A feast of excess
酒池肉林 (주지육림) means A pond of wine and a forest of meat — the utmost luxury and debauchery. bacchanalian means Of drunken revelry; characterized by riotous, dissolute feasting. East Asian idiom and Western myth mirror the same human truth.
The Meeting
In the Roman night, the women who served the wine god Bacchus (the Maenads) climbed the mountains, drank wine, and danced in frenzy. The name of the rite was the Bacchanalia — a sacred festival where restraint and reason gave way. Thousands of kilometers away, the tyrant King Zhou of ancient China filled a pond with wine and raised a forest of hanging meat (酒池肉林). Three thousand men and women, the Records of the Grand Historian tells us, frolicked naked among it all. On one side a frenzy offered to a god; on the other, a corruption made by a king.
Western Myth — The Festival That Unbinds Reason, the Bacchanalia
Bacchus (Greek Dionysus) was the god of wine and frenzy. The festival held in his honor, the Bacchanalia, originated in the Greek Dionysia and passed to Rome. Euripides' tragedy The Bacchae rendered the madness of this festival most intensely — when Pentheus, king of Thebes, forbade the worship of Dionysus, the women seized by the god's frenzy (the Maenads) mistook the king for a deer and tore him apart with their bare hands. In Rome the Bacchanalia at first admitted only women, but later, when it became mixed in sex, the dissoluteness reached its peak, and in 186 BC the Roman Senate enacted the "Decree on the Bacchanalia" (Senatus Consultum de Bacchanalibus), executing thousands. This was the first large-scale religious persecution in Roman history. In the 1620s the word bacchanalian entered English, meaning "of drunken revelry, like a riotous festival." Today "bacchanal" means "an uncontrollable party, a frenzied festival."
What the etymology of bacchanalian reveals: in the West, excess could also be a "divine act." A rite in which reason (the Apollonian) was loosed for a time so that one might be reborn through frenzy (the Dionysian) — the twin faces of Greek culture that Nietzsche captured in The Birth of Tragedy. Western excess was a "deviation in order to return to the normal."
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Oxford English Dictionary"bacchanalian, adj." 1620s, from Latin Bacchanalia, festival of Bacchus, from Bacchus (Dionysus).
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Online Etymology Dictionaryetymonline.com/word/bacchanalian — "characterized by drunken revelry."
Eastern Lore — The Pond of Wine, the Forest of Meat, Jiuchi Roulin
Jiuchi Roulin (酒池肉林) is the story of King Zhou (紂王, 11th century BC), the last ruler of the Shang (Yin) dynasty, recorded in the Annals of Yin in Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian. "He made a pond of wine and hung up meat to form a forest, and had men and women strip naked and chase one another among it, drinking through the whole night (以酒爲池 懸肉爲林 使男女倮相逐其間 爲長夜之飮)." The debauchery of King Zhou and his favored concubine Daji reached its extreme. She is said to have laughed as she watched people fall from a copper pillar set over a charcoal fire (the punishment of paolao, 炮烙之刑). When the loyal minister Bigan remonstrated with him, the king split open his chest to kill him, saying, "They say a sage's heart has seven openings — let us see." In the end King Wu of Zhou overthrew King Zhou, and this is the Yin-Zhou transition. Mencius judged it thus: "To slay King Zhou was to slay a tyrant, not to kill a sovereign (誅一夫紂矣, 未聞弑君也)." Jiuchi Roulin thereafter became the representative idiom for "the height of a king's luxury and corruption." It was cited as a warning to later monarchs such as Emperor Xuanzong of Tang and his consort Yang Guifei, and King Uijong of Goryeo.
The essence of Jiuchi Roulin is the Eastern judgment that "excess is not divinity but sin." If the Western Bacchanalia was a "rite of unbinding," the Eastern Jiuchi Roulin was "evidence of collapse." The East almost never portrays luxury in a positive light — the end of luxury is always the ruin of the state.
Where the Mirrors Meet — Where the Two Myths Converge
Both point to "the extreme feast of wine, meat, and sex." The Bacchanalia and Jiuchi Roulin both paint the same scene.
Both carry negative meaning today. bacchanalian = "dissolute," Jiuchi Roulin = "the ruinous luxury of a fallen state" — East and West share the same modern verdict on excess.
Yet their original contexts differ. The West began with a "festival serving a god" and fell into corruption; the East began with "a king's greed" and ended in national ruin.
Their moral meanings differ too. In the West, excess was a "sanctioned deviation" (periodic release); in the East, excess was an "unforgivable sin" (grounds to slay a king).
Mnemonic — One Line to Take Home
- ✓ bacchanalian = derived from Bacchus, the wine god. Of drunken revelry; characterized by riotous, dissolute feasting.
- ✓ 酒池肉林 = a pond of wine and a forest of meat. The utmost luxury and debauchery.
- ✓ Remember it in one stroke: "bacchanalian and Jiuchi Roulin — two different civilizations telling the same story."
"Myth never dies. In bacchanalian and in Jiuchi Roulin, it lives and breathes still, today."
