ORGY: ORGY IN ASIA

Western scholarship in the history of religions has taken the orgiastic rituals of the eastern Mediterranean (Dionysos, Cybele) as the ideal type of religious behavior manifesting as reckless bodily movements contributing to states of emotional excess, sometimes with the assistance of intoxicants. In the context of large-scale festivities, the force of these excesses sets aside the normal psychological restraints such that religious exaltation is obtained en masse through all types of sensual pleasure. This view enabled scholars and others to link such pre-Christian rites with transgressive behavior in western European history, especially witchcraft and heresy. Theories of "pagan survivals" were advanced to explain both the presence of pre-Christian elements in festivals of the church year and the periodic outbreaks of heresy and sorcery. The weaknesses of these theories of subterranean survival of paganism require some attention in order to avoid applying errors of method to festival-located orgiastic rituals in Asian cultures.

There is little archeological evidence to support the claim that the orgiastic rites of Cybele, Dionysos, the Maenads, or Priapus were handed down, even in mitigated form, from classical antiquity to the customs of medieval Christian pilgrimage sites. At best the evidence from folklore supports a continuity in which the survival, healing, and fertility concerns of human societies were addressed in festival rites at locations that continued to be venerated across the centuries. Rural customs involving magic, cursing, exorcism, and folk medicine were for many centuries associated with Christian saints and their shrines.

At the shrine of Saints Cosmas and Damian in Isernia, Italy, a supposed "phallic cult" (or "cult of Priapus") was thought to have survived from pagan antiquity, when in reality the rites deemed pre-Christian could just as easily have arisen in the context of medieval popular Catholicism. If anything it was the continuity of the site and its geography that carried forward in time the pre-Christian meaning. Cultural anthropologists have come to similar conclusions about South and Southeast Asian shrine festivals, where the village tradition addresses itself to survival, healing, and fertility in its own ritual idiom, even within the matrix of "great tradition" religiosity.

A Critical Examination of the Definition

In such societies the orgiastic ritual is lived as a positive aspect and not primarily as a way to fulfill instinctual drives. Most cultures indulge forms of transgression and release, such as recreational alcoholic consumption, raucous music, banquets, and prostitution. Orgiastic rituals, however, are not primarily recreational activities; they occupy a precise niche in societal expressions of religious emotion.

Transgressive collective behavior should be understood in terms of forms of conduct that are not done openly or outside particular times and places. The counterpoint to the orgy as unbridled collective transgression may be seen in a text from the Pali canon of early Buddhism. This Buddhist "Genesis" myth asserts that sexual relations arise when human karmic propensities undergo embodiment, density, and passion. The sexual act provokes reactions of revulsion and shame, and so the first cabins are constructed in order to conceal the act of coitus. (Aggañña Sutta 27; iii; 88–89.16–17: "Accordingly those who indulged in such immoral practices began to build themselves dwellings so as to indulge under cover.") The sexual act performed in the presence of others, whether active participants or spectators, is understood to be "transgressive" on a deep level of human experience. Lived as part of a larger continuum of human activity, however, the orgy effectively reflects the variegated character of human life itself. Such rites enable humans to transcend moral categories under certain circumstances so as to become protagonists in a cosmic drama. Thus human community, and not the individual or couple alone, can become an intentionally sacred representation of larger cosmic energies that require periodic renewal.

To this end human societies sanction periods of festival. Within the matrix of festival, the orgy has an initiatic character, because those who participate for the first time have to be informed in some way about the boundary between the quotidian or profane and the sacred; even the orgy has a sacred confine that encloses its secrets from the uninitiated or the unprepared. The orgy is not merely a ritual to be enacted at the will of the participants. Because a transgression of conventional norms is involved, there has to be a link between the orgiastic rite and the correct time and place. Festivals are calculated to fall on specific conjunctions of the cosmic markers of time. Only under the circumstances in which the human protagonists in a ritual are joined with the cosmic cycle of time can a rite renew the world by reenacting the creative events of primordial time, at the threshold between timelessness and time. Orgy cannot sanction anything without reference to the rightness of time and place, when the vital energies of the cosmos can be renewed. As a conscious, organized human ritual art form enacted during the time of festival, the orgy makes possible a return to the time of origins in which chaos prevailed. This was the time before the ordering principles of the cosmos began to operate so as to establish the social order, with gender distinctions, hierarchy, caste, and rulership. Both the profane interactions of the social order and the agricultural cycles on which human life depends are subject to decay and disharmony. Therefore a cycle of festivals in the course of the year periodically renews environment and society. Some festivals, though not all, have elements of sexuality, violence, role reversal, use of intoxicants, and frenzy.

In effect the orgy is a rite not of stasis and interiorization but of intensely energetic renewal. Orgiastic practices work with the play of energy in forms associated with dancing and singing gods and goddesses to whom the human protagonists are assimilated. Environments and human communities are reconstituted with particular emphasis on the blessings of sex and fertility. Orgiastic spirituality is in stark contrast to those contemplative practices that emphasize stillness, centeredness, silence, renunciation, solitude, and ascetic discipline. In the orgy extreme excess, ritual sacrifice of human beings, cannibalism, mutilation, transgender mimicry, sexual promiscuity, and even warfare can become forms perceived as vehicles of communal and cosmic renewal. Typically these extreme forms undergo mitigation in substitutionary enactments.

Nevertheless the use of drumming, extremely rhythmic music, dance, raucous songs, intoxicants, banqueting, and sexuality continue to have a place in a large number of festivals around the world, however routinized and mitigated they may have become across the span of time. These festivals engage the human body in the ritual play of infracosmic impulses. Often these forces are linked to the presence of the powerful Mother who embodies the earth as a source of vitality, and are intimately bound up with the experience of community and tradition. A community's capacity to renew itself is measured precisely by its obedience to the demands of instinct, with the understanding that instinct, in both the human body and the social body, has its own set of rules. Times of festival open up an anamnetic channel to primeval chaos that allows for the temporary redress of grievances rooted in inequalities of gender, race, and class. The cosmic antinomianism of the orgiastic festival turns all social relations upside down, exposing and assailing patterns of abuse.

Relationship to the "Great Traditions"

The dynamic structure of the festival continues to prevail in South and Southeast Asian societies, where the religious meaning of space and time still retains many elements of archaic sensibility. Significant places are typically associated with holy men and women or supernatural beings of the great traditions. Festivals may be linked to events from Buddhist, Hindu, or Muslim history, legend, and mythology. The social coherence of the festival is, however, local in nature and only tenuously linked to the myth and symbol systems of the "great" formal religious traditions. For the vast majority of the population, Hindu and Buddhist textual and philosophical understandings have only tangential relationships to the lived realities of space, time, and other more immediate matters. Among these in particular are the physical environment within which they live, spatially differentiated in terms of its uses for habitation and agriculture, and the ongoing cycle of the year, also closely tied to the agricultural cycle on which human life, with its own rhythms, depends.

India

It is likely that ideas and practices of an orgiastic type are rooted in archaic sex rites magically associating natural and human fertility. These sex rites contributed widely to the development of religious ideas and to the evolution of human thought. In India archaic elements survived and were given new forms and interpretations over time with the larger evolutionary tendencies of the great traditions.

In general the original Vedic rituals made use of an intoxicant (soma ), sexuality, and obscenity, as in the ritualized copulation in the Brhadaranyaka Upaniṣads account of the horse sacrifice. Maithuna, sexual union, is suggestive of the doctrine of nonduality between the human and the divine. In myth and ritual even adulterous love (parakiy a) in Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava theology came to symbolize the "illicit" and dangerous character of relations between the human soul (Rādhā) and the divine Lover (Kṛṣṇa). At times the valorization of adulterous and promiscuous union would have been enacted in the Bengali Sahajiya Tantric rituals. Maithuna is one of the "five m's" of left-hand path Tantra (Vāmācāra ) in the Kaula Kapalika cults of Shaivism. Some Tantric groups may have advocated uncontrolled use of maithuna in ritual "orgies" as an extreme test of control and detachment. In these sectarian contexts the orgiastic festival is reconstructed along the lines of a transformative spiritual yoga or practice (sādhana ).

Surviving orgiastic festivals in the village setting become a locus for the expression of feelings otherwise prohibited or formally repressed, above all by the caste system and by gender roles. These outbursts, occurring strictly during festival times, are sanctioned by gods such as Kālī or Kṛṣṇa. Their seasonal festivals, such as Holi, or the celebration of the goddess Bhadrakali's defeat of the demon Darika, allow transgressive behavior to become obligatory. There are strict and unpleasant "rules" involving danger, excess, sexuality, transvestism, use of intoxicants, and acts of violence.

The violent aspects of these manifestations might seem to correspond to the hormonal drives of adolescent males and to the sense of frustration and quotidian resentment on the part of married women. However, there is also a kind of ethical side to the violence: the oppressed and marginal categories of society identify and take a playful vengeance on those who normally have all the privileges and make use of them unjustly. In fact the attacks on ritual purity in these events is precisely a divinely sanctioned transgression meant to undermine, even if only for a day or so, the rules of caste, gender, and rituality, so that the true character of human relations might be revealed and vindicated.

Tibet

The ritual traditions of Tibet reflect an assimilation of Tantric deity cycles from India and China within the preexisting Bon worldview. After the first diffusion of the Indian Vajrayāna in Tibet in the eighth and ninth centuries, a period of experimentation ensued in which the orgiastic elements of the Sahajiyā cults were readily imported by a population eager to obtain the benefits of sorcery. A reaction set in during the early eleventh century, spreading as far as Central Tibet, with a consequent suppression not only of the sorcery cults but even of the strictly controlled sexual yogas of the "Path of Means" (thabs lam ). Milarepa (c. 1052–1137) criticized these reforms, which had made the Tantric methods suspect. He recovered and taught the Path of Means, including the use of karmamudra (sexual yoga), as the best way to attain realization of Voidness. The yogin tradition in Tibet preserved many lineages that recognized in the figure of the ḍākinī s and other high-energy goddesses the same gendered transformational power that is encountered in shamanism and mediumism. The orgiastic elements were here, as elsewhere, mitigated in the form of festive ritual cycles or as yogic contemplative practices.

Thailand

The annual ritual cycle in Northeast Thai villages provides an obvious example of mitigated orgiastic rituality in the temporary ordination as Buddhist monks of a group of young men of the village each year during the rainy season retreat. The rite is part of a sequence that is related closely to the fertility of the rice fields on which the village depends. This rite also links closely to human fertility, as the explicitly phallic rockets of the rocket festival following the young men's ordination and the accompanying obscene songs make abundantly clear. In fact the period of temporary ordination is also explicitly seen as a preparation for marriage rather than as a commitment to the path of asceticism.

Central Asia

The typology described here corresponds to those elements of the ancient folk beliefs as they have survived in synthesis with Shīʿī Islamic spirituality. The typical practices of dervish Sufism, dancing (whirling) to produce a state of mind open to Divine Remembrance (dhikr ) and singing "noisy" (yahri ) mystical poetry, reflect this cultural synthesis. Dervish orders based on the Malamatiya tradition in Iran, in Kazakhistan, and along the Sino-Turkestan border disseminated the ideal of qalandariya, the classic wandering dervish, bearer of heterodox theology, whose nonconformist behavior not only repudiated conventional values but sought to subvert static models of spiritual attainment. The beloved Shams al-Tabrizi, who inspired the poetry of Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī (1207–1273), was the archetype of qalandariya.

The extent to which any of the antinomian forms of Sufism could be considered "orgiastic" is debatable. It is true that homosexual activity, reflecting a concretization of the love poetry that reached its heights in writings of Hafiz in the Persian-Turkish cultural world, came to characterize the excesses of courtly life in Central Asia. This Ṣūfī-related trend penetrated as far as North India, always being characterized as somehow a "decadent" form of the devotional pattern of the qalandariya brotherhoods. However, in the case of Hafiz there seems to have been an underlying message that the spectrum from mysticism to the bacchanal can be used by the poet to demand a redress of grievances from society and from history. Specifically this would refer to the Iranian cultural resistance to Arabic dominance: the poetry expresses a humanistic vision in opposition to religious rigorism. Thus to take on the appearance of immorality or even to commit illicit acts such as wine drinking or sexual indulgence is tantamount to warding off the sin of pride in oneself and the exposure of arrogance in the false piety of others.

The literary tradition linked to the festival settings of Shīʿī Islam continued to have a place for such figures as late as the nineteenth century. The well-educated, though marginalized poet who likes to make mullās look ridiculous became something of a folk hero. Typically he pays inordinate attention to women and young men. This stock character is found in the folk theater tradition, in which the rogue poet (rend ) shows himself undaunted by authority figures. Social and political criticism could thus be channeled through such characters of satire, farce, and allegory.

China

Primordial rites and festivals are preserved in the perennial syncretism typical of Chinese religion and rituality. Young women's role as shamanesses is a feature of the recognition of the feminine as a bearer of mysterious power going back to prehistory. Closely associated with their shamanic healing rituals are the phenomena of mediumism and possession. Daoist systems sought to channel these primordial elements into systems of sexual hygiene bearing fruit in bodily immortality. The cult of energy in Daoist healing arts is related to breath and sexual energy sometimes cultivated by union with multiple partners but is not typically expressed orgiastically. The body, its instincts, and the rules of instinctual behavior are seen as part of a cosmic synergy of phenomena.

However, the inevitable lure of uncontrollable energy in a tightly knit society finds a time of festivity in which to surface. The Cheung Chau Festival (Festival of the Bun Hills) begins on the eighth day of the fourth moon and lasts for four days. It is an atypical and at times dangerous celebration. Four days of religious rites, Chinese operas, and the burning of paper clothing as gifts are conducted to placate the spirits. Cities are absorbed in a party atmosphere, with processions and celebrations at every turn. Huge structures, typical of fertility rites elsewhere, are built. These towering mounds are covered with baked buns. The signal is given, and young people scramble up the towers, picking off as many buns, which symbolize good luck, as they can hold.

Japan

The role of shamanism is a background for most Japanese rituality. Shintō ritual preserves the primordial spirituality of Japan typically concerned with fertility. The island nation was originally a peasants' country, and each agricultural community had its own local religious celebrations (matsuri ). Each festival was organized around the Shintō shrine or the local Buddhist temple in order to honor the deities. Festivals still take place all over the country, especially in summer. These folk events are high-energy manifestations of social cohesion through veneration of natural forces (kami ).

Typically large teams of male youths play the role of bearers of power in festival processions with deity-palanquins (mikoshi ), even though in some places priestesses continue to preside over the temple rites. The youths, who are plied liberally with sake, wear happi, short kimonos that come down to their waists, usually worn with T-shirts underneath and shorts but sometimes just with white loincloths. With a towel or bandana wrapped around the forehead, this is the perfect outfit for a mikoshi bearer or taiko drummer sweating in the heat of a summer festival in this unique expression of powerful male bonding. The young men who carry the mikoshi are not supposed to provide the kami with a smooth, fast ride. Instead, they sway in all directions and push the mikoshi up and down, often violently to amuse the kami. The movement of a mikoshi is considered to be directed by the will of the kami beyond the control of those shouldering it. In some matsuri festivals mikoshi of several shrines are brought together. In some others the mikoshi is carried into a river or sea to be washed. In other festivals mikoshis are brought into contests of one kind or another, often causing blood to be shed. The kenka matsuri, or fighting festival, involves violent ramming between competing mikoshi until one or another is destroyed.

Although the ancient "orgiastic" elements have been transformed, it is evident that extreme violence, the use of intoxicants, and the hint of sexuality remain in the matsuri tradition. In addition the event can bring about the same kinds of role reversals that allow for the correction of faults seen elsewhere. The symbolism of an entire community being "wrapped" in the embrace of the kami and its undulating procession is still in evidence. Moreover there is a sense of breaking out of the reserve that characterizes Japanese social behavior most of the year, so that criticisms that would otherwise remain unspoken can be offered in an endurable manner.

The Interplay between Aberration and Festival

The notion of the orgiastic ritual in Western studies of the history of religions is a function of constructions of East Mediterranean polytheism going back to Roman times. The sexual rites of archaic cultures can be seen as reviving agricultural fertility through the apotropaic magic of festival—most often taking the form of dance, rhythmic song, mime, and sexually referent poetry or gesture. Obscene gestures, erotic dancing, and sexually colored lyrics are part of festival and wedding rites in many places, especially in village and archaic cultures, but it is extremely rare to find group, frenzied sexual intercourse as part of a fertility rite or festival. Most cultures of Central Asia, China, Japan, Southeast Asia, and India find the notion of having sex in front of others to be utterly repugnant—an antisocial aberration. Even in the left-handed practices, the initiatic rite in which the guru has intercourse with a female partner in order to produce the male and female sexual fluids used in the rite of initiation, the practice is restricted and highly controlled. This rite was mitigated throughout the Himalayan cultural zone such that symbolic substances and objects replaced the actual coital act. The sexual practices here are yogic, not frenzied. The sexual yoga (karmamudra) of the songs of the mahāsiddhas are practiced by the partners in secret.

Maenad-type orgies, themselves literary products of the ancient writers who constructed the women of Thrace as "wild and out of control," should not too easily be read into Tantric rites, village festivals, Shintō processions, Daoist erotic therapies, and shamanic healing rituals. Communities celebrate fertility with songs, dances, gestures, costumes, and symbolic objects rather than with the act of coitus itself in any form.

The Failure of the Orgy

The risk of modern orgiastic conduct in the contemporary East Asian avant-garde is that it is transgression without festival in the full sense of the word and as such goes against the instinctual laws of the body. Even instincts have a certain discipline, as is evident in Tantric practice, in cannibalism, in sacrificial violence, and in warfare. Take away the necessary features of communitas and there is no festival at all. Take away the characteristics of festival and there is no sacredness. With the deconstruction of sacredness, all that remains is unbridled violence and malice. Libidinous excess brings on brutal dehumanization, not renewal of human and cosmic energies. In this way modern theatrical attempts at orgiastic ritual tend to be little more than a reflection of the soulless postmodern culture against which they purportedly rebel. The social matrix in which sacred time, space, and tradition could allow mitigated orgiastic rites to effect renewal is now being dismantled by the spread of ideological secularism. Invasive modernity constructs oppositions in the form of class, race, and gender conflict rather than complementarity. Deconstruction suppresses the prophetic voice that calls for redress and reconciliation, which was perhaps the most durable social value of the ancient rites.

See Also

Tantrism.

Bibliography

Bataille, Georges. L'Erotisme. Paris, 1957. Translated as Eroticism, Death, and Sensuality, San Francisco, 1986.

Bhattacharyya, N. N. History of the Tantric Religion. 2d ed. New Delhi, 1999.

Caldwell, Sarah. Oh Terrifying Mother: Sexuality, Violence, and Worship of the Goddess Kali. Oxford, 1999.

Crawley, Ernest. The Mystic Rose: A Study of Primitive Marriage and of Primitive Thought in Its Bearing on Marriage. Revised and enlarged by Theodore Besterman. London, 1965. Much on sexual taboos.

Das Gupta, Shashibhusan. Obscure Religious Cults. Calcutta, India, 1976. Sahajiyās both Buddhist and Vaiṣṇava, Ṣūfī relations with the Bauls of Bengal.

Girard, René. Violence and the Sacred. Baltimore, 1979.

Kapferer, Bruce. The Feast of the Sorcerer: Practices of Consciousness and Power. Chicago, 1997. Analysis of violence, passion, and power in Sri Lanka.

Lewis, Franklin. "Hafez and Rendi." Available from www.iranica.com. A study of the demimonde of Hafez's poetry, weaving between social and religious critique and analyzing the nature of transgression in Ṣūfī sectarianism.

Marriott, McKim. "The Feast of Love." In Krishna: Myths, Rites, and Attitudes, edited by Milton B. Singer. Honolulu, 1966. A classic anthropological study of orgiastic behavior in North India during the Holi festival.

Samuel, Geoffrey. "The Religious Meaning of Space and Time: South and Southeast Asia and Modern Paganism." International Review of Sociology 11, no. 3 (2001): 395–418. Study of three sites in which ritual festivals have persisting elements of ancient fertility cults within the matrix of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam. Excellent insights into the role of festival and community.

Tiso, Francis. "Revisiting Pagan and Christian Syncretism: The Shrine of Saints Cosmas and Damian in Isernia." Origins: Caiete Silvane 6, nos. 3–4 (2003): 16–25. A study of the phallic cult at an Italian shrine with methodological observations and links with geography and festival customs.

White, David Gordon. Kiss of the Yogini: Tantric Sex in Its South Asian Contexts. Chicago, 2003. A key study of ritual sex and its links with magic in Hindu Tantric traditions.

Francis V. Tiso (2005)