A history of orgies

Burgo Partridge

Published by Spring Books , hardcover
binding discolouration


CONTENTS
Preface
The Greeks
The Romans
The Middle Ages and the Renaissance
Puritan and Rake
The Medmenhamites and the Georgian Rakes
The Eighteenth Century on the Continent
The Victorians
The Twentieth Century
Bibliography
Index

PREFACE
An orgy is an organized blowing-off of steam; the expulsion of hysteria accumulated by abstinence and restraint, and as such tends to be of an hysterical or cathartic nature.
Every kind of restraint producer its tensions. Man is in the awkward position of possessing both civilized and animal inclinations which have somehow to be reconciled, usually to the disadvantage of the Jatter, but increasing pressure cannot be withstood for ever, and so, from every kind of tension there is a release—the orgy. Many orgies would not be generally described as such. Wars are, in one sense, an extreme and disagreeable form, farther down the scale come quarrels at cocktail-parties, the practical jokes of stockbrokers, minor marital infidelities — one need not elaborate.

In this book orgies of a sexual character or origin only will be included; this, both because of their superior interest for everybody, and because of the difficulties of recognizing and defining some orgies of other kinds as such.

The orgy serves the useful purpose, not only of providing relief from tension caused by abstinence, necessary or unnecessary, but also of rearousing by contrast an appetite for the humdrum temperances which are an inevitable part of everyday life. Hence it has been used by such very different groups as the peoples of Ancient Greece, and (unwillingly), the medieval Christian Church.

There is, hoorever, another kind of orgy, that of the individual. This is not, in fact essentially is not, organized or concioned by the state or by society, since it arises from the equation by the individual, of the society or state with the sense of confinement and restriction which affiets him. This ........