Sex Drugs & Rock ‘n’ Roll
How Roman Counterculture Shaped Christianity
Preamble:
Death and rebirth are central themes of Christianity, both in its mythology—the story of Jesus is about coming back from the dead—and in its actual history. Christianity resurrected dead and dying older traditions and carried them forward into the Middle Ages and beyond.
Three major examples—all readily allegorized by death and rebirth—are debt forgiveness, astronomical cycles, and ego death. These are the three main layers of Christian source material.
The experience of ego death suggests that the physical world is an illusion, an insight that is the basis of magic in the historical sense. Political authority stops people from having this experience because it threatens an economic order in which the poor make money on behalf of the rich; the poor won’t reliably show up to work if they discover that work is an illusion.
Early Christians presented a magical challenge to Roman authorities by appealing directly to the economically disadvantaged and emphasizing long-term economic sustainability with references to astronomical cycles and debt forgiveness. Magic is the perennial foil to power, as we will see again in the Renaissance.
This essay in one sentence:
The classic trope of Dionysus, the resurrected wine god of the Greeks, was recycled both by the Baccanalian cult during the Roman Republican period and by Christianity during the Roman Imperial period; both were countercultural drug cults persecuted as part of a broader class war.
The Modern Drug War
The Nixon administration passed the Controlled Substances Act in 1970, which introduced heavy penalties for the possession of drugs like magic mushrooms, heroin, and marijuana. These substances were all placed in the most restrictive “Schedule 1” category, indicating a high potential for abuse and no accepted medical use.
According to Nixon's chief domestic advisor, John Ehrlichman, the Controlled Substances Act had nothing to do with public health. In a 1994 interview with journalist Dan Baum, he stated:
The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.
The Controlled Substances Act was a legal pretext to crack down on prominent opposition to the Vietnam War. It illustrates how the line between illegal contraband and sanctioned medicine exists not to serve public health but to serve political purposes.
The Ancient Drug War
The Second Punic War ended in 201 BC with a dramatic Roman victory over the Carthaginians. Inevitably, the spoils of war were not distributed evenly. The Roman oligarchy instead seized most of the conquered territory and slaves for themselves. They combined these into vast slave farms called latifundia.
All that cheap slave labor drove down agricultural prices below what non-slave farms could sustain. Because they couldn’t compete with slaves, Rome’s small farmers were financially ruined. When they couldn’t pay their debts, mass foreclosures delivered their family estates into the hands of the already wealthy, who used it to expand their latifundia even further.
These mass foreclosures outraged a working class that had fought and bled to defend Rome from Hannibal; having their family farms foreclosed upon wasn’t the reward they expected for their service to the Republic. Displaced from their lands, these desperate farmers poured into Rome from the countryside. By 186 BC, the Roman Senate feared they had a revolution on their hands.
Meanwhile, the cult of the wine god Bacchus had exploded in popularity. The all-night Bacchananlian raves were presided over by women. Cultists played raucous music and mixed wine with powerful psychoactive ingredients in emulation of the Greek worship of Dionysus.
This Roman version of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll proved every bit as alluring as the American version would two thousand years later. And just as it did during the Vietnam War era, this trinity became the vehicle for a backlash against the political establishment.
That’s why the Senate cracked down on the Bacchanalia. Like Nixon, they feigned concern for the youth as a pretext to eliminate a political threat with state power. It was a bloodbath. According to the Roman historian Livy, thousands of cultists were put to death. The Senate didn’t abolish the Baccanalia. Instead, it subordinated the edgy Cult of Bacchus into a milquetoast, state-sanctioned celebration under the control of the political authorities.
Christianity
The Senate’s crackdown on the Cult of Bacchus was a success. It forestalled the revolt, and the Senate clung to power for another century of class struggle before Roman society's grotesque wealth inequality finally erupted into civil war.
For 500 years, the Roman oligarchy had used its control of the Senate to fleece the working class at every turn. Finally, in 49 BC, Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon stream with his army and marched on Rome as a populare, a populist politician advocating for the poor. By then, the situation was so incendiary that only an autocrat could hold Roman society together. After the ensuing period of civil war, Rome would primarily be ruled by emperors for the rest of her history, while the Senate was reduced to a largely ceremonial role.
This titanic class struggle was the historical backdrop against which Christianity emerged. Jesus’ hostility toward the established economic hierarchy is evidenced by his fierce advocacy for the poor and by his violent treatment of moneylenders in the Temple of Solomon.
Early Christians were involved in the renewed class war that marked the end of the Roman Republic and, around Jesus's time, the dawning of the Roman Empire. They revived and incorporated many rituals and symbols of the old Bacchic cult, repressed by the Senate a century before. These included the eating or drinking of the flesh or blood of the gods, ecstatic or rapturous states of mind, speaking in tongues, and, most crucially, a rebellious opposition to the prevailing economic hierarchy.
The histories of the Bacchanalia and Christianity are so intertwined that the Vatican Museum is filled with statues of Bacchus and his Greek predecessor, Dionysus. On a recent trip there, our tour guide felt compelled to acknowledge all the pagan statuary. He explained that Christianity recycled older sets of symbology to make the new faith broadly comprehensible to the inhabitants of the Roman Empire.
The title card to this essay is a photo from the Apostolic Palace, taken by the author, of a mosaic depicting implements of Bacchic worship. Among them are a ceremonial kantharos cup, a magic wand called a thyrsus used to mix the psychedelic wine, and a drum-like musical instrument called a tympanum. These are the symbols of the old Roman counterculture—their version of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll—that early Christians adopted during the Fall of Rome.
Further Materials
At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
Legalize It All; How to win the war on drugs by Dan Baum
Then Hispala revealed the origin of the religious rites. At first, she said, it was a sanctuary of women and it was customary that no man was admitted to it. There had been three days appointed each year on which they held initiations into the Bacchic rites during the day. It was customary to choose the matrons in turn as priestesses. Paculla Annia, a Campanian priestess, had changed everything as if by the advice of the gods: for she had been the first to initiate men, her sons, Minius and Herennius Cerrinius. She had made the rites by night and not by day, and she had made the days of initiation from three days in a year into five days every month. From the time that the rites were performed in common, men mingling with women and the freedom of darkness added. There, no wickedness, no shameful act was left untried. There were more lustful acts among men with one another than among women. If any of them were less inclined to suffer abuse or reluctant to commit the crime they were sacrificed as victims. To consider nothing as a crime was the highest religion among them. Men, as if with their minds seized, fanatically tossing their bodies, told prophecies; matrons in the dress of Bacchantes, with loose hair and carrying burning torches, ran down to the Tiber, and plunging their torches in the water, because their torches contained live sulfur mixed with calcium, they brought them out, flames still burning. The men were said to be snatched by the gods, whom bound to machines were carried out of sight into secret caves: they were those who refused to either swear an oath or to join in the crimes or to suffer shame. It was a huge number, now nearly a second population; among them certain noble men and women. In the last two years it was decided that no one more than twenty years old could be initiated: this was the desired age for those to suffer both corruption and shame.
Titus Livius (Livy), Ab urbe condita, Book 117