Orgy ιστορία
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 Nile Valley, killing every man, woman, and child in sight. With mankind on the verge 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 in the benign form of Hathor, the goddess of joy, love, and fertility. To commemorate this event, the Ancient Egyptians held communal Festivals of Drunkenness at the beginning of their calendar in mid-August, when the Nile is swelling. Revellers drank to the point of passing out, to be awoken by the beating of drums, symbolizing the transformation of Sekhmet into Hathor. The revels, 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.
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The word ‘orgy’, which ultimately derives from the Ancient Greek orgion/orgia, entered the English language in the 1560s to mean ‘any licentious revelry’. Today, people think of an orgy as a party involving open and unrestrained sex between diverse people with no or little prior knowledge of one another. But originally, orgia referred to the secret rites of the 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. The procession begins at sunset, led by torchbearers and followed by wine and fruit bearers, musicians, and a throng of revellers wearing masks and, well, not much else. Closing the parade 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-giving rise to an early form of theatre and comedy. Having arrived 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 may have been interlaced with other entheogens (substances that ‘generate the divine from within’). 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.
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