The club I wanted to join was waiting in Pompeii

Woman with an ox heart, on right, in the House of Thiasus, Pompeii (Supplied: pompeiisites.org)

Given that Groucho Marx's maxim about abhorring club membership is one I have long taken to heart, this is significant and made even more so because I suspect any woman reading this will immediately want to join too.

The secret women's society I'm referring to involves copious amounts of wine, food and feverishly dancing around to wild music wearing diaphanous gowns; with initiation culminating in cutting the heart of an oxen out of its chest with a sword and your bare hands.

The walls of the dining room are frescoed in exquisitely detailed panels of Satyrs and woodland deities painted in the rare, blood-red pigment called cinnabar. (Supplied: Virginia Trioli)

This cult was revealed to me in a series of recently uncovered rooms in a home that had been buried for almost 2000 years beneath the ancient Vesuvian ash and pumice at the excavations of Pompeii.

The walls of the dining room are frescoed in exquisitely detailed panels of Satyrs and woodland deities painted in the rare, blood-red pigment called cinnabar. They depict the transition of a demure young woman into a maenad, a frenzied female follower of Dionysus, complete with her final, triumphant brandishing of a dripping ox heart. In one panel, another woman is leaping off her pedestal and running towards the garden outside, as if fleeing in terror at the bloody rites inside. As Groucho always said, not everyone wants to join.

Visiting this remarkable site earlier this year and seeing these rooms which are now open to the public was, without exaggeration, one of the highlights of my life. The colours and richness and beauty of the painted detail was one thing. The vast, preserved ordinariness and mysteries of a working Roman port-town was another.

But best of all, was discovering the optimistic and very human philosophy that preserves and protects all of it. In a time when we are watching breathtaking fools make ruinous choices, and are globally shrugging off crucial decisions to the silicone minds of AI, scholarship and intelligence became the most important artefacts I encountered.

The frescoes are in a banqueting hall of the House of Thiasus, in what was once a very posh neighbourhood of Pompeii, and they form a megalography — a cycle of paintings featuring nearly life-size figures. It's only the second painted example of female Dionysian initiation after the 1909 discovery of the Villa of the Mysteries.

The only reason this one was uncovered was because it was part of an area of the long-burie