The whole community greeted the
re-awakening vitality of the earth by an unrestrained abandonment to
passion. Man aspired to be no more than the flower which scatters its
seed to the winds. The incomprehensible lords of cupidity and rank
vegetation did not suffer the individualisation of desire. The complete
union of the male and female qualities, as manifested both in nature and
man, was solemnised in the Orgies, and not by any means the relationship
of an individual man to an individual woman, or sexuality connected with
individuals and dominated by them. Nor was this unfettering of instinct
a symbolical act; for it to be so, man must have stood over against
nature as an intellectual being, mirroring and transforming her acts by
his own deeds. He was as yet far from this. His ambition did not reach
beyond the desire to fulfil nature in himself. Before the majesty of
sex--worshipped in the vague, shadowy mothers of mankind, Rhea, Demeter,
Cybele, and their human offspring, the phallic Dionysus and the
hundred-breasted goddess of Ephesus--the individual with his piteous
limitations shrank into insignificance.
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