Bacchanal

By Deane Barker • • tags: history, definition •
Updates
This content has been updated 1 time since it was first published. The last update happened .

Definition: a wild and indulgent party

This comes from Bacchus, the Roman god of wine and revelry.

In some context, it has a sexual subtext, used to describe and orgy or indulgent sexual performance.

Humorously, one of the top search results for the word is the Bacchanal Buffet at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas.

Why I Looked It Up

In “The Tomb,” a short story by H.P. Lovecraft:

One morning at breakfast I came close to disaster by declaiming in palpably liquorish accents an effusion of eighteenth-century Bacchanalian mirth…

In the story, the main character is slowly being taken over by a spirit during the overnight hours, and apparently speaks with the inflections of that spirit at breakfast the next morning, running the risk of being discovered.

Update

Added on

The buffet at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas is called “The Bacchanal Buffet.”

Links to this – Dionysian December 8, 2023
Dionysus was the Greek god of wine-making, orchards and fruit, vegetation, fertility, festivity, insanity, ritual madness, religious ecstasy, and theater. All very pleasure-oriented things. This phrase is a lot like Bacchanal .
Links from this – The Complete Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft May 10, 2023
This is an anthology of every work of narrative fiction H.P. Lovecraft wrote, in order. (I say “narrative fiction” because he apparently wrote a bunch of poetry that isn’t in this book.) I had always wondered about Lovecraft. I was familiar with “Call of Cthulhu,” the role-playing game. Then a few...