Why Every Era Gets the Parties it Deserves

The Romans had their wine-soaked Bacchanalia, medieval peasants their harvest celebrations, and we have Instagram-optimized music festivals where the queue for WiFi is longer than the one for beer. Yet strip away the historical details and something remarkable emerges: humans have always gathered to lose themselves, to transcend the mundane, to remember what it feels like to be part of something larger than their individual anxieties.

Painting The Wedding Dance by Pieter Breugel The Elder (1566)

Catharsis and Divine Ecstasy

Our story begins in ancient Greece, where around the third century BCE a curious phenomenon swept through the Mediterranean world: the Dionysiac mysteries, wild nocturnal festivals that would make Burning Man look like a church picnic.

Initially, these festivities were women-only. In a patriarchal society where they had virtually no public voice, the Dionysiac mysteries offered something unprecedented: a space where wives, daughters, and slaves could claim temporary autonomy, speak directly to the divine, and experience forms of power unavailable anywhere else in Greek society.

When these celebrations migrated to Rome and transformed into the Bacchanalia, they retained their subversive essence while expanding beyond gender boundaries.

The popularity of these festivals wasn't mere coincidence but a symptom of deeper social tensions brewing in the expanding Roman Republic.

 

As Rome absorbed Greek culture and eastern mystery religions, citizens found themselves caught between traditional Roman values and seductive new forms of personal spirituality. It's here that Friedrich Nietzsche's famous dichotomy between Apollo and Dionysus becomes illuminating: Roman society was built on Apollonian principles—order, reason, measured beauty, collective harmony—yet the human psyche yearned for the Dionysian counterpoint of chaos, passion, and individual transcendence. The Bacchanalia represented this eternal tension in its purest form.

Community and Interdependence

Where ancient Romans used festivals to transcend social boundaries, medieval Europeans used them to reinforce social bonds. Medieval weddings for example, famously portrayed in Brueghel’s Boerenbruiloft, were economic alliances disguised as parties. When Bruegel's peasants gathered to celebrate a union, they weren't witnessing a romantic commitment, they were investing in the community's future. The practical bonds created at these gatherings would shape daily cooperation long after the last dance ended.

Power and Performance

By the time we reach the glittering salons of 18th-century Versailles, celebration had transformed into something far more calculated: a weapon of soft power; carefully choreographed performances of aristocratic superiority. Every silk dress, every powdered wig, every languid gesture was designed to communicate one clear message: we possess something you cannot touch.

Marie Antoinette's infamous parties weren't just tone-deaf extravagance (though they were certainly that), but deliberate political theater in an age when legitimacy increasingly required performance.

The aristocracy had learned that in a world where divine right was being questioned, you had better put on a good show.

Their elaborate masked balls, impossible gardens or orchestrated "natural" picnics, all were sophisticated propaganda designed to make inequality look like art. This strategy backfired in a spectacular way. While the aristocrats danced their minuets and played at being shepherdesses, the people whose labor funded these fantasies were taking note. Every reported detail of royal excess became ammunition for revolutionary fury. The same parties that were meant to demonstrate untouchable power instead revealed the aristocracy's profound disconnection from reality.

Hidden Desires and Midnight Revelries

The nineteenth century marked the height of industrial progress, imperial expansion, and a deep ambivalence toward pleasure. In Victorian England, feasting lost its spontaneity and became increasingly confined to the private sphere. Banquets were highly performative, bound by strict etiquette, as the rise of the bourgeoisie brought with it a new kind of social anxiety: how to display refinement without appearing vulgar.

Yet the Dionysian spirit didn’t vanish; it merely went underground. This was the age of opium dens, secret societies, and absinthe parlors; a double life of respectability and vice. Masquerade balls, imported from continental Europe, offered rare spaces where respectable men and women could temporarily shed their public identities along with their moral constraints.

These were not innocent entertainment, but release valves for a society that had repressed almost every form of spontaneous human expression.

 

The masks were more than costume; they were psychological tools, enabling desires that could not be acknowledged in daylight. The flutter of a fan, the coded meaning of a bouquet, the intricate choreography of courtship were all part of a culture that had turned instinct into a sophisticated game of concealment and revelation.

Dancing on the Edge of Apocalypse

After the unprecedented carnage of World War I, Western civilization faced an existential crisis that no amount of Victorian propriety could remedy. An entire generation had witnessed the slaughter of millions, the collapse of old certainties, and the brutal reality that progress could march hand in hand with destruction.

The parties of the 1920s carried an almost manic energy that set them apart from all previous celebrations. This was not the calculated excess of Versailles, nor the tightly controlled outlets of Victorian society. It was existential hedonism: a profound philosophical statement about the nature of existence in the modern world.

When traditional structures had proven so catastrophically inadequate, perhaps the only honest response was to embrace the temporary, the improvisational, and the beautifully meaningless.

 

The decade’s signature innovations, such as jazz music, cocktail culture and nightclubs, shared a common thread: the elevation of the momentary and ephemeral over the permanent and monumental. The crash of 1929 would eventually end the party, but for one brief, glittering decade, an entire civilization decided that if life was ultimately absurd, it might as well be accompanied by excellent music and some very good gin.

Counterculture and Collective Utopia

In the 1960s, the feast became political again. In a world gripped by Cold War paranoia, civil rights struggles, and decolonization, young people sought new forms of belonging, and celebration became protest. By 1969, when half a million young people converged on a dairy farm in upstate New York, celebration had evolved into something unprecedented in modern history: a large-scale and highly visible symbol of dissent against established power.

While earlier festivals and rituals had carried elements of social or political resistance — from the subversive Bacchanalia of ancient Rome to the carnival traditions of medieval Europe — Woodstock was unique in its scale, explicit political messaging, and role within the emerging counterculture movements.

It was not just a music festival; it was a three-day experiment in anarchist utopia and a powerful statement of cultural rebellion. Woodstock and similar gatherings such as the Monterey Pop Festival (1967) and the Human Be-in (1967) helped define the spirit of communal ritual and cultural rebellion that characterized the era. These celebrations embodied the Dionysian impulse anew, now infused with Eastern mysticism, psychedelics, and radical love.

Searching for Connection in the Age of Algorithms

In today’s hyperconnected, hyper-individualised world, the feast persists, but it has shapeshifted. The modern rave, with its pulsing bass, stroboscopes and collective trance, is both a flight from and a return to the self. Whether in Berghain, the Nevada desert or a muddy festival field, people gather not for spectacle but for surrender — to dissolve the boundaries of the self and feel part of something larger, especially as loneliness and mental health struggles rise.

The thread that links Dionysiac revelers to medieval peasants and contemporary festival-goers is not nostalgia or hedonism. It is the enduring human recognition that individual existence, however rich, remains incomplete without moments of collective transcendence. In every age, celebration functions as both mirror and antidote to the limitations of the dominant culture, revealing what we lack while granting temporary relief from that lack.