TEN REASONS TO GO TO AN ORGY

Ten Reasons to go to an orgy

The exhibition, currently on show at the Petit Palais in Paris is ‘'Les Bas-Fonds du Baroque’ and is showing 70 paintings of artists living in Rome during the 17th century baroque, interested in the Bacchian orgiastic life of their Roman forefathers.

The artists of the time were living in the area around the Villa de Medici and had travelled down from France and Northern Europe. 

French artists included Valentin de Boulogne, Simon Vouet, Nicolas Tournier, and Claude Lorrain. Artists from Northern Europe were Pieter Van Laer, Gerrit van Honthorst, and Jan Miel; and from the South, Bartolomeo Manfredi, Lanfranco, Salvator Rosa, and Jusepe de Ribera.

 However, these paintings are more about the outcome of excess rather than a full appreciation of the thinking of ancient Rome.  The Roman Empire was a hugely creative era and while being famous for its inventions, from aqueducts to domes and roadways, it was also famous for its orgies.

The Orgies

Many ancient traditions use extreme states to push through to sacred visions.  Devotees of Bacchus engaged in ritual orgies, using wine and sexuality to attain altered states.  

At this time in ancient Rome, it was thought that this type of revelery was good for the soul. Through the arduous process of bringing the unconsciousness to light, a person was able to reach his mythic roots.

Bacchus was also the god of creative inspiration and the worship was an effort for the attainment of divine ecstasy.  The darkness of this journey is what made the frenzies necessary; they were not an end in themselves; and the orgies were a way of smashing the shell of waking consciousness to arouse the sleeping divinity within.

Here are ten reasons to go to an orgy:

1.   LEARN TO LET GO

To shed your old, ensnaring thought processes, go to an orgy. It was a way to transcend from the bondage of habits and mental programming.

2.  LET GO OF EARTHLY ATTACHMENTS, LEARN NON-ATTACHMENT

If you are possessive, … go to an orgy!  At an orgy, everyone belongs to themselves and are free

3.  STOP BEING JUDGMENTAL

If you are a bit pudic and religious fearing, and want to shatter those old behaviours, judgements and mindsets, go to an orgy.  Bacchus represents freedom and transgression!

4  BOND

All Earth’s creatures are special. Bacchus’s acolytes were Satyrs, Silenus or Pan, all creatures of nature

5 OPEN YOUR BOUNDARIES

If you awaken your Bacchus within, you should eventually find your spiritual path so that you're no longer living life the same old way and constricted

6 HEAR YOUR INTUITION

A lot of artists found wine inspiring and free love.  Bacchus also awoke creative ideas.

7. DISSOLVE YOUR INHIBITIONS

Show your wobbly bum in public and don't be afraid

8.  HEAR LOVE AND NOT EGO

Inspired by Bacchus, you are more likely to listen to the voice of lover rather than the voice of ego.  Ego is fear, judgement, self-criticism.  Whereas love is acceptance, liking, understanding compassion….

9.  APPRECIATE YOUR SENSES.

Bacchus promotes the exaltation of the senses, Let your senses enjoy themselves.  Sensitivity, sexuality and sensuality are gifts in life: appreciate them!

10.  CONNECT TO A WHOLE

Open to others and open your mind.  Though these occasions happened secretly, they were very open and sharing and nobody was excluded.  Everyone in the group was loved.

Some of painters at the Petit Palais explore the ideas of these ancient roman orgies.  A group of painters called the Bentvueghels would go through Bacchanalian initiation rites, and perform rituals while attending taverns and brothels, including black magic and enchantments.

Roeland van Laer’s painting shows syphilitic drunkards in “The Bentvueghels in a Roman Tavern”

But most of the work of the exhibition looks at the results of excess.  Even any eroticism is often pictured as lurid and sordid.  It involves prostitution, deception, manipulation.  Two painting use figs and fingers suggestively to insinuate sex, using an image from Dante's Inferno

Peter Van Laer did a self-portrait of himself as a sorcerer's apprentice.  Eventually his excesses made him lose his mind and become a victim of depression.

Peter Van Laer self-portrait as a sorcerer's apprentice

Angelo Caroselli painted a young witch overwhelmed by demonic forces, also as a result of excess.

Many paintings ask the ambiguous question: are the aphrodisiacs or wines used to awakening people or actually just to send them to sleep and lose their sense of connection to the earth and their mythic unconscious, Bacchus, the god so lively, inspired, inventive and alert to new ideas, is not awoken in them at all?

Later paintings in the exhibition show people in a trance-like states caused by wine, where the consumers have lost their reason and any music causes trance rather than have any magical effect.

Claude Lorrain paints prostitutes in his and though the sunset distracts, there is still a bleak reality and other painters show beggars with red noses, gypsies, rapscallians, bandits and some of the portraits of the margins of Rome, far away from its glories.

This exhibition explores the theme of excess in Rome.  Maybe the painters were making that comment that there is a delicate fineline between Bacchus’s magic powers and the dreadful abyss that is just below the veneer of Rome, with its stately buildings, taking you to a dark underground world, where you could fall into and never return.

The exhibition runs from 24^th February to 24^th May 2015

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