A History of Orgies
ISBN-13: Ν/Α
Writer: Burgo Partridge
Title: A History of Orgies
Place of publication: London
Publisher: Spring Books
Year of publication: 1966 (second impression)
Format: 143x220 mm
Pages: 224
Binding: hardbound in colour dust jacket
Cover photograph by Poussin's Bacchanal by permission of The Trustees of The National Gallery
Weight: 585 gr.
Original price: GBP 8/6
Supplier: Watermill Books
Order Number: 67123462
Order Shipped: 28th July 2020
Entry Number: 2020011
Entry Date: 14th August 2020
BOOK DESCRIPTION
There has never been a History of Orgies. Sexologists have detailed the behaviour of many societies, from the Ancient Greeks to the modern aborigine, but for examples of mankind pursuing sexual enjoyment in its most pure and exaggerated from we must turn to the Orgy.
Mr. Partridge evaluates the motives behind orgies and examines to what extent social environment and individual psychology overlap to produce these phenomena, The sincerest exponents of Hedonism were of course the Greeks and it was their naive concept of sexuality which led, with or without religious pretext, to the orgy. Their celebrations of the Aphrodisia, the Dionysia and the Thesmophoria here described, were feasts in honour of the grape, the human form and fertility, and they form one pattern for subsequent imitators.
The Romans, more sophisticated but less wholesome, improved these Greek festivals but infected them with an alien spirit of mysticism and cruelty. Thus though Nero, Caligula and Tiberious arranged orgies on a more massive scale, their attitude was complicated by a guilt complex which demanded scapegoats. So licence and blooshed became inseparable in the Roman mind. At the decline of the Roman Empire, orgies, whether on the Greek or Roman model, became the cloistered pastime of the rich. So their performance becomes a matter of private, rather than public enterprise.
Those medieval ecclesiastics, Popes John XII and Benedict IX were orgy minded as was Pope Alexander VI who arranged a gumkhana course of lighted candles and obliged a troupe of naked girls to pick up the hot chestnuts scattered between them. There are the peculiar parties of Michelangelo described by Benvenuto Cellini and the almost nightly junketings of the Restoration of which the mock marriage between Louise de Quérouaille and Charles II was an example.
The succession of eighteenth-century Hell-Fire clubs with their absurd and intricate solemnities employed the leisure of aristocrats like the Earl of Sandwich and the poet Charles Churchill and of course the entire energies of Sir Francis Dashwood. In Scotland ther was 'The Most Ancient and Puissant Order of the Beggar's Benison and Merryland' and its sister organisation 'The Wig Club' which used an amazing (and still extant) apparatus and regalia.
Even in Victorian England there were outlets for the orgy minded, witness Ciora Pearl, courtesan of the 'sixties, who had herself served up naked in anchovy sauce at one of her own dinner parties.
Mr. Partridge has to conclude the History of Orgies with Alister Crowley at his temple of Cefalu in Sicily but no doubt some later chronicler will be able to describe the debauches of the twentieth century.
Although orgies cannot be neatly labelled 'good' or 'bad', the author condemns those who have regarded sex as a demon to be exorcised or placated, but equally, as a hedonist, he cannot object to those who have enjoyed sexual pleasure to the full as a gift of life itself.
