Ever Feel Like Being A Seed? (The Ritual Function of Orgy) MIRCEA ELIADE

 

The Ritual Function of Orgy

“The orgy sets flowing the sacred energy of life. Human beings become at one with the forces of the universe. They break down the barriers between man, society, nature and the gods; they help force life and the seeds of things to move from one level to another, from one zone of reality to the next.”

Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion

 “Like seeds that lose their shape in the great underground, merging, disintegrating and becoming something different (germination), so men lose their individuality in the orgy, combining into a single living unity . . . They try once more to enter the primal, pre-formal, chaotic state—a state that corresponds in the cosmological order to the chaotic formlessness before the creation. Man yearns to be seed, not person.”

[excerpted from the book by U.R. Bowie, Here We Be, Where Be We?]