we ought to come even to the point of intoxication, not for the purpose
of drowning ourselves but of sinking ourselves deep in wine. For it washes
away cares and raises our spirits from the lowest depths. The inventor of
wine is called _Liber_ because he frees the soul from the servitude of
care, releases it from slavery, quickens it, and makes it bolder for all
undertakings." The Romans were a sterner and more serious people than the
Greeks, but on that very account they recognized the necessity of
occasionally relaxing their moral fibres in order to preserve their tone,
and encouraged the prevalence of festivals which were marked by much more
abandonment than those of Greece. When these festivals began to lose
their moral sanction and to fall into decay the decadence of Rome had
begun.

All over the world, and not excepting the most primitive savages--for even
savage life is built up on systematic constraints which sometimes need
relaxation--the principle of the orgy is recognized and accepted. Thus
Spencer and Gillen describe[111] the Nathagura or fire-ceremony of the
Warramunga tribe of Central Australia, a festival taken part in by both
sexes, in which all the ordinary rules of social life are broken, a kind
of Saturnalia in which, however, there is no sexual license, for sexual
license is, it need scarcely be said, no essential part of the orgy, even
when the orgy lightens the burden of sexual constraints. In a widely
different part of the world, in British Columbia, the Salish Indians,
according to Hill Tout,[112] believed that, long before the whites came,
their ancestors observed a Sabbath or seventh day ceremony for dancing and
praying, assembling at sunrise and dancing till noon. The Sabbath, or
periodically recurring orgy,--not a day of tension and constraint but a
festival of joy, a rest from all the duties of everyday life,--has, as we
know, formed an essential part of many of the orderly ancient
civilizations on which our own has been built;[113] it is highly probable
that the stability of these ancient civilizations was intimately
associated with their recognition of the need of a Sabbath orgy. Such
festivals are, indeed, as Crawley observes, processes of purification and
reinvigoration, the effort to put off "the old man" and put on "the new
man," to enter with fresh energy on the path of everyday life.[114]

The orgy is an institution which by no means has its significance only for
the past. On the con