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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.

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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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Synonyms, or Opposites?

Socrates at his trial
Socrates: humble, but not always modest.

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

If you are brilliant and know that you are brilliant, is it arrogant to say so? And if you pretend that you are not, is that humility—or merely modesty?

‘Modesty’ and ‘humility’ are often used interchangeably, but they are actually very different concepts.

‘Modesty’ derives from the Latin modus, ‘measure’ or ‘manner’, and means restraint in appearance and behaviour. It is the reluctance to flaunt, display, or otherwise draw attention to oneself.

Modesty often implies a certain artfulness or artificiality, perhaps even insincerity or hypocrisy. In Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850), Uriah Heep is characterised by his obsequiousness, and often brings up his own ‘umbleness’ in an attempt to disguise the true scale of his ambition. Modesty often poses as humility, but, unlike humility, is superficial and external rather than deep and moral. At best, modesty is no more than good manners.

Indeed, modesty can sometimes be a subtle form of vanity or advantage-seeking. By conspicuously understating some trait or achievement, we may be inviting others to contradict and praise us, or to like us better. The ego has not disappeared; it has merely become more cunning.

‘Humility’, like ‘humiliation’, derives from the Latin humus, ‘earth’ or ‘dirt’. Unlike mere modesty, true humility derives from a proper perspective on our human condition: one among billions on a small planet among billions, like a spore on a crumb of cheese.

Of course, it is nearly impossible for human beings to remain this objective for very long, but truly humble people are nonetheless far more conscious of their cosmic insignificance, an insignificance that verges on non-existence. A speck of dust does not think itself superior or inferior to another, nor does it concern itself with what other specks of dust might or might not think.

Enthralled by the miracle of existence, the truly humble person lives not for herself or her image, but for life itself.

In sum, to be humble is to subdue our ego so that things are no longer all about us, whereas to be modest is to protect the ego of others so that they do not feel uncomfortable, threatened, or small, and attack us in turn.

Because genuinely humble people often have a great deal to be modest about, they may need to slap on an extra thick veneer of modesty, or simply give up the game.

Humble people do not, as is often thought, have a low opinion of themselves. Instead, they have an accurate opinion of themselves, and, probably, of us as well. They neither elevate nor diminish themselves, but seek to see themselves and everything else for what they truly are. Erasmus (d. 1536) could not have put it more pithily when he said, ‘Humility is truth.’

If humility is truth, modesty is often a lie—so that the two can sometimes come into conflict. Modesty may require us to gloss over the truth to spare the feelings of others; humility, on the other hand, may demand that we speak the truth. Whereas Uriah Heep was modest without being humble, Socrates was humble without always being modest.

The Case of Socrates

In 399 BCE, at the age of seventy, Socrates was indicted for impiety. He was accused of ‘studying things in the sky and below the earth’, ‘making the worse into the stronger argument’, and ‘teaching these same things to others’.

At his trial, he gave a defiant defence, telling the jurors that they ought to be ashamed of their eagerness to possess as much wealth and reputation as possible, while not caring for or giving thought to wisdom or truth, or the best possible state of their soul.

After being convicted and sentenced to death, Socrates addressed the jurors, saying:

You think that I was convicted through deficiency of words—I mean, that if I had thought fit to leave nothing undone, nothing unsaid, I might have gained an acquittal. Not so; the deficiency which led to my conviction was not of words—certainly not. But I had not the boldness or impudence or inclination to address you as you would have liked me to address you, weeping and wailing and lamenting, and saying and doing many things which you have been accustomed to hearing from others, and which, as I say, are unworthy of me. But I thought that I ought not to do anything common or mean in the hour of danger: nor do I now repent of the manner of my defence, and I would rather die having spoken after my manner, than speak in your manner and live.

Throughout his long life, Socrates had been a paragon of humility. When his friend Chaerephon asked the Delphic oracle if anyone was wiser than Socrates, the priestess of Apollo replied that no one was wiser. To discover the meaning of this divine utterance, Socrates questioned a number of people with a claim to wisdom, and in each case concluded, ‘I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know.’ From then on, he dedicated himself to the service of the gods by seeking out anyone who might be wise and, ‘if he is not, showing him that he is not.’ 

Was Socrates lacking in humility before the jurors? Was he, paradoxically, being arrogant by bragging about his humility? Perhaps he deliberately put on a brazen display because he wanted to die, because he understood that by dying a martyr his teachings would be preserved for posterity.

Or perhaps genuine humility can seem like arrogance to those who are truly arrogant.

The more arrogant someone is, the more modesty they require from others.

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Freud and the Discovery of the Unconscious

Portrait of Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud in 1921, photographed by Max Halberstadt.

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

Essay substantially revised on 8 September 2026.

People with a high level of anxiety have historically been referred to as ‘neurotic’. The term ‘neurosis’ derives from the Ancient Greek neuron (‘nerve’) and loosely means ‘disease of the nerves’.

The core feature of neurosis is anxiety, but neurosis can also manifest in more distinct forms such as phobias, panic attacks, irritability, depression, perfectionism, and obsessive-compulsive tendencies. Whatever form or forms it takes, neurosis can prevent us from living in the moment, adapting usefully to our environment, and developing a richer, more nuanced, and more fulfilling outlook on life.

Neurosis and the Loss of Meaning

For Carl Jung, neurosis often reflected a crisis of purpose and meaning. In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, he noted that the majority of his patients consisted ‘not of believers but of those who had lost their faith’.

Yet he also believed that neurosis could, in some cases, benefit the sufferer.

In Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, he wrote:

The reader will doubtless ask: What in the world is the value and meaning of a neurosis, this most useless and pestilent curse of humanity? To be neurotic—what good can that do? … I myself have known more than one person who owed his whole usefulness and reason for existence to a neurosis, which prevented all the worst follies in his life and forced him to a mode of living that developed his valuable potentialities. These might have been stifled had not the neurosis, with iron grip, held him to the place where he belonged.

Freud and the Birth of Psychoanalysis

The most original, influential, and controversial theory of neurosis is that of Sigmund Freud.

Freud studied medicine in Vienna from 1873 to 1881 and, after a time, decided to specialise in neurology. In 1885–86, he spent the best part of a year in Paris, where he was impressed by the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot’s use of hypnosis in the treatment of ‘hysteria’ (Greek, hysterikos, ‘of the womb’), an outdated and inherently sexist construct involving the conversion of psychological distress into physical and psychological symptoms.

Freud returned to Vienna and opened a private practice, but gradually abandoned hypnosis in favour of ‘free association’, which involved asking the patient to relax on a couch and say whatever came into her mind.

In 1895, inspired in particular by Josef Breuer’s treatment of Bertha Pappenheim (better known as Anna O.), Freud and Breuer published the seminal Studies on Hysteria. Following the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), Freud was appointed professor at the University of Vienna and began to gather a devoted following.

He remained a prolific writer throughout his life. Some of his most influential works include Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), Totem and Taboo (1913), and Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920).

Following the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938, Freud fled to London, where, in the following year, he died of cancer of the jaw. His daughter Anna became a distinguished psychoanalyst in her own right and did much to develop and systematise his account of the ego defence mechanisms.

The Talking Cure

In Studies on Hysteria, Freud and Breuer argued that neurotic symptoms could originate in traumatic experiences that had been excluded from consciousness. Treatment involved helping the patient to recover these experiences and give expression to the emotion attached to them, leading to a sudden and dramatic outpouring of feeling (‘catharsis’) and, ideally, to the disappearance of the symptom.

Freud later moved beyond this early ‘cathartic method’, placing ever greater emphasis on free association, dream interpretation, and the patient’s relationship with the analyst. By remaining relatively passive and inscrutable, the analyst became a kind of blank canvas onto which the patient could project thoughts and feelings carried over from important earlier relationships—a process called ‘transference’.

In the course of analysis, the patient might display ‘resistance’ by changing the topic, blanking out, falling asleep, arriving late, or missing appointments. Such behaviour was only to be expected: it indicated that the patient was approaching repressed material but remained afraid of confronting it.

Routes into the Unconscious

Freud famously called dreams ‘the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious’. Dreams, he believed, are disguised fulfilments of repressed wishes. Their surface story, or ‘manifest content’, conceals a deeper ‘latent content’ that has been distorted to make it more acceptable to the sleeping mind. The task of dream interpretation is to work backwards from the manifest content to the hidden wish beneath it.

Besides dreams and free association, Freud identified two further routes into the unconscious: parapraxes and jokes.

Parapraxes, better known as ‘Freudian slips’, are ‘faulty actions’ that occur when unconscious thoughts and desires suddenly parallel and then override conscious thoughts and intentions. Examples include calling a partner by the name of an ex-partner, substituting one word for another that rhymes or sounds similar (‘I would like to spank/thank you’), or combining two words into a single one (‘He is a very lustrous [illustrious/lustful] gentleman’).

Although parapraxes often manifest in speech as ‘slips of the tongue’, they can also manifest as misreadings, mishearings, forgettings, and the mislaying of objects. In Freud’s world, even a joke was never only a joke—and an accident might not be entirely accidental.

The Architecture of the Mind

In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud presented and elaborated upon his ‘topographical model’ of the mind, distinguishing between the conscious, the unconscious, and an intermediary layer called the preconscious, which, although not presently conscious, could readily be accessed by consciousness.

He later became dissatisfied with the topographical model and supplemented it with the ‘structural model’, according to which the mind is divided into the id, ego, and superego.

The id, which is wholly unconscious, contains our drives and repressed emotions. Governed by the ‘pleasure principle’, it seeks immediate gratification regardless of circumstance or consequence.

Opposing it is the partly unconscious superego, a sort of moral judge arising from the internalisation of parental figures and, by extension, of society itself.

Caught in the middle is the ego, which, unlike the id, has both conscious and unconscious parts. Governed by the ‘reality principle’, it mediates between the id, the superego, and the demands of reality, postponing gratification and enabling the person to function in the world.

Neurotic anxiety arises when the ego is overwhelmed by these competing demands. To protect itself, it deploys various defence mechanisms (‘ego defences’) that block or distort impulses from the id, making its outrageous demands seem more acceptable, tolerable, and manageable.

Freud’s topographical and structural models of the mind
Freud’s topographical model (the ocean) and structural model (the iceberg) superimposed. Only the tip of the iceberg is conscious.

Sex, Death, and the Oedipus Complex

For Freud, human behaviour is driven above all by instinct. The life instinct, or Eros, seeks survival, propagation, pleasure, and creation, and draws its energy from the libido or sex drive. Opposed to it is the death instinct, the unconscious urge towards aggression, destruction, and, ultimately, the peace of non-existence.

Human life is shaped by the tension between these two elemental forces: the impulse to bind and build, and the impulse to break apart and return to nothingness.

Even in childhood, the libido is the primary motivating force. As children mature, they pass through a series of psychosexual stages—oral, anal, phallic, latent, and genital—each centred upon a different source of pleasure and conflict. If a conflict is not adequately resolved, part of the personality may remain ‘fixated’ at that stage, contributing to neurotic symptoms and patterns of character in later life.

The most notorious of these conflicts is the Oedipus complex, named after the mythological king who unwittingly killed his father and married his mother. In Freud’s account, the young boy takes his mother as his first love-object and comes to regard his father as a rival. But since his father is stronger and more powerful, he eventually relinquishes his claim upon his mother and identifies with his father instead.

Freud’s corresponding account of female development is even more controversial and, like much of his sexual theory, is better understood as a mythology of the mind than as literal science. Even so, the Oedipus complex captures something profound: that we do not enter society directly, but through the triangle of the family, by learning that we cannot possess everything—or everyone—that we desire.

Freud’s stages of psychosexual development

Freud’s Enduring Influence

Although derided in his time and still today, Freud is without question one of the deepest and most original thinkers of the twentieth century.

Many of his specific theories are unscientific, unfalsifiable, or simply wrong. Yet his larger vision—that much of mental life takes place outside awareness, that we are divided against ourselves, that childhood shapes adulthood, that symptoms have meanings, and that human beings are strangers in their own minds—has become so deeply embedded in our culture that we can no longer easily perceive its influence.

Despite being disowned or disdained by physicians, Freud is, ironically, the most famous of all physicians, and the only physician to have become a household name. He is credited with discovering—or at least mapping—the unconscious and inventing psychoanalysis, and had a colossal impact not only on psychiatry but also on art, literature, and the humanities.

He may have been thinking of himself—he often did—when he noted that ‘the voice of intelligence is soft, but it does not die until it has made itself heard.’

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I revisit Freud in The Meaning of Madness and Hide and Seek: The Psychology of Self-Deception.

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