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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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The Psychology and Philosophy of Solitude

Jove decadent (1899), by Ramon Casas.
Jove decadent (1899), by Ramon Casas.

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

Solitude and loneliness are not synonyms; if anything, they’re opposites. Whereas there is not much to recommend in loneliness, solitude gives us the freedom to think our own thoughts, follow our own inclinations, and live, if only for a time, entirely at our own pace.

Other people constrain us. They may be too inhibited for us, shrinking from thoughts that we would pursue, or unable to have them; or they may be too boorish, offending our sensitivities with their nasty habits and crude opinions.

Company, like employment, is a trade-off. A job provides income, security, and structure, but at the cost of our best life. Similarly, company provides affection, stimulation, and distraction, but at the cost of sinking our time and potential. For many people, this is a bargain well worth making. But perhaps not you, or you wouldn’t have read this far.

The Metaphysics of Loneliness

We tend to think of lonely people as single people, assimilating people who are lonely with people who are alone, and people who are alone with people who are single. But people who are single are not necessarily alone, and people who are alone are not necessarily lonely. Conversely, it is possible and even common to feel at our loneliest when completely surrounded by partner, family, and friends.

Many people choose to remain single, and some even choose to isolate themselves, or, at least, not to actively seek out social bonds. Such ‘loners’ (the very term is pejorative, implying, as it does, abnormality and deviousness) may revel in their rich inner life or simply dislike or distrust the company of others, which, they feel, comes with more costs than benefits. Many loners are actually very good with people when needs must, or when the right person turns up.

Timon of Athens, who lived at around the same time as Plato, began life in wealth, lavishing money upon his fawning friends, and, in accordance with his notion of friendship, never expecting anything in return. But when he ran out of coin, all his friends deserted him, reducing him to the hard toil of labouring the fields.

One day, as Timon tilled the earth, he uncovered a pot of gold, and, suddenly, all his former friends came tumbling back. But rather than welcome them with open arms, he cursed them and drove them away with sticks and clods of earth. Timon declared his hatred of humankind and withdrew into the forest—where, much to his chagrin, people sought him out as some kind of holy man.

Did Timon feel lonely in the forest? Probably not, because he did not believe that he lacked for anything. As he no longer valued his friends or their company, he could not have desired or missed them—even though he may have pined for a better class of person, and, in that limited sense, felt lonely. Loneliness is not an objective state of affairs so much as a subjective state of mind, a function of desired and achieved levels of social interaction and also of types of interaction. Lovers often feel lonely in the single absence of their beloved, even when completely surrounded by family and friends. Jilted lovers feel much lonelier than lovers who are merely apart from their beloved, indicating that loneliness is not merely a matter of the amount or degree of interaction, but also of the potential or possibility for interaction—as brought home during the coronavirus lockdowns.

Conversely, it is common to feel lonely within a marriage because the relationship is no longer validating or nurturing us, but diminishing us and holding us back. As the writer Anton Chekhov (d. 1904) admonished, ‘If you are afraid of loneliness, do not marry.’

And yet for many people marriage is, among others, an attempt to flee from their lifelong loneliness and escape from their inescapable demons.

At the bottom, loneliness is not the experience of lacking but the experience of living. It is, in other words, part and parcel of the human condition. Unless a person is resolved, it can only be a matter of time before the feeling of loneliness resurfaces, often with a vengeance.

On this account, loneliness is the manifestation of the conflict between our desire for meaning and the absence of meaning from the universe, an absence that is all the more glaring in modern societies which have sacrificed traditional structures of meaning on the thin altar of truth.

So much explains why people with a strong sense of purpose and meaning, or simply with a strong narrative, such as Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, or St Anthony of the Desert, are protected from loneliness regardless of the circumstances in which they may find themselves.

St Anthony (d. 356 CE), like Thoreau centuries later, sought out aloneness precisely because he understood that it could bring him closer to the real questions and value of life. He spent fifteen years in a tomb and twenty years in an abandoned fort in the desert of Egypt before his devotees persuaded him to withdraw from his seclusion to instruct and organise them, whence his epithet, ‘Father of All Monks’ (‘monk’ and ‘monastery’ derive from the Greek, monos, ‘solitary’, ‘alone’). Anthony emerged from the fort not broken and emaciated, as all had been expecting, but healthy and radiant, and expired in his hundred and sixth year—which in the fourth century might in itself have counted as a minor miracle.

Loneliness vs Solitude

St Anthony did not lead a life of loneliness, but one of solitude. Loneliness, the pain of being alone, is distressing; solitude, the joy of being alone, is freeing and empowering.

Our unconscious requires solitude to process experiences and unravel problems, so much so that our body imposes it upon us each night in the form of sleep. By removing us from the constraints, distractions, and opinions imposed upon us by others, solitude frees us to reconnect with ourself, assimilate ideas, and generate identity and meaning.

For Friedrich Nietzsche (d. 1900), people without the aptitude or opportunity for solitude are mere slaves because they have no alternative but to parrot culture and society. In contrast, anyone who has unmasked society naturally seeks out solitude, which becomes the source and guarantor of a more authentic set of values and ambitions.

Nietzsche was never one to mince his words:

I go into solitude so as not to drink out of everybody’s cistern. When I am among the many I live as the many do, and I do not think I really think. After a time it always seems as if they want to banish my self from myself and rob me of my soul.

Solitude removes us from the mindless humdrum of everyday life into a higher consciousness which reconnects us with our deepest humanity, and also with the natural world, which quickens into our muse and companion. When we think of company, we usually think of people. But animals too are company, as are plants, the sea, wine, and all beautiful things. I call them ‘low intensity company’, and, often, I prefer them.

By loosening the bonds of dependency and the constraints of compromise (and compromise about compromise), we free ourselves up for problem solving, creativity, and spirituality. If we are able and willing to embrace it, this opportunity to refine our perspectives creates the strength and security for still greater solitude and, in time, the substance and meaning that guards against loneliness.

The life of St Anthony can leave the impression that solitude is at odds with attachment, but this need not be the case so long as the one is not pitted against the other. For the poet RM Rilke (d. 1926), the highest task of lovers is not merely to tolerate but ‘stand guard over’ the solitude of the other.

Of his early mentor, the sculptor Auguste Rodin, Rilke wrote: ‘Rodin was solitary before he was famous. And fame, when it arrived, made him perhaps more solitary.’ Other creatives who found inspiration in solitude include Emily Dickinson, Frida Kahlo, Marcel Proust, Nikola Tesla, and Vincent van Gogh.

In Solitude: A Return to the Self (1988), the psychiatrist Anthony Storr persuasively argues that: ‘The happiest lives are probably those in which neither interpersonal relationships nor impersonal interests are idealised as the only way to salvation. The desire and pursuit of the whole must comprehend both aspects of human nature.’

Be this as it may, not everyone is capable of solitude, and for many people aloneness will never amount to anything more than bitter loneliness. Younger people often find aloneness difficult, while older people are more likely, or less unlikely, to seek it out. So much suggests that solitude, the joy of being alone, stems from, as well as promotes, a state of maturity and inner richness.

Profound peace of heart and perfect peace of mind, these highest earthly goods after health, are to be found in solitude alone, and, as a permanent disposition, only in the deepest seclusion. And if our own self is great and rich, we enjoy the happiest state that can be found on this miserable earth. —Arthur Schopenhauer

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Why the Greeks Thought Wine Deserved a God

Sick Bacchus, by Caravaggio
Caravaggio’s Young Sick Bacchus (in fact, a self-portrait) — To the Greeks, wine was not merely a drink but an affirmation of life in the face of death.

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

Would you turn the other cheek? Not that cheek. Discover the last and most unusual of the Olympian gods.

Dionysus 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. Owing to his hold on the imagination, there is much mythical material surrounding him.

Dionysus was the son of Zeus and Semele, one of the four daughters of Cadmus. When Semele was pregnant with Dionysus, a jealous Hera persuaded her to ask Zeus to reveal himself to her ‘as he does to his wife’. Zeus reluctantly obliged, leading Semele to die from one of his thunderbolts. Zeus succeeded in saving his son from her womb, and stitched him into his thigh (probably a euphemism for his testicle)—whence the Dionysian epithet dimētōr, ‘of two mothers’, ‘twice-born’.

Following this second birth, Hermes placed Dionysus into the care of his aunt Ino and her husband Athamas, asking them to bring him up as a girl. Even in this guise, Hera recognised him and inflicted madness upon Ino and Athamas, who killed their children before killing themselves. To protect him, Zeus turned Dionysus into a kid, which Hermes spirited to the satyr Silenus and the mænads of Mount Nysa. Silenus became his tutor, and the centaur Chiron completed his education.

After the young Dionysus discovered the magical vine, Hera drove him mad. He roamed the world to escape from her while teaching mortals the secrets of winemaking. He travelled to Egypt and Syria, and even led a campaign into India. According to the historian Diodorus Siculus (d. 30 BCE), Dionysus taught all the known world how to make wine—except for Britain and Æthiopia. In Phrygia, he met the mother goddess Cybele, who taught him the mysteries and, by channelling it, cured him of his madness. He then established his cult and rites, inspired by those of Cybele.

While in Phrygia, Silenus wandered off drunk and was carried to King Midas. When Dionysus came to collect him, he offered Midas any wish. Midas asked for the power to turn whatever he touched into gold. Before dinner, he had turned every bush in his famed rose garden to gold. But he was horrified when his food and wine also turned to gold. His daughter tried to comfort him, but she too suffered the same fate. When Midas begged to be rescued, Dionysus told him to bathe in the River Pactolus, the golden sands of which later became the source of Croesus’ fabulous wealth.

Dionysus returned to Greece in a triumphal procession of satyrs and mænads. However, his wild and alien cult met with resistance. In Thrace, King Lycurgus captured his followers and drove Dionysus into the sea. Dionysus visited madness on Lycurgus—leading him to kill his wife and son and chop off his own legs in the belief that they were vines.

In his own city of Thebes, Dionysus was opposed by his cousin Pentheus, the son of Agave. The seer Tiresias urged Pentheus to embrace Dionysus, warning him, ‘Your blood [will be] poured out and defile the woods and your mother and sisters…’ But Pentheus forbade his worship, after which the women of Thebes lost their minds and left their homes to cavort in a frenzy on Mount Cithæron. Pentheus hid in a tree to spy on them, but the daughters of Cadmus found him and tore him apart from limb to limb. Agave tore off his head, put it on a pike, and took it to Cadmus—before realising what she had done.

Some time later, Dionysus chartered a ship manned by Tyrrhenian mercenaries. Believing him to be the son of a rich man, they sailed towards Asia with the intention of ransoming him. When they bound him to the mast, the bonds simply fell away. The helmsman Acoetes warned that this was no ordinary man, but the captain failed to change course. Dionysus filled the vessel with ivy and flute song, leading the mercenaries to lose their minds and leap into the sea. He then turned them into dolphins, sparing only Acoetes, who bore witness to his divinity.

On Naxos, Dionysus found Ariadne, who had been abandoned there by Theseus. Dionysus had countless lovers, both male and female, but married only Ariadne, giving her a crown and fixing it into the heavens as the constellation Corona. He then travelled to Hades to bring back his mother Semele, and all three ascended to Olympus.

The Meaning of Dionysus

Dionysus’ origins are shrouded in the mists of time, and it may be that he is a composite of a number of similar gods from far-flung times and places. His name is first attested on tablets recovered from Mycenæan Pylos, although its etymology is uncertain. The Greeks had many other names or epithets for him, including Androgynos, Bromios [Thunderer], Eleuthereus [Liberator], and Tauros [Bull].

Whatever his origins, Dionysus came to symbolise the impulsive, the chaotic, and everything that escapes human reason and control—and, by extension, nature and its vitality. Like nature, he is both creation and destruction, representing on the one hand growth and fertility and on the other wine and dissolution. He dissolves the boundaries between reason and instinct, civilisation and nature, life and death, the human and the divine. As twice-born and returned from Hades, he crosses and re-crosses the boundary between life and death. He reminds us, as does the hero, that life is at its fullest in the jaws of death.

Much of his mythology is about establishing himself as a god, suggesting that he may in part be rooted in a historical figure. Although the Greeks, especially Greek men, resisted his alien and anarchic cult, he rose to become one of the principal Olympian gods.

Dionysus was the last of the twelve Olympian gods to arrive, and the only one with a mortal parent—embodying, like wine itself, the duality between the human and the divine.

He rode in a chariot drawn by big cats and accompanied by an ecstatic retinue, or thíasos, of erect satyrs and frenzied mænads. Under the influence of the god and his wine, satyrs and mænads tore apart sacrificial animals and ate them raw. The Greeks honoured Dionysus in several annual festivals, including the City Dionysia, which became the premier competition for playwrights in Athens. The thíasos, especially the triumphal procession on Dionysus’ return to Greece, served as a model for later Dionysian processions and, according to Pliny the Elder, even the Roman Triumph.

Dionysus appears in early Greek art as a bearded man, but later evolves into an alluring and androgynous youth. His attributes include the thyrsus, a fennel staff tipped with a pinecone; the kantharos, a drinking cup with high handles; the vine and ivy; the snake; and the bull.

For Sigmund Freud, Dionysus and his thíasos symbolised the id, the deep, primitive, and instinctual part of the mind. Freud requested that his ashes be preserved in an Ancient Greek krater painted with Dionysian scenes—where they remain to this day.

To Dionysus, the most important individual in his train was Silenus, the wisest and, not coincidentally, the most drunken of his followers. The Midas myth has become famous the world over and is a powerful way of making the point that the true wealth of life resides in life itself. Assuming we have a modest amount, it is not generally a lack of funds but a lack of soul, or lack of love, that keeps us from living.

Silenus is also associated with the bleak teaching that the best thing for human beings is never to have been born, and the next best to die as soon as possible. Plato alludes to this ‘Wisdom of Silenus’ but thinks it dangerous and refrains from spelling it out too clearly. In Plato’s Symposium, Alcibiades compares Socrates to Silenus for being ugly outside but beautiful inside.

In his earliest work, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nietzsche popularised a dichotomy between Apollo and Dionysus. The Apollonian stands for light, reason, order, and individuation, whereas the Dionysian is all about darkness, irrationality, chaos, and dissociation. The Dionysian impulse, similar to Freud’s concept of the id or Jung’s concept of the shadow, is a primal force that demands to be acknowledged and integrated.

Dionysus himself lost his mind until he mastered the mysteries, after which he became a model of sanity or even hypersanity and established his cult. If too much of the Dionysian is destructive, too much of the Apollonian is stultifying, whereas a balance of the two unleashes the best of both.

Nietzsche argued that the Ancient Greeks achieved that rare balance of the Apollonian and Dionysian, notably in the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles, which, by providing a paradigm of existential suffering, enabled people to experience a profound sense of release and escape. But owing to the influence of rationalists such as Socrates and Plato, the Apollonian took over, and European culture came to lack passion and vitality.

The dichotomy between Apollo and Dionysus is, however, a modern one. The Greeks, if anything, tended to assimilate them: Like Apollo, Dionysus was said to have the gift of prophecy, and even to inhabit the Temple of Apollo at Delphi during Apollo’s winter absence.

The Dionysian Mysteries were related to the Orphic and Osirian Mysteries. Orphics held the ‘first Dionysus’, or Zagreus, to have been torn apart and eaten by the Titans before being reborn through Semele. They worshipped Dionysus as a chthonic aspect of Zeus and connected him with the reincarnation and immortality which they sought for themselves.

Dionysus also has much in common with Jesus Christ: a divine father, a mortal mother, and a rebirth or resurrection. Both carried a revolutionary message of salvation, sought to establish a following on earth before ascending to heaven, and roamed about performing miracles. Still today, followers of Jesus ritually eat his flesh and drink his blood in the bread and wine of the eucharist.

Of course, Dionysus was never likely to turn the other cheek—or, at least, not that cheek—but he was, unusually among the Olympian gods, a good friend to humankind.

If Prometheus gave us fire, Dionysus gave us wine, the inner fire which frees the mind and dissolves the ego along with all of its problems. Wine brings us together, helps us be together, and be inventive together, as in the Greek symposia and Roman convivia, in which measured drinking could lead to expansive elation and creative association and the voicing of disruptive ideas and perspectives.

It can be no coincidence that, on all four sides, in all four corners, the borders of the Roman Empire stopped where wine could no longer be made.

Life without wine would be a pale shadow of itself. I raise my glass to Dionysus.

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What Wine Reveals About Being Human

Plato's Symposium
The Symposium by Anselm Feuerbach (1869). In ancient Greece, wine was not merely consumed; it created a space for conversation, friendship, poetry, and philosophy.

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

Wine is in decline.

Across much of the world, especially among younger generations, people are drinking less wine than they once did. The reasons are several: changing attitudes to alcohol, concerns about health, economic pressures, changing patterns of socialising, and shifting cultural values.

Perhaps this is no great loss. If wine is merely alcohol, then one drink can be replaced by another.

But wine has never been merely alcohol. For thousands of years, wine has occupied a remarkable place in culture and civilisation. It has flowed through religion and ritual, philosophy and poetry, friendship and celebration.

The deeper question, then, is not why people drink wine, or are drinking less of it, but why wine has mattered so much to human beings.

Human beings have always sought ways to turn necessity into meaning. We do not merely eat; we dine. We do not merely speak; we tell stories. We do not merely gather; we celebrate. We do not merely see; we behold. We do not merely survive; we live.

Wine is one of the oldest ways in which we transform ordinary experience into something more elevated. It takes grapes, sunlight, soil, and time, and turns them into something capable of carrying memory, place, history, and human intention.

Wine is nature transformed into culture.

Wine lovers know that wine is so much more than a drink. But how are we to explain this to those who do not already know it?

When you uncork a bottle of mature fine wine, what you are drinking is the product of a particular culture and tradition, a particular soil and exposure, a particular climate, the weather in that year, and the love, labour, and lives of people who may now be no more. If you know how to read it, the wine, like a book, will speak to you of all those things and more.

The wine is still alive, still evolving, so much so that no two bottles can ever be quite the same. By now, the stuff has become incredibly complex, almost ethereal. Without seeking to blaspheme, it has become something like the smell and taste of God.

This moving mirror. This distillate of time and place. It will send shivers down your spine. It will make you burst into laughter and tears. It will knock you right out of yourself, release you from the abstract and self-absorbed prison of the mind, and redeliver you into the magic and mystery of the world as though you had just been reborn.

Every wine that can do this does it in its own way, so that there can be no end to your journey. At its best, wine returns us to the world: more alive, more embodied, and more at home in it.

To get the most out of wine, you will need to sharpen your senses, and you will need to deepen your knowledge. Through wine, we become more aware of our senses and begin to develop them, especially the neglected, almost vestigial, senses of smell and taste. By awakening our faculties, we begin to experience the world more intensely. We also begin to experience it in a different way, as though we were a different kind of animal. We become more instinctual—until, like Nietzsche, we can declare:

My genius is in my nostrils.

Modern life encourages us to live as detached minds moving through an abstract world. Wine returns us to our senses. We are embodied creatures, creatures of sensation and perception, rooted in place and time.

Through wine, I have learnt a great deal about geography, geology, meteorology, biology, agriculture, chemistry, gastronomy, art, history, languages, literature, psychology, philosophy, and religion. Through wine, I have communed with many parts of the world—and visited many of them too. Wine regions, with their gardened slopes and Goldilocks climates, are among the most agreeable destinations imaginable.

Blind tasting has sped up my development. It has also taught me about the methods of the mind and, in the process, made me less bigoted and less dogmatic.

On so many levels, wine offers both a motivation and a medium through which to apprehend the world. It is, ultimately, a kind of homecoming, a way of feeling at home in the world.

A dinner without wine may still be a perfectly serviceable dinner, but for me—and, I suspect, for many wine lovers—it feels somehow incomplete. To put a bottle onto the table is to offer more than a drink. It is to invite conversation, companionship, and the possibility of transforming the quotidian and utilitarian into something more.

Without it, something intangible is missing: the transition from eating to dining, from nourishment to pleasure, from company to companionship, from the practical to the contemplative, from the necessary to the meaningful.

Wine brings people together, not merely to drink, but to converse, create, and celebrate. The Greeks understood this well. In the symposium, wine was not consumed merely for intoxication. It formed part of a carefully cultivated social and intellectual ritual. Friends gathered to eat, drink, debate, sing, and explore ideas. The word symposium itself means ‘drinking together’.

The drinking may have been the pretext, but not the true purpose—and in the most immortal of all symposia, that of Plato, the guests make a point of moderating their intake. Wine created the conditions for conversation, friendship, poetry, and philosophy. It loosened the mind without clouding it. It allowed people to step outside their ordinary roles and encounter one another in a different way.

The Romans continued this tradition in their convivia, gatherings in which food, wine, and conversation became an art. For many centuries, wine occupied this place in human life: not as an escape from civilisation, but as one of its highest expressions.

Yet wine has always possessed another, more mysterious dimension. It has not only helped to shape civilisation, but also reminded us that civilisation cannot be everything. The Greeks expressed this through Dionysus, the god of wine, regeneration, theatre, religious ecstasy, and ritual madness. Dionysus embodied something that every civilisation must somehow accommodate: the human need to loosen the boundaries of the self, to escape from rigid identities, and to experience a larger reality.

Wine played a central role in the Dionysian Mysteries, which aimed above all at ecstatic union with the divine—an idea that has survived to this day in the sacramental blood of Christ. The Dionysian impulse stood in tension with the Apollonian order and restraint imposed by society.

Civilisation depends upon both: the impulse to create form and the impulse to dissolve it. Without form, there is chaos; without dissolution, there is stagnation. This is why wine has always stood between refinement and abandon, cultivation and dissolution. Blind tasting, with its emphasis on reason and deduction, is an attempt to marry these forces. It requires intuition and imagination, but also discipline and analysis.

In The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nietzsche recognised the Dionysian impulse 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 … 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.

‘Ecstasy’ literally means ‘to stand outside oneself’. Modern life, with its relentless emphasis on the sovereign self, has made such moments increasingly rare. More than ever before, we are encouraged to construct, defend, and project our individual identities. 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 may have lost the art of letting go, leading to a poverty or monotony of conscious experience. Yet there are times when the surest way of finding ourselves is, paradoxically, to lose ourselves.

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.

Wine matters not because it is unique, but because it reveals something universal. It represents something deeply human: our desire to transform necessity into meaning, and to experience life more fully and authentically.

A grape becomes wine. A meal becomes a celebration. Company becomes companionship. A moment becomes a memory. Necessity becomes meaning.

Perhaps what we risk losing is not merely wine, but one of humanity’s oldest reminders that life is not only something to endure, preserve, or prolong.

It is something to experience, savour, and celebrate—something that returns us to the world with our senses awake, our minds open, and our place within it restored.

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

Discover the world of wine

In The Concise Guide to Wine and Blind Tasting, Neel Burton offers an engaging introduction to the art, science, and meaning of wine. Going beyond grape varieties and tasting notes, the book explores how wine connects nature, culture, history, and human perception.

Whether you are a complete beginner or a seasoned enthusiast, you will learn how to taste wine with greater confidence, understand what makes different wines distinctive, and develop the skills of blind tasting. Along the way, you will discover why wine has occupied such a unique place in human civilisation—for wine is not merely something we drink, but something we experience, interpret, and share.

A guide to becoming not just a better wine taster, but a more attentive observer of the world.

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How Would You Respond to Nietzsche’s Madman?

Nietzsche's madman
Nietzsche’s Madman lights a lantern in the bright morning hours and runs into the marketplace crying, ‘I seek God! I seek God!’

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 15 August 2026.

The Scientific Revolution disrupted the centuries-old Aristotelian system of the Church and universities. It all began in 1543, when the Pole Nicolaus Copernicus published On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres. This work challenged the geocentric system of Aristotle and Ptolemy in which the Earth—and, more importantly, man—stood proud and unmoving at the centre of the universe. The Aristotelian system had provided not only a scientific model but also a moral and metaphysical order, with everything in its proper place. To overthrow it was to overthrow everything. 

It is arguably Newton who completed the Copernican Revolution, and put the nail in the coffin of the Aristotelian system, with the publication, in 1687, of his Principia mathematica. In this work, which is deemed impenetrable, he introduced his three laws of motion along with the Law of Universal Gravitation. These laws applied to the celestial spheres as much as to a falling apple—with the implication that the heavens were not some separate, higher realm, but of one piece with your backyard.

In the mid-1660s, Newton kept a notebook with the title, Certain Philosophical Questions. Above this title, he inscribed the motto (which is a paraphrase of Aristotle): Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend, but truth is a greater friend still.

The More Radical Revolution

Also undermining the Aristotelian worldview were William Harvey’s demonstration of the circulation of blood, published in his De motu cordis of 1628, and Galileo’s discovery that falling objects undergo uniform acceleration irrespective of their mass, published in his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (i.e. the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic and the Copernican) of 1632. Old Aristotle had held that heavier objects fall faster, and that blood is constantly produced in the liver and consumed in the body’s periphery.

More radically, both Harvey and Galileo privileged experiment and observation over the authority of Aristotle, Ptolemy, Galen, and the Bible. Only a decade earlier, in 1620, Francis Bacon had formalised the modern scientific method in his Novum organum, which sought to undermine and replace Aristotle’s canonical treatise on logic, the Organon (hence the title, Novum organum, or New Organon). Galileo even had the gall to publish in Italian rather than the de rigueur Latin.

The revolution was not merely in what people believed, but in how they came to believe it—and who they should believe.

In Search of a Hero

The demise of the Aristotelian system, for all its promises, left a void that needed filling, ideally by some all-encompassing metaphysical system on the scale of the old, Aristotelian one. If the Earth no longer stood at the centre of the cosmos, was man not the glory of creation, as affirmed in the Bible (1 Corinthians 11:7)? In this new mechanistic, atomistic world of matter in motion, where might God and the immaterial soul fit in? Where freedom and justice? And where, therefore, heaven and hell?

Consider the scale of the imaginative shift required. In 1588, as a young mathematician, Galileo had been invited to address the Florentine Academy on the location, size, and arrangement of hell as described in Dante’s Inferno. The Scientific Revolution had begun to dismantle the circles of hell, and everything else, while remaining silent on what might replace them.

The three men who rose to the almost impossible challenge of weaving a new metaphysics that could accommodate the Scientific Revolution and make sense of man’s place within it were René Descartes (1596–1650), Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716).

Each offered a radically different solution. Descartes preserved God and the immortal soul by splitting reality into mind and matter. But in so doing, he created the problem of how such radically different substances might interact. Spinoza went in the opposite direction, collapsing mind and matter by identifying God with Nature. Leibniz sought another way out of the mind-body problem: his universe consisted not of interacting minds and bodies but of immaterial ‘monads’, co-ordinated by God in a ‘pre-established harmony’. Whereas Descartes and Leibniz sought to salvage what they could, and reaffirm man’s position in the order of things, the ‘heretic’ Spinoza provided no such comforts.

In November 1676, Leibniz travelled to The Hague to meet the dying Spinoza. He had been troubled by Spinoza’s still-secret metaphysics, and spent hours in discussion with him. If God and Nature were one and the same, and everything followed necessarily from the nature of God, what became of freedom, providence, and man’s special place in creation? Leibniz’s own metaphysics—the monadology—can be read as an attempt to solve Descartes’s mind-body problem without falling into Spinozism.

Nietzsche’s Break

By Nietzsche’s time, the great metaphysical systems had begun to look like what they were: elaborate attempts to salvage God and the soul of man from the assaults of science.

In The Gay Science (1882), Nietzsche calls time on the projects of his predecessors. Nietzsche could not have been more categorical about this: God, he declares, is dead.

Nietzsche was not simply announcing his atheism. By the late nineteenth century, there would have been nothing new in that. Instead, he was pointing to the consequences of unbelief: if our highest values—human dignity, moral obligation, justice—are founded in God, what happens to them if we can no longer believe in this God? Do we just go around pretending as if nothing had changed? Or do we invent ourselves anew?

The Gay Science is especially remembered for Aphorism 125, the so-called Parable of the Madman. In it, a madman lights a lantern in the bright morning hours, runs into the marketplace, and cries incessantly, ‘I seek God! I seek God!’ When the people laugh and jeer at him, he jumps into their midst and pierces them with his eyes: ‘Whither is God? … I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the seas? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon?’

What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the din of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. [Gott ist tot! Gott bleibt tot! Und wir haben ihn getötet!]

Later that same day, the madman forces his way into several churches to strike up a requiem for God. When dragged out and called to account, he always replies, ‘What after all are these churches now if not the tombs and sepulchres of God?’ [Was sind denn diese Kirchen noch, wenn sie nicht die Gräber und Grabmäler Gottes sind?]

The townspeople are not scandalised by the Madman’s atheism. They are themselves unbelievers, which is why they laugh at him. The joke, however, is on them. They have abandoned God without thinking it through. The Madman has arrived, then as today, ‘too early’.

Instead of facing up to this crisis, we linger in a state of denial and false hope, like Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon, who lend their lives structure and meaning by waiting for Godot.

In response to the death of God, Nietzsche advocates a so-called ‘gay science’: a sceptical, light-hearted, artistic approach to life. Nietzsche’s response to the collapse of certainty is not despair, as is often thought, but freedom, creation, and experimentation: the courage to live without assurances and treat life as something to be interpreted, repurposed, and affirmed.

Not simply hanging around, unsure whether to stay or leave.

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If this essay spoke to you, you might look into The German Greeks, my history of German philosophy.

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