The Seba library treats Orgy in 9 passages, across 7 authors (including Neumann, Erich, Nietzsche, Friedrich, Hillman, James).
The fascination of sex and the drunken orgy culminating in unconsciousness and death are inextricably combined in her.
Neumann identifies the orgy as the psychic signature of the Great Mother archetype, in which erotic ecstasy and annihilation are structurally fused rather than accidentally conjoined.
, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019thesis
they all involve one thing: some kind of an orgy of feeling—employed as the most effective means of deadening dull, paralyzing, protracted pain; hence priestly inventiveness in thinking through this single question ‘how can one produce an orgy of feeling?’
Nietzsche psychologizes the orgy as the ascetic priest’s primary therapeutic technology, a managed affective flooding deployed to overwhelm chronic suffering.
, On the Genealogy of Morals, 1887thesis
Where Apollo is moderation, Dionysos is exaggeration, of which orgy is the best example.
Hillman posits orgy as the paradigmatic expression of the Dionysian standpoint, structurally opposed to Apollonian detachment and clinically necessary for a complete therapeutic orientation.
, Suicide and the Soul, 1964thesis
he must assume sexuality to its extreme limit—the orgy. An Abyssinian song declares this: ‘She who has not yet engendered, let her engender; he who has not yet killed, let him kill!’
Eliade frames ritual orgy as a cosmic obligation rather than transgression, a religious act required to sustain vegetable life and maintain the human being’s participation in cosmic order.
, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, 1957thesis
she kills and tears her son to pieces in the madness of the orgy and bears off his bloody head in triumph.
Neumann illustrates the orgy’s destructive extreme through Agave’s Dionysiac madness, showing how orgiastic consciousness obliterates the boundary between love and murder within the Great Mother complex.
, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019supporting
When people go too far in spiritualizing sex they are led into a sexual orgy, the eternal serpent of the abyss will react and bite.
Jung interprets orgiastic regression as the enantiodromic consequence of excessive spiritualization, the unconscious compensating one-sided idealism with its opposite extreme.
, Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928-1930, 1984supporting
how often has it happened in the history of religion that its rites, orgies and mysteries degenerate into vicious debauches!
Jung observes a recurring historical dynamic in which sacred rites containing orgiastic elements lose their religious container and collapse into destructive excess.
, Symbols of Transformation, 1952supporting
orgy, 220, 221; of Dionysus, 255; in fantasies, 229, 230
This index entry from the Jung–Kerényi volume positions the Dionysian orgy as a psychologically active image appearing both in cult and in analysands’ fantasies, linking mythic and clinical registers.
, Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis, 1949supporting
orgy, Dionysian, 70
A brief index reference in Jung’s Alchemical Studies clusters the Dionysian orgy with Oriental wisdom and alchemical themes, situating it within the broader network of transformative symbolic processes.
, Alchemical Studies, 1967aside