Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization

by Edward Slingerland

In ancient Egypt, the Festival of Drunkenness was a major holiday commemorating the salvation of humankind when the fierce goddess Hathor was tricked into getting drunk on red-dyed beer instead of human blood. After some ceremonial preliminaries, it consisted primarily of everyone getting completely hammered in the Hall of Drunkenness, participating in ritually sanctioned sexual orgies, and then eventually falling asleep. As Mark Forsyth observes, “This was drinking with only one aim in mind: sacred drunkenness, and to be a holy drunk you have to be wholly drunk.”103 In the morning, an enormous image of the goddess was snuck into the hall, and then everyone was abruptly woken up, still drunk, by an ear-shattering din of drums and tambourines, to find the great goddess looming over them. This can’t have been wholly pleasant, but it had to have been awe-inspiring.