Reading it brought to mind two things. One, the list of men lauded by RT in his writings on incest, some of whom known for having faced charges for raping children. Two, rebirth and transformation. Part 5 will focus on the latter, and part 6 on the former.
Rebirth and Transformation
He encouraged his followers "to give birth" to themselves, to die to their old bodies, to "their hypocritical, rigid and selfish customs," and "to be reborn to a body with more energy and vitality", "free from rigidities and prejudices," and "to return with the irrational and obscure energy of renewed instincts" "in an ardent body" and "in the majesty of sex". "From the degenerate background of our culture," he writes, "we must be reborn as animals, full of strength, grace and harmony."
But Before Rebirth, The Orgy
When you hear the word orgy, what comes to your mind? Group sex? Did you know that originally the word orgia referred to ecstatic ceremonial rites held in honour of an ancient Greek or Roman deity? These secret rites were only open to the initiates and commonly involved frenzied singing, dancing, drinking, and sexual activity. RT was interested in Greek mythology and in the psychology of the orgy. He seemed to be especially fond of Dionysus, so much so that he wrote poems in his honour and created dances to help his followers embody the archetypal energy of the god of excess, drunkenness, orgasmic passion, and dissolution of the sense of self and of all limits.
"Man is reintegrated into a biocosmic unity, even if this unity means regression from the mode of person to that of sow. In a sense, the orgy transmutes man into an agricultural condition. The abolition of the norms of limits and individualities, the experience of all telluric and nocturnal possibilities are equivalent to the acquisition of the state of seeds that decompose in the earth, abandoning their form to give life to a new plant. Among its other functions in the spiritual and psychological economy of a community, the orgy also has the task of making possible and preparing the 'renewal', the regeneration of life. The onset of an orgy can be compared to the appearance of the green sprout in the furrow: it is a new life that begins, and for that life the orgy satisfies man with substance and momentum. Not only that, but the orgy, by reactivating the mystical chaos prior to creation, makes it possible to repeat the creation.
Man temporarily regresses to the amorphous, nocturnal state of chaos, in order to be reborn with greater vigor in his diurnal form. The orgy, like immersion in water (paragraph 64), cancels creation, but at the same time regenerates it; identifying himself with the undifferentiated, pre-cosmic totality, man hopes to return to himself restored and regenerated, in short 'a new man'. In the structure and function of the orgy, we identify the same desire to repeat a primordial gesture: the Creation organizing chaos. In the alternation of daily life-orgy (Saturnalia, Carnival, etc.) we identify the same rhythmic vision of life, formed of action and sleep, of birth and death, and the same cyclical intuition of the Cosmos, which arises from chaos and returns to it through a catastrophe or a "mahapralaya", a 'great dissolution'. No doubt monstrous forms are degradations of this fundamental intuition of the cosmic rhythm and of the thirst for regeneration and renewal. But we must not start from these aberrant forms, to understand the origin and function of the orgy. Each 'feast' has an orgiastic vocation in its structure."