Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy

by Barbara Ehrenreich

  Furthermore, to the extent to which Dionysus can be said to have a philosophy or ethical stance, it bears a certain resemblance to that of Jesus. Dionysus was a lover of peace, as we have seen; and, like Jesus, he upheld the poor and rejected the prevailing social hierarchy. According to Euripides, who was certainly not an unambivalent admirer of the wine god, the Dionysian man is:

  Watchful to keep aloof both mind and heart

  From men whose pride claims more than mortals may.

  The life that wins the poor man’s common voice,

  His creed, his practice—this shall be my choice.4

  Rounding out their shared bohemian perspective, both were scornful of the toil and striving that take up so much human energy. Dionysus was always pulling women away from their housework to join his manic rites. Jesus advised his followers to quit worrying about where their next meal would come from and emulate the lilies of the field and the fowls of the air: “for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns.” Both, in fancier words, upheld what has been called a hedonic vision of community, based on egalitarianism and the joyous immediacy of human experience—as against the agonic reality of the cruelly unequal and warlike societies they briefly favored with their presence.5

  There is one more parallel between Jesus and Dionysus. Long before Jesus’ arrival, Dionysus had himself become a god of personal salvation, holding out the promise of life beyond the grave. The official patriarchal gods—Zeus (Jupiter to the Romans) and Yahweh—had little to offer by way of an afterlife, but the various ecstatic cults available in the Greco-Roman world—those centered on Demeter, Isis, Cybele, and Mithra, for example—all held out their mysteries as portals to eternal life. According to Burkert, “The same is true for the Dionysiac mysteries from at least the fifth century B.C. onward [although] scholars have been reluctant to acknowledge this dimension of Dionysiac worship.”6 The widespread use of Dionysian imagery on gravestones testifies, most likely, to the wine god’s promise of salvation.7 This was not simply a verbal promise, as it was for Christians; pagans could apprehend their immortality directly, through participation in the god’s ecstatic rites. To “lose oneself” in ecstasy—to let go of one’s physical and temporal boundaries—is to glimpse, however briefly, the prospect of eternity.

  Dionysus and the Jews

  How to explain the resemblance between the son of Zeus and the son of Yahweh? It could be argued that each is a manifestation of some underlying archetype, existing within the human imagination, of a divine or semidivine rebel and savior figure. But there is another possibility: that the historical figure of Jesus was subtly altered and shaped by his early followers and chroniclers in order to make him more closely resemble Dionysus. As hellenized Jews, who spoke and wrote in Greek, these early chroniclers were familiar with Dionysus and the entire extended family of pagan deities. In fact, more so than other Jews, the early Christians were intellectually engaged with the ideas and philosophies of classical pagan culture. 8 But why should they want to style their own god-man after a pagan deity, and an apparently disreputable one at that?

  The answer must be connected to the strange fact that, in apparent defiance of the First Commandment, the Jews of Roman Israel were already worshipping Dionysus at the time of Jesus and identifying him with their “one” god Yahweh. The historian Morton Smith pointed out that the god Dionysus was worshipped throughout the Hebrew world in Roman times: “Accordingly, it is not surprising that Yahweh was often identified by gentiles with Dionysus … The surprising fact is that this identification first appears among the Jews themselves.” On a Hebrew coin, for example, Yahweh is portrayed (and the mere fact of his portrayal is a startling break from Jewish tradition) with Dionysian attributes—wearing a satyr’s mask and driving the chariot of Triptolemus, which Dionysus had used for his travels around the world.9

  In addition, there are reports of Jewish worship of Dionysus in Rome, while in Jerusalem the Jews may have been ecumenical enough to worship Yahweh in the form of both Zeus and Dionysus. Considering the “popularity of the cult of Dionysus in Palestine” as well as the material evidence from coins, funerary objects, and building ornaments showing that Yahweh and Dionysus were often elided or confused, Smith concluded that “these factors taken together make it incredible that these symbols were meaningless to the Jews who used them. The history of their use shows a persistent association with Yahweh of attributes of the wine god.”10 As the theologist Robert M. Price writes:

  There surely was such a thing as Jews taking attractive features of Gentile faiths and mixing them with their own … Maccabees 6:7 tells us that Antiochus converted large numbers of Jews to the worship of Dionysus. One suspects it was no arduous task, given that some Greek writers already considered Jehovah simply another local variant of Dionysus anyway. The Sabazius religion of Phrygia is plainly an example of worshipping Jehovah as Dionysus.11

  Thus Jesus was born into a Jewish culture that had embraced, to a certain extent, the pagan gods, especially Zeus and Dionysus. According to the classicist Carl Kerényi, Jesus’ early followers, and probably Jesus himself, were aware of “the existence of a massive non-Greek religion of Dionysus between the lake of Genesareth and the Phoenician coast.” Jesus traveled in this region and took many of his metaphors from viniculture. In particular his odd insistence that he is “the true vine” makes little sense unless there is also a false vine, and has been interpreted as a direct challenge to Dionysus. 12 As for Jesus’ Dionysus-like trick of turning water into wine, this was, Smith argues, derived from “a myth about Dionysus told in a Dionysiac festival celebrated at Sidon.” A first- or second-century CE report of the festival “shows striking similarities, even in wording, to the gospel material.”13

  There are several features of Dionysus that would have made him an attractive prototype for the deified Jesus. First, of course, were the ecstatic elements of Dionysian worship; the Maccabees had introduced elements of Dionysian ritual into Jewish festivities two centuries before Jesus’ birth, and Smith says these were very popular. In a broader sense, the early Jewish followers of Jesus may have been impressed, as were the Greeks and Romans before them, by the wine god’s accessibility to the individual worshipper. Yahweh—at least before his own apparent merger with Dionysus—had been a stern and impersonal deity, while Dionysus always held out the possibility of a direct and personal relationship through participation in his rites. Furthermore, unlike so many deities, Yahweh included, Dionysus was not a local or parochial god; his cult was universal and potentially open to anyone, anywhere.

  When the historical Jesus was executed by the Roman authorities, his followers coped with this tragedy by turning him into a god—but not just any god. They seem to have chosen as their model a particular god who was already at large in their community, a god who held out the promise of immortal life and divine communion, and who welcomed even the lowliest of individuals. I am not suggesting that this was a conscious choice, made by certain followers of Jesus who secretly fancied the god Dionysus. But Dionysiac themes were ever present in the pagan/Jewish culture in which Jesus’ followers sought to interpret their leader’s brief life and tortured death. There were forty years between Jesus’ death and the first written account of his life—time enough for his followers to assemble a myth of his divine lineage and mission out of the cultural bricolage available to them, which already included the notion of a wine-bringing, life-giving, populist, victim god. Christ crucified was, perhaps in a more than merely symbolic way, Dionysus risen.

  Could there have been any actual overlap between the cults of Jesus and Dionysus, or fraternal mixing of the two? In support of that possibility, Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, in their somewhat sensationalist book The Jesus Mysteries, offer a number of cases, from the second and third centuries, in which Dionysus—who is identified by name—is depicted hanging from a cross.14 Then there is what the archaeologist Franz Cumont called “a strange fact for which no satisfactory explanation has as yet been fur
nished”: the burial of a priest of Sabazios, along with another follower of this god, who was a variant of Dionysus common to Asia Minor, in the Christian catacomb in Rome.15 Accompanying the burial site are frescoes depicting “how Vibia [the follower of Sabazios] was carried away by Death, as Kore had been carried away by Hades, how she was judged and acquitted, and how she was introduced by a ‘good angel’ to the sacred meal of the blessed.”16 The presence of Dionysus/Sabazios in a Christian burial site decorated with a very Christian story of death and the afterlife would seem to suggest that the deified Jesus and the old wine god were, however briefly, once on excellent terms with each other.

  Ecstatic Christianity

  More to the point, for our purposes, is the evidence—frustratingly scattered and inconclusive, I admit—that the early Christians engaged in ecstatic practices resembling those of the mystery cults in Greece and the “oriental” religions in Rome. Certainly the Romans suspected that they did. The first-century Roman writer Celsus compared Christians to practitioners of the “Bacchic mysteries” and to the “begging priests of Cybele and soothsayers, and to worshippers of Mithras and Sabazius.”17 Beyond that, Romans imagined Christians performing all the lewd acts attributed to the cult of Bacchus, with even more diabolical variations such as human sacrifice, infanticide, and cannibalism thrown in. As Fronto, the tutor of the emperor Marcus Aurelius, understood the Christian sacrament of communion: “It is the blood of this [sacrificed] infant—I shudder to mention it—it is this blood that they lick with thirsty lips; these are the limbs they distribute eagerly; this is the victim by which they seal their covenant.”18

  The attractiveness of Christianity to women, and the consequent mingling of the sexes, was another source of prurient Roman speculation.

  On a special day they gather in a feast with all their children, sisters, mothers—all sexes and all ages. There, flushed with the banquet after such feasting and drinking, they begin to burn with incestuous passions … with unspeakable lust they copulate in random unions, all equally being guilty of incest, some by deed, but everyone by complicity.19

  Most of what Christians of the first and second centuries actually did together—whether they even possessed a standardized form of worship, for example—is unknown to us today, but the general scholarly view is that “church services were noisy, charismatic affairs, quite different from a tasteful evensong today at the parish church.”20 They met in people’s homes, where their central ritual was a shared meal that was no doubt washed down with Jesus’ favorite beverage, wine.21 There is reason to think they sang too, and that the songs were sometimes accompanied by instrumental music. 22 Justin Martyr, a gentile convert who died at the hands of the Romans in 165 CE, once wrote that children should sing together, “just as in the same way one enjoys songs and similar music in church.”23 Very likely, Christians also danced; at least this is how the historian Louis Backman interpreted various statements of the second-century Church fathers. Clement of Alexandria (150-216 CE), for example, instructed the faithful to “dance in a ring, together with the angels, around Him who is without beginning or end,” suggesting that the Christian initiation rite included a ringdance around the altar. At another point Clement wrote that in order to invoke the “zest and delight of the spirit,” Christians “raise our heads and our hands to heaven and move our feet just at the end of the prayer—pedes excitamus,” where, according to Backman, pedes excitamus is “a technical term for dancing.”24

  So Christians sang and possibly danced, but did they dance ecstatically, as did members of the old Dionysian cults? The evidence for ecstatic dancing, such as it is, hinges on Paul’s instruction, in his letter to the Corinthian congregation, that women should keep their heads covered in church (1 Cor. 11:5). This may represent nothing more than a concern that Christianity remain within the normal pagan and Jewish bounds of gender decorum. After all, Paul did not want women prophesying or even speaking in church, despite the fact that he worked with women as fellow proselytizers and had at one point proclaimed that “male and female are one in Christ.” An alternative explanation for the head-covering rule, proposed by the theologian E. S. Fiorenza, is that the women of Corinth were becoming a little too exuberant for Paul’s tastes.

  It seems that during their ecstatic-pneumatic worship celebrations some of the Corinthian women prophets and liturgists unbound their hair, letting it flow freely rather than keeping it in its fashionable coiffure, which often was quite elaborate and enhanced with jewelry, ribbons and veils. Such a sight of disheveled hair would have been quite common in the ecstatic worship of oriental deities.25

  Roman women spent hours on their tight coiffures, leaving the long, unbound look to the worshippers of Dionysus, Cybele, and Isis. If we know one thing about Paul, it is that he was greatly concerned about making Christianity respectable to the Romans, and hence as little like the other “oriental” religions—with their disorderly dancing women—as possible.

  This may seem like a rather tenuous inference, but the association between hair-tossing and ecstatic practice is widespread and was well established in the ancient world. Recall the prehistoric depictions of dancing women whose flowing hair suggests headtossing or at least rapid motion. In the second-century Roman Empire, the Syrian writer Lucian reported that the galli, or male worshippers of Cybele, “shook off their caps and rolled their heads downward from the neck,” while Apuleius described them as “hanging down their heads a long while, moving their necks around with supple motions, and whirling their loose hair round and round.”26 E. R. Dodds, in his famous work The Greeks and the Irrational , suggested that hair-tossing might be a universal hallmark of religious ecstasy. A nineteenth-century missionary, for example, who witnessed a “cannibal dance” in British Columbia, thought that “the continual jerking [of] their heads back, causing their long black hair to twist about, added much to their savage appearance.” Similarly, a notable feature of certain Moroccan dancers was that “their long hair was tossed about by the rapid to-and-fro movements of the head.”27 An observer of the eighteenth-century American Great Revival reported of people overcome by “the spirit”:

  Their heads would jerk back suddenly, frequently causing them to yelp, or make some other involuntary noise … Sometimes the head would fly every way so quickly that their features could not be recognized. I have seen their heads fly back and forth so quickly that the hair of females would be made to crack like a carriage whip, but not very loud.28

  The hypothesis that Paul was concerned with controlling ecstatic activity, and not just women, is at least consistent with the fact that, a few verses after the hair-covering line in his letter to the Corinthians, he warns Christian men to keep their hair cut short (1 Cor. 11:14). Furthermore, there is archaeological evidence for the continuing worship of Dionysus in Corinth during Paul’s lifetime, prompting one twentieth-century evangelical Christian scholar to conclude that “the Dionysian religion would probably have had some influence” on the overly exuberant Corinthian Christians.29

  Without question, the early Christians indulged in one very odd form of behavior, but whether it was truly ecstatic, or even communal, is not so clear. This was speaking in tongues, technically called glossolalia and colloquially, in our own time, tongue-speaking. It first occurs among the biblical Christians in the Book of Acts, when hundreds of the faithful have gathered to observe the Jewish Pentecost.

  And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind …

  And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them.

  And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the spirit gave them utterance. (Acts 2:2-4)

  Passersby assume they are drunk, but what has happened is that, miraculously, the assembled Christians of all nationalities—Parthians, Medes, Elamites, Cretans, Arabians, Egyptians, Romans, and Jews are among those mentioned—can at last understand one another. The mutual unintelligibility of huma
n languages, which had frustrated the Hebrews since the Tower of Babel story in the Old Testament, was finally overcome.

  Later we encounter tongue-speaking among the Corinthians, who are again being rebuked by Paul for excessively enthusiastic behavior. He does not denounce the practice, describing it as a legitimate “gift of the spirit,” but unfortunately this god-given form of speech has by now become unintelligible. Concerned as usual with public relations, Paul worries about how this practice might appear to the unconverted: “If therefore the whole church be come together in one place, and all speak with tongues, and there come in those that are unlearned, or unbelievers, will they not say that ye are mad?” (1 Cor. 14:23).

  But is tongue-speaking really a sign, or symptom, of communal ecstasy or some trancelike state induced by it? William Samarin, a sociolinguist and the author of a 1972 book on glossolalia, insists that it has nothing to do with ecstasy, either now or among the ancients. “Anyone can do it,” he told me. “All you have to do is believe you can speak another language.”30 True enough, unlike some of the physical symptoms of trance—convulsions, for example, or unusual bodily contortions—glossolalia is easily faked or at least consciously indulged in, and there might well have been a motive to do so: The “gift” of glossolalia seems to have been a source of prestige within the early Christian community; Paul himself boasts to the Corinthians that he can do it “more than all of you.” Similarly in our own time, charismatic television preachers will sometimes demonstrate their spiritual authority by breaking into short bursts of tongue-speaking, after which they return to English without the slightest change of demeanor or tone of voice. And unlike the extraordinary mental states sometimes brought on by music and dance, tongue-speaking does not always take place in the context of an emotionally charged group. There are many reports of its occurrence during solitary prayer, although these are of course impossible to verify.31