, exclusivity, with a precondition of love.

Can Love Be Divided?

To love more than one person is not necessarily to love each person less, just as to love two children is not necessarily to love each child less. ‘True love’, wrote PB Shelley (d. 1822), ‘in this differs from gold and clay / That to divide is not to take away.’ Love is not finite like money or time, or gold and clay, but grows in the giving.

If having a second child is not to betray the first, and taking on a new friendship is not to diminish our old friendships, why should romantic love alone obey a different arithmetic?

Love may not be finite, but time and attention are. Having a second child need not diminish our love for the first child, but it inevitably changes the distribution of our time and attention. And, you know what, maybe it does diminish our love for the first child. Maybe taking on a new friendship does diminish our old friendships. After all, firstborns and old friends often feel this way. Maybe things are more complicated than the binary truths we tell ourselves to simplify our lives.

Polyamory as an Experiment in Love

In 2006, the term polyamory (‘many loves’) made it into the Oxford English Dictionary. Polyamory is the philosophy or state of being romantically involved with more than one person at a time, with the knowledge and consent of all parties involved. The focus of polyamory is more on intimacy than on sex, and polyamorous relationships, while being romantic, need not be sexual.

Polyamory is not the same as polygamy, which, unlike polyamory, is culturally sanctioned and codified. And it is not the same as cheating, swinging, or free loving, since the focus is on intimacy and relationship building, with the knowledge and consent of all parties involved. While some people see their polyamory as an identity or orientation, others see it more in terms of an ethical alternative to infidelity.

Despite its ethical dimensions, polyamory is more heavily stigmatised than cheating: cheating may threaten the system, but at least operates from within it, whereas polyamory outright does away with it. Like a lie, which is defined in relation to the truth, cheating accepts the principle of romantic exclusivity even as it violates it.

Polyamory in Practice

Polyamory has long been recognised as an alternative lifestyle in gay subculture, and is becoming more and more mainstream, driven, among others, by feminism, gay emancipation, and the fragmentation of families and communities.

Polyamorous relationships can take many forms. They are often triads, or quads—maybe one couple with another. ‘Polyfidelity’ refers to a closed polyamorous relationship in which the parties agree to restrict themselves to one another, rather than take outside lovers. In some cases there may be a primary couple with one or more ‘secondary’ partners who are perhaps more distant or occasional. In other cases, one partner may have, or wish for, outside relationships, while the other may be content with just the primary relationship.

The partners of one partner, who are not also one’s partners, are referred to in the jargon as ‘metamours’, and it is in the spirit of polyamory that one treats them with courtesy and respect, as potential friends rather than rivals.

For some people, polyamory is experienced less as a lifestyle choice than as an orientation, leading to demands for legal recognition and protection for at least some forms of polyamorous relationships.

The Burden of the One

The modern romantic couple, closed as it is on itself, carries an extraordinary burden. One quite unqualified person may be expected to be lover, best friend, confidant, amanuensis, domestic partner, financial partner, co-parent… for decades and into old age. And when it transpires that this person is unable to meet all our needs, we may come to regard this as a failure of love. 

Polyamory acknowledges that some people’s relational needs are best met by more than one person, and, conversely, relieves the pressure of having to meet all of another person’s needs. By creating more space around a tired, claustrophobic relationship, it can breathe new love and new life into the relationship.

Because polyamory is non-exclusive, existing relationships and friendships are less likely to be abandoned or neglected in favour of ‘the one’, leading to a larger and stronger social network with more resources, skills, and perspectives to draw upon.

Unlike with serial monogamy, there is less incentive to write off an older relationship—and, by extension, a part of our history and who we are—simply because a more exciting or practical one has come along.

Indeed, there is something particularly brutal, even unnatural, about how someone with whom we have shared the best years of our life can suddenly become not merely a stranger but persona non grata. Surely, we can be better than this.

Love, Jealousy, and Possession

Of course, polyamory, too, has drawbacks. From a young age, we are taught that true love is the love of just one person, and that that person will be able to meet all our needs. The princess awaits her prince, and, when he finds her, they live happily ever after. There is no question of another prince, and still less of a squire or lady-in-waiting. Given this state of affairs, and the stigma of polyamory, it may be hard to find people, or enough people, with whom to conduct polyamorous relationships. But this is more a criticism of society than of polyamory proper.

People are naturally prone to possessiveness and jealousy, even when they insist they aren’t. The princess does not await some prince, but her prince. A new relationship is full of enthusiasm and excitement, or, to give it its proper name, ‘New Relationship Energy’—which can be tough on an existing partner. Jealousy can be even more of an issue if half of a couple is polyamorous, while the other half merely tolerates, rather than embraces, it. Having someone else’s smell on your partner’s skin and in your bedsheets is more than just a little confusing.

Jealousy is often treated as childish possessiveness. But it is more complicated than that. It may express fear of abandonment, helplessness, inadequacy, threatened status, or the perfectly rational recognition that our partner is committing precious time and attention to another and, all the while, comparing us.

Constraints do not always impoverish us. Sometimes, by closing off possibilities, they enable other possibilities to develop more fully. Romantic exclusivity may constrain love, but it may also preserve and concentrate it.

Triangles Needing to Be Squared

Polyamory demands time, energy, security, self-knowledge, emotional intelligence, and communication skills. Things can get pretty complicated, which can undermine the quality of the relationships and the very viability of the enterprise. Many people may not have the time, energy, or skills to manage much more than one relationship, and, of course, may not feel a need for more than one partner, if even that. For many people, the ideal number of partners is not one or two, but one-third or half.

This brings us back to Nietzsche, Salomé, and Rée. Their difficulty was not simply that three people were involved, but that the three did not want the same thing. Salomé envisaged an intellectual trinity; Nietzsche wanted Salomé; Rée had also proposed to her. While Nietzsche and Rée had been friends, neither had a romantic interest in the other, but merely tolerated the arrangement for the sake of Salomé. Although in a love triangle, their desires were not triangular.

The Measure of Love

Polyamory is neither the solution to love nor the end of monogamy. If anything, thinking seriously about polyamory reveals why monogamy has proved so enduring. Love may not be finite, but we are; jealousy is not simply a social convention to be unlearnt; and constraints, far from merely constraining us, can preserve and concentrate what we value most.

But polyamory also reveals how much unnecessary baggage we have loaded onto monogamy. To love one person need not mean possessing that person, expecting them to meet our every need, neglecting our other relationships, or banishing former lovers from our lives. Nor need we mistake exclusivity, inherited from the institution of marriage, for the essence or measure of love.

There may be a time in our lives for polyamory. But even if we decide to outright reject it, there is much to be gained from adopting a more fluid, flexible, and forbearing approach to relationships—and stealing a bit more life from the closing jaws of death.

Continue Exploring

If this essay spoke to you, you might look into For Better For Worse, an unconventional exploration of romantic love, marriage, and lasting relationships. For a broader exploration of love, desire, jealousy, and the emotions that shape our lives, see Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions.

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A History of the Orgy

Paul Cézanne, Bacchanale, c. 1875–80.
Paul Cézanne, Bacchanale, c. 1875–80.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Why orgies are no longer what they were.

Civilisation depends upon restraint. We are expected to play our allotted roles, respect boundaries, control our appetites, and maintain a coherent sense of self. Yet, across cultures and throughout history, people have sought occasions on which to let it all go: to drink, dance, disguise themselves, and disappear into the crowd. The Ancient Greeks personified this tendency towards dissolution in Dionysus, and in the nineteenth century Nietzsche referred to it as the Dionysian. But the impulse is older even than Dionysus—and, of course, far from dead.

Ancient Egypt

The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Heavenly Cow contains the Myth of the Destruction of Mankind. Displeased with the mounting rebelliousness of mankind, the ageing Sun God Ra sends his daughter Hathor to wreak revenge. Hathor takes the form of the bloodthirsty lioness Sekhmet and rampages up and down the Valley of the Nile, killing every man, woman, and child in sight. With mankind on the brink of extinction, Ra takes pity, and floods the fields with beer dyed red with ochre. Mistaking the beer for blood, Sekhmet drinks to intoxication and falls asleep—to arise once again in the benign form of Hathor, goddess of joy, love, and fertility.

To commemorate this episode, the Egyptians held communal Festivals of Drunkenness in mid-August, to coincide with the swelling of the Nile. Revellers drank to the point of passing out, only to be awoken by the beating of drums—mirroring the transformation of Sekhmet into Hathor. The revels, which had an important religious dimension and took place in and around temples and shrines, also included dancing and public sex, in part to imitate and propitiate the flood and fertility to come.

Ancient Greece

The word ‘orgy’, which derives, ultimately, from the Greek orgion (‘sacred rite’), entered the English language in the 1560s to mean ‘a licentious revelry’. Today, people think of an orgy as a party involving open and unrestrained sex between multiple people. But originally, orgia referred to the secret rites of Ancient Greek mystery cults such as the Dionysian Mysteries and the Cult of Cybele, which aimed, above all, at ecstatic union with the divine. The modern sense of ‘orgy’ retains only the licence, without the transcendence.

Dionysus, who, like Jesus, died and was reborn, was the god of wine, regeneration, fertility, ritual madness, ecstasy, theatre, and pleasure, among others. In certain times and places, or among certain people, he was the most important god—more important, even, than Zeus—and most fervently venerated around the time of the vernal equinox.

Let me paint you a picture of a Dionysian orgy. The procession begins at sunset, led by torchbearers followed by wine and fruit bearers, musicians, and a throng of revellers wearing masks and… well, not much else. Closing the rear is a giant phallus representing the resurrection of the twice-born god. Everyone is pushing and shoving, singing and dancing, and shouting the name of the god stirred in with ribaldry and obscenity.

Arriving at a clearing in the woods, the crowd goes wild with drinking, dancing, and every manner of sex. The god is in the wine, and to imbibe it is to be possessed by his spirit—although in the bull’s horn the booze has been interlaced with other entheogens (substances that ‘generate the divine from within’). Animals, standing in for the god, are hunted down, torn apart with bare hands, and eaten raw with the blood still warm and dripping.

This ‘Dionysian’ impulse for irrationality and chaos can be understood as a natural inversion of, and release from, the habitual ‘Apollonian’ order and restraint imposed by the state and state religion. In The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nietzsche recognises it as a primal and universal force:

Either through the influence of narcotic drink, of which all primitive men and peoples speak, or through the powerful coming on of spring, which drives joyfully through all of nature, that Dionysian excitement arises. As its power increases, the subjective fades into complete forgetfulness of self. In the German Middle Ages under the same power of Dionysus constantly growing hordes waltzed from place to place, singing and dancing. In that St. John’s and St. Vitus’s dancing we recognize the Bacchic chorus of the Greeks once again, and its precursors in Asia Minor, right back to Babylon and the orgiastic Sacaea.

By diverting the Dionysian impulse into special rites, the orgy kept it in check, preventing it from surfacing in more insidious and perfidious ways. More than that, it sublimed it into an invigorating and liberating—and, in that much, profoundly religious—celebration of life and the life force.

The orgy permitted people to escape from their artificial and restricted social roles and regress into a more authentic state of nature which modern psychologists have come to associate with the Freudian id or unconscious. It appealed most to marginal groups, since it set aside the usual hierarchies of man over woman, master over slave, patrician over commoner, rich over poor, and citizen over foreigner. In short, it gave people a much-needed break: like modern holidays, but cheaper and more effective.

Ancient Rome

The Dionysian cult spread through the Greek colonies to Rome and beyond. In 186 BCE, the Senate severely restricted it through the Senatorial Decree concerning the Bacchanalia (Senatus consultum de Bacchanalibus). According to the historian Livy, the decree led to more executions than imprisonments, with many choosing instead to commit suicide.

Illicit Bacchanalia persisted but gradually morphed into the tamer Liberalia in honour of Liber Pater (‘Free Father’), the Roman god of wine and fertility who so resembled Bacchus/Dionysus as to fold into him. As with the Dionysian cult, the Liberalia featured a giant phallus, carted through the countryside to fertilise the fields and safeguard crops—after which a virtuous matron would crown the phallus with a garland or wreath. This sort of ‘depravity’ also featured in other religious festivals such as the Lupercalia, which included naked noblemen coursing through the streets and whipping willing noblewomen with strips of goatskin.

The reign of Constantius II (337–361 CE) marked the beginning of the formal persecution of paganism by the now Christian Roman Empire. But the springtime fertility orgy survived through the tumult of the centuries, albeit in attenuated forms. At last, unable to do away with it, the Church integrated it into its calendar as Carnival—which, to this day, involves reversal of social norms and roles, licentiousness, and feasting ahead of the deprivations of Lent.

But one doesn’t have to wait for Carnival to have an orgy. In the summer of 2017, as reported in the Italian press, the police broke up a drug-fuelled gay orgy at the Vatican—the problem from the police’s perspective being more with the drugs than with the sex.

Mediaeval Europe

May Day celebrations across Europe and North America have their origins in the Roman Floralia and corresponding Celtic traditions. In mediaeval times, people danced around the gigantic phallic symbol of the Maypole before descending into the fields for wanton sex, avowedly to ‘fertilise the land’.

In the Anatomie of Abuses (1583), the puritan Philip Stubbs inveighed against these practices:

What clipping, what culling, what kissing and bussing, what smooching and slobbering one of another, what filthy groping and unclean handling is not practised in the dances … I have heard it creditably reported (and that viva voce) by men of great gravitie and reputation, that of fortie, threescore, or a hundred maides going to the wood over night, there have scaresly the third part of them returned home againe undefiled.

In 1644, the Puritans outlawed Maypoles in England, with the Long Parliament’s ordinance damning them as ‘a Heathenish vanity, generally abused to superstition and wickedness’.

Ecstasy

‘Ecstasy’ [ex stasis] literally means ‘to be or stand outside oneself’. It is a trance-like state in which consciousness of an object is so heightened that the subject dissolves or merges into the object. Einstein himself called it the ‘mystic emotion’ and spoke of it as ‘the finest emotion of which we are capable’, ‘the germ of all art and all true science’, and ‘the core of the true religious sentiment’.

More than ever before, modern society emphasises the sovereign supremacy of the ego and the ultimate separateness and responsibility of each and every one of us. From a young age, we are taught to remain in tight control of our ego or persona with the aim of projecting it as far out as possible. As a result, we have lost the art of letting go—and, indeed, may no longer even recognise the possibility—leading to a poverty or monotony of conscious experience.

Letting go can threaten the life that we have built and even the person that we have become, but it can also free us from our modern narrowness and neediness, and deliver, or re-deliver, us into a bigger and brighter world.

Man, said Balzac, dies in despair, while the spirit dies in ecstasy.

Continue Exploring

If this article spoke to you, you might look into Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions and For Better For Worse: Essays On Sex, Love, Marriage, and More.

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