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 contrary, the high tension, the rigid routine, the gray monotony of modern life insistently call for moments of organic relief, though the precise form that that orgiastic relief takes must necessarily change with other social changes.  As Wilhelm von Humboldt said, “just as men need suffering in order to become strong so they need joy in order to become good.”  Charles Wagner, insisting more recently (in his Jeunesse) on the same need of joy in our modern life, regrets that dancing in the old, free, and natural manner has gone out of fashion or become unwholesome.  Dancing is indeed the most fundamental and primitive form of the orgy, and that which most completely and healthfully fulfils its object.  For while it is undoubtedly, as we see even among animals, a process by which sexual tumescence is accomplished,[115] it by no means necessarily becomes focused in sexual detumescence but it may itself become a detumescent discharge of accumulated energy.  It was on this account that, at all events in former days, the clergy in Spain, on moral grounds, openly encouraged the national passion for dancing.  Among cultured people in modern times, the orgy tends to take on a purely cerebral form, which is less wholesome because it fails to lead to harmonious discharge along motor channels.  In these comparatively passive forms,