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What we can learn from the orgies of old.

orgy

Parties today are really nothing like they used to be.

To commemorate the destruction of the bloodthirsty lioness Sekhmet, the Ancient Egyptians held communal Festivals of Drunkenness at the beginning of their calendar year in mid-August, when the Nile is swelling.

Revelers drank to the point of passing out, only to be awoken by the beating of drums. The celebrations, which had an important religious dimension and typically took place in temples and shrines, also included dancing and public sex, in part to imitate and propitiate the flood and fertility to come.

The word “orgy,” ultimately from the Greek orgion, 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 strangers. 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.

Dionysus, who, like Jesus, died and was reborn, was the god of wine, regeneration, fertility, theatre, and religious ecstasy, and was most fervently celebrated 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 and followed by wine and fruit bearers, musicians, and a throng of revelers wearing masks and, well, not much else. At the back 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 mixed in with ribaldry and obscenity.

Arriving at a clearing in the woods, the crowd goes wild with drinking, dancing, and every imaginable 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 is interlaced with many other mind-bending substances. Animals, which stand in for the god, are hunted down, ripped apart with bare hands, and consumed raw with the blood still warm and dripping.

The “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), the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche recognizes 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 dance 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 on special days, the orgy was intended to keep it under control, preventing it from surfacing in more insidious and perfidious ways. More than that, it transformed it into an invigorating and liberating—and, in that much, profoundly religious—celebration of life and the life force.

It permitted people to escape from their artificial and restricted social roles, and regress into a more authentic state of nature, which modern psychologists have associated 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.

The Dionysian cult spread through the Greek colonies to Rome. In 186 BCE, the Roman Senate severely restricted it, but illicit Bacchanalia persisted, especially in Southern Italy, gradually folding into the much tamer Liberalia in honour of Liber Pater (“Free Father”), the Roman god of wine and fertility who so resembled Bacchus/Dionysus as, eventually, to fold into him.

As with the Dionysian cult, the Liberalia featured a giant phallus, carted through the countryside to fertilize the land and safeguard crops—after which a virtuous Roman matron would crown the phallus with a wreath. “Depravity” also featured in other Roman religious festivals, such as the Floralia, with prostitutes dancing naked, and the Lupercalia, with naked noblemen running through the streets and whipping willing ladies with strips of goatskin.

The 4th-century reign of Constantius II marked the beginning of the formal persecution of paganism by the Christian Roman Empire. But the springtime fertility orgy survived through the centuries, albeit in attenuated forms. At last, unable to suppress it, the Church integrated it into its calendar as Carnival—which, still today, involves the reversal of social norms and roles, licentiousness, and feasting ahead of the deprivations of Lent.

May Day celebrations across Europe and North America trace their origins to the Roman Floralia and corresponding Celtic traditions. In medieval times, people danced around the gigantic phallic symbol of the Maypole before descending into the fields or woods for indiscriminate sex, supposedly to fertilize the land. 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” literally means “to be or stand outside oneself” (“ex-stasis”). It is a trance-like state in which consciousness of an object is so heightened that the subject dissolves or merges into the object. Albert 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 emphasizes 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 recognize the possibility—leading to a poverty or monotony of conscious experience.

As I argue in Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions, letting go can threaten the life that we have built or 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.

Little children have a quiescent or merged ego, which is why they brim with joy and wonder. Youth and ecstasy are the echoes of a primordial wisdom.

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A philosophical cure for fear and anxiety

actress

“Anxiety” said the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, “is the dizziness of freedom.” What could he have meant by that?

Anxiety can be defined as “a state consisting of psychological and physical symptoms brought about by a sense of apprehension at a perceived threat.”

Fear is similar to anxiety, except that with fear, the threat is, or is perceived to be, more concrete, present, or imminent.

Fear and anxiety can, of course, be a normal response to life experiences, protective mechanisms that have evolved to prevent us from entering into potentially dangerous situations and to help us escape from them should they befall us regardless.

For example, anxiety can prevent us from coming into close contact with disease-carrying or poisonous animals, such as rats, snakes, and spiders, from engaging with a much stronger or angrier enemy, and even from declaring our undying love to someone who is unlikely to spare our feelings.

If we do find ourselves caught in a potentially dangerous situation, the fight-or-flight response triggered by fear can help us to mount an appropriate response by priming our body for action and increasing our performance and stamina.

In short, the purpose of fear and anxiety is to protect us from harm and, above all, to preserve us from death—whether literal or figurative, biological or psychosocial.

On the other hand, severe or inappropriate anxiety can be maladaptive, preventing us from doing the sorts of things that most people take for granted, such as leaving the house or even our bedroom. I once treated a patient with an anxiety disorder who, to avoid ever having to leave his bedroom, urinated into a bottle and defaecated into a plastic bag.

Such pathological anxiety is very common and often presents in one or more distinct patterns or syndromes, such as phobia, panic disorder, or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

As with the adaptive forms, these pathological forms of anxiety can be interpreted in terms of life and death. Common phobias such as arachnophobia (spiders), ophidiophobia (snakes), acrophobia (heights), achluophobia (darkness), and brontophobia (storms) are all for the sorts of dangers that commonly threatened our ancestors. Today, man-made hazards such as motor cars and electric cables are much more likely to strike us, but most phobias remain for natural dangers, presumably because man-made hazards are too recent to have imprinted themselves onto our genome.

Panic disorder involves recurrent panic attacks during which symptoms of anxiety are so severe that the person fears that he or she is suffocating, having a heart attack, or losing control. Very soon, the person develops a fear of the panic attacks themselves, which in turn sets off further panic attacks. A vicious cycle takes hold, with the panic attacks becoming ever more frequent and severe and even occurring “out of the blue.”

As with phobias, the ulterior fear in panic disorder is of death and dying, as it is also with PTSD, which is a reaction to a traumatic life event, such as a car crash or physical or sexual assault. Common symptoms of PTSD include anxiety, of course, but also numbing, detachment, flashbacks, nightmares, and loss of memory for the traumatic event.

The symptoms of PTSD vary significantly from one culture to another, so much so that PTSD is sometimes thought of as a “culture-bound syndrome.” Culture-bound syndromes are essentially culture-specific anxiety disorders, which, again, like all anxiety disorders, can easily be understood in terms of life and death.

Dhat, for example, seen in South Asian men, involves a sudden fear about the loss of semen in the urine, whitish discoloration of the urine, and sexual dysfunction, accompanied by feelings of weakness and exhaustion. Dhat may be rooted in the old Hindu belief that it takes 40 drops of blood to create a drop of bone marrow, and 40 drops of bone marrow to create a drop of semen, and thus that semen is a concentrated essence of life.

In addition to fear and anxiety and their pathological forms (such as phobias, panic disorder, etc.), there is a more abstract or philosophical form of anxiety that has been called “existential anxiety.” While fear and anxiety and their pathological forms are grounded in threats to life, existential anxiety is rooted in the brevity and apparent meaninglessness or absurdity of life, that is, in a kind of metaphorical death.

As I argue in my new book, Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions, existential anxiety is so disturbing that most people avoid it at all costs, constructing a false reality out of goals, aspirations, habits, customs, values, culture, and religion in a bid to deceive themselves that their lives are special and meaningful and that death is distant or delusory.

Unfortunately, such self-deception comes at a heavy price. According to the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, people who refuse to face up to “non-being” are acting in “bad faith” and living out a life that is inauthentic and unfulfilling.

Facing up to non-being can bring insecurity, loneliness, responsibility, and, consequently, anxiety, but it can also bring a sense of calm, freedom, and even nobility. Far from being pathological, existential anxiety is a necessary transitional phase, a sign of health, strength, and courage, and a harbinger of bigger and better things to come.

For the philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich, refusing to face up to non-being leads not only to inauthenticity, as Sartre had said, but also to pathological (or neurotic) anxiety.

In The Courage to Be, Tillich writes:

He who does not succeed in taking his anxiety courageously upon himself can succeed in avoiding the extreme situation of despair by escaping into neurosis. He still affirms himself but on a limited scale. Neurosis is the way of avoiding nonbeing by avoiding being.

According to this striking outlook, pathological anxiety, although seemingly grounded in threats to life, in fact, arises from repressed existential anxiety, which itself arises from our uniquely human capacity for self-consciousness.

Facing up to non-being enables us to put our life into perspective, see it in its entirety, and thereby lend it a sense of direction and unity. If the ultimate source of anxiety is fear of the future, the future ends in death; and if the ultimate source of anxiety is uncertainty, death is the only certainty.

It is only by facing up to death, accepting its inevitability, and integrating it into a life that we can escape from the pettiness and paralysis of anxiety, and, in so doing, free ourselves to make, and get, the most out of our lives.

This esoteric understanding is what I have come to call “the philosophical cure for fear and anxiety.”

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shame

The psychology of the reflexive emotions, and the differences between them.

Embarrassment, shame, and guilt are all three reflexive emotions, that is, emotions about the self.

Although there is some overlap, embarrassment, shame, and guilt are distinct constructs.

Let’s look at them each in turn.

Embarrassment

Embarrassment is the feeling of discomfort when (1) some aspect of ourselves is, or threatens to be, revealed to others, and (2) we think that this revelation is likely to undermine the image that we seek to project to those others.

Potential sources of embarrassment vary according to circumstances and, in particular, to the company in which we find ourselves. They include particular thoughts, feelings, or dispositions; actions or behaviors, such as farting or swearing; conditions or states, such as a spot on the nose or smelly feet; possessions, such as our car or home; and relations, such as our oafish partner, criminal uncle, or lecherous aunt.

Sources of embarrassment need not be beneath our projected image, but merely out of keeping with it—which explains why it is possible, at times, to be embarrassed by our posh parents or rarefied education.

Shame

Whereas embarrassment is a response to something that threatens our projected image but is otherwise morally neutral, shame is a response to something that is morally reprehensible.

Shame is often accentuated if its object is exposed, but, unlike embarrassment, also attaches to a thought or action that remains undisclosed and undiscoverable to others. Embarrassment can sometimes be intense, but shame is a more substantial feeling in that it pertains to our moral character and not merely to our social character or image.

Shame arises from measuring our actions against moral standards and discovering that they fall short. If our actions fall short and we fail to notice, we can “be shamed” or made to notice—an extreme example being Cersei Lannister’s Walk of Shame in Game of Thrones. If having been made to notice, we do not much mind, we can be said to be shameless, or to “have no shame.”

In the Rhetoric, Aristotle, ever the fine psychologist, remarks that shame also arises from lacking in honorable things shared by others like us, especially if the lack is our own fault and therefore owes to our moral badness.

Finally, it is possible to feel shame vicariously, that is, to share in the shame of another person or feel shame on his or her behalf, especially if this person is closely allied or associated with us: for example, our partner, sibling, or child. Thus, even blameless people can experience shame, and so much is also true of embarrassment and other emotions. “Hell,” said Jean-Paul Sartre, “is other people.”

Try, right now, to act out the feeling of shame. The word “shame” derives from the Proto-Indo-European for “to cover,” and the feeling of shame is often expressed by a covering gesture over the brow and eyes, a downcast gaze, and a slack posture. Other manifestations of shame include a sense of warmth or heat and mental confusion or paralysis. These signs and symptoms can communicate remorse and contrition and, in so doing, inspire pity and pardon.

Even so, we may prefer to make a secret of our shame, for shame can itself be shameful—or, to be more precise, embarrassing.

People with low self-esteem, being harsher upon themselves, are more given to shame. In some cases, they may defend against shame with blame or contempt, often for the person or people who incited their shame. This is only likely to lead to deeper shame, and therefore to lower self-esteem, opening up a vicious cycle—which might be broken if, like certain politicians, they stop feeling shame at all.

While overwhelming shame can be destructive, mild to moderate shame is mostly a force for good, goading us to live more ethical lives.

In Dying for Ideas, the philosopher Costica Bradatan writes:

…the chief reason for studying philosophy is not a desire to know more about the world, but a profound sense of dissatisfaction with the state in which one finds oneself. One day you suddenly, painfully, realize that something important is missing in your life and that there is too large a gap between what you are and the sense of what you should be. And before you know it, this emptiness starts eating at you. You may not know yet what exactly it is that you want, but you know quite well what you do not want: remaining the person you currently are. You may be so ashamed that you don’t even dare to call that “existence”: you don’t exist yet properly. It must have been in this sense that Socrates used the term “midwifery” for what he was doing. By subjecting those around him to the rigors of philosophy, he was bringing them into proper existence. So closely related to self-detestation, it may be that philosophy begins not in wonder, but in shame.

Guilt

Whereas shame pertains to a person, guilt pertains to an action or actions and to blame and remorse. Shame says, “I am bad.” Guilt says, “I did something bad.”

More subtly, shame involves falling short of cultural or societal moral standards, whereas guilt involves falling short of one’s own moral standards. Thus, it is entirely possible to feel guilty about actions of which many or most of our peers approve, such as wearing designer clothes, driving a gas-guzzling car, or eating red meat.

As I discuss in my new book, Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions, shame and guilt often go hand in hand, which is why they are so often confused. For instance, when we injure someone, we often feel bad about having done so (guilt) and, at the same time, feel bad about ourselves (shame).

Yet guilt and shame are distinct emotions. Shame is “egodystonic,” that is, in conflict with our desired self-image, and high levels of shame are correlated with poor psychological functioning. In particular, eating disorders and many sexual disorders can be understood as disorders of shame, as can narcissism, which can be construed as a defense against shame.

Guilt, on the other hand, is “egosyntonic,” that is, consistent with our self-image, and—except in extreme cases, such as that of the regicidal Lady Macbeth—is either unrelated or inversely correlated with poor psychological functioning.

Faced with the same set of circumstances, people with high self-esteem are more prone to guilt than to shame, and more likely to take corrective or redemptive action.

There is a fourth “negative” reflexive emotion, humiliation, which I will save for my next article.