These women, because they are Bacchai, carry the thyrsos, since it is the god’s own mystical emblem, and wear his holy garment, the fawn-skin hair-shirt—raiment of mysticism. But the Greek mystics wore it with the hair side outward.
Folk who of a sudden impulse abandon the social routine—the looms and shuttles—of their group, deserting parents, spouses, or children in order to indulge any form of private, personal, emotionally religious practice, are quite certain to incur resentment, for they are being all too literally ‘un-popular’. Periodic bouts of Dionysiac frenzy may have come to Greek villages and tiny townships in the seventh century B.C. and caused not only resentment but possible persecution of the cult by conventional persons. However, by the beginning of the sixth century some cities of Greece were growing fairly large, and for such Dionysos Bromios, with his mysteries that drove the women wildly to the mountains, became a subject of the very gravest concern. There are indications that the whole trouble was resolved during the first half of the sixth century B.C. by the actions of three brilliant Greek statesmen, and in characteristic Greek fashion. In important centres the cult of Dionysos was taken into the mechanism of the State cults, and the buskin of Bacchos was saved from becoming a sabot, poised to immobilise the machinery of government.
Periander, who ruled Corinth from about 625 to 585 B.C., deliberately introduced a Dionysiac festival into the richest Greek city of the day. His neighbour Cleisthenes, Despot of Sicyon, displaced the cult of an old local hero by the cult of Dionysos. More; this powerful man, who, supporting the Delphians in a local war with Crisa, and commanding the allied forces, founded the quadrennial Pythian Games in 582 B.C. at Delphi—this ruler of Sicyon may have been the man who introduced the actual worship of Dionysos into Delphi; or, if he did not bring it in, he so strengthened and encouraged it as to give to Bacchos a status second only to that of Pythian Apollo. The holy sepulchre of Dionysos was placed in the secret, underground adyton of the temple beside the navel-stone of ‘Earth’ and the sacred tripod of the Pythia. Thus to combine the realms of the careful god of law and order and of the mystical god of licence and abandon was one of the most startling examples of Greek genius for adjustment. Law could be redeemed from mechanistic rote by the natural human contact of the anarchic god, while licence could be put under control by companying with the god of self-knowledge and moderation. Order could learn about disorder, and disorder about order.
Corinth, Sicyon, Delphi were three, and Athens the fourth place where great skill was used to accommodate the Dionysiac trouble. Peisistratus was ruler of Athens from 566 B.C.; and at about the time when he founded the Panathenaic Games for Athene he also instituted the Great Dionysia. That is to say he brought into Athens and installed at the foot of the Acropolis the ancient wooden statue of Dionysos from Attic Eleutheræ, on the frontier of Bœotia, a village which was claiming to be the god’s birthplace. With the statue came its priest and his little company of village mummers called ‘goat-singers’—in Greek tragōdoi—country lads and devotees of the god who at times kept company with the local village Mænads, the god-possessed girls who wandered in the woods of Mount Cithæron. Under the walls of the Acropolis they ranged some wooden seats for spectators in a semicircle, and put up a little stage on to which the first mummer leapt to tell his tale, while the others answered back and sang short choruses. Here the tragōdoi created for a city audience ‘tragedy’, and the theatre was born. Presently ‘revel-singers’—kōmōdoi—produced shows of another kind, and ‘comedy’ came into being. Yet it was all built round the cult of Dionysos; and it canalised a great flood of energy that would have found anarchical outlets elsewhere. It did this for the men—but not for the women. In their case Delphi had to help.
‘Thyiads’ was the name used both in Athens and at Delphi—but not, apparently, elsewhere—for ‘Mænads’, the women in ecstasis; and this formed so strong a link between the women and girls of both communities that they established a joint biennial enterprise for the impelling mysteries. No certain date can be given for the beginning of this union of Thyiads from two places far apart from one another, but it may well have started after the days of Peisistratus and at the time when the Athenian Alcmæonid family—whose close connection with Delphi has already been mentioned—-were in control of Athens. That would be towards the end of the sixth century B.C. Late in summer or in the autumn of every second year the Chief Priest of Athens selected a troupe of women and girls from among the best Athenian families to be Thyiads for the State.{118} No certainty exists about their number; but as figures fourteen and sixteen have been suggested, it is not likely that there were more than a score of them in any year. There was doubtless a woman experienced, but like Lysistrata relatively young and active, who had made the expedition several times, and was therefore the leader. At Delphi such a one was ‘Principal’—at least in later days—and Plutarch when priest at Delphi valued the Senior Thyiad, Klea, as an intimate friend. But the Athenian women and girls chosen to be Thyiads were committed to weeks of hard outdoor life; for, starting in late October, they had to make their way on foot from Athens, by way of Eleusis, Eleutheræ, Platæa, Thebes, Lebadeia, Panopeus, and Arachova, to Delphi. It was a route little short of a hundred miles, traversing rough, steep mountain-passes; and it may be reckoned today as about forty-five walking hours, or five walking days. There were, of course, rests on the pilgrimage; they stopped in towns where Dionysos was worshipped to perform their dances, as Pausanias, the traveller, learnt from personal conversation with some Thyiads as late as the second century of our era. Perhaps they were ten days or more on the way. Yet such a walk undertaken barefoot in early winter proves that the young women and girls of Athens were assuredly tough. The once-popular notion that Athenian females were dull, unenterprising creatures, as physically inadequate as though they had never stepped outside a convent or a seraglio and therefore held in disdain by the men, is now ceasing to be maintained with conviction. The Thyiads are one more example—if such be really needed—of some temporary independence and of audacious activity on the women’s part.
It is November, and the news has come that the Athenians are near. The Delphian girls go out to meet them. An hour away—and the two throngs mingle happily. Together they pass below the crags of Hyampia, from which the great rocks had crashed down upon the greedy Medes. Together they enter the precinct gate and wind up the paved way past the east front of Apollo’s temple and along its north side to that place which is the ‘temple’ of Dionysos—the theatre. Every theatre is a temple of Bromios; and the subconscious knowledge of its ineluctable consecration to the spirit of the god may explain why even to our own day “ciphers to this great accompt on your imaginary forces work”.
The Delphic theatre, up at the highest corner of the sacred precinct, was at first a semi-circular hollow scooped from the mountain-side and only later built of solid stone. From this the Thyiads pass into the township of Delphi to stay with their hosts, whom one may assume to have been Thyiads too, or the parents of Thyiad girls. If you have been to the place early in the winter season you can more easily picture the setting and the view. To the south and west the sea in the Gulf of Itea looks oddly like quicksilver, and the mountains, half veiled in cloud, seem very distant. From the gorge of the River Pleistos below, with its long, dark-green mat of olive-trees joining the huge olive-tree carpet of the Itean plain, mists lift and gather and build themselves into clouds, which rise still higher, as though speeding to join the towering mass that shrouds Parnassus. When the sun gets through fitfully he still gives warmth, but shadows have winter’s chill. In that setting and climate imagination may picture what happens after a few days of rest for the Athenians. Sunset; and the air is tense with a knowledge that Mystery is soon to begin. The Thyiads are gathered in the theatre’s circular orchestra, fawn-skins falling over their pleated robes. Each holds a thyrsos, some have castanets or little drums, some hold young animals in their arms. The evening draws in, and a few Bacchoi climb up the steps
holding lighted torches; someone touches a drum and a sigh goes up. At the altar in the centre the priest of Dionysos cuts the throat of a young he-goat—a sacrifice to Bromios, who is coming to possess his votaries. Bacchos is not merely the wine-god, but the god of all natural fluids: wine, and honey, milk, and such others as betoken a god of fertility. The blood of the goat runs out on to the altar, down on to the pavement. Strange that either fasting or raw meat, the scourge or the thyrsos, the tolled bell or the beaten drum, the body buried in the hooded habit or the naked limbs dancing upon the mountain-top may equally produce a sense of mystical union with God.
High up on the Bad Stair a shepherd youth, with a tail of horsehair tied on to make one think him a satyr, puts his double flutes to his lips. The thin, weird notes are magnified and repeated by echoes. A girl in the theatre screams and flings back her head. “Evoe, Evoe! He comes!” Drum, and another drum; rhythm, and the castanets begin to clapper. It has grown almost dark, for the torches seem brighter now. They are moving up through the gangways between the rows of seats and out to the highest corner, where the path leads straight to the Bad Stair. The whole throng of Thyiads follows the torch-bearers, for “Bromios leads his revellers to the mountains, to the mountains”.
You, the barbarian from another land, may sit there alone in the theatre, wrapped in your warmest cloak, and look up to the mountain-side to see the torch-lights slowly rising in zigzags up that wild track while snatches of the music of Bromios the Boisterous come drifting down. For nearly two hours you may still see those lights before they vanish four thousand feet up. And then, what happened then?
Part of the answer is in The Bacchæ of Euripides, but not all. For that play is not set in the chill of creeping winter which these Athenian girls and women had to face in company with the Delphian Thyiads. The Corycian Cave, dedicated to Pan and the Nymphs, to which they climbed, is not easy of access nowadays—it is about three hours on foot from Delphi—but it is very large and a warm shelter in a storm. Once upon a time news came to Delphi that before the Thyiads could reach the cave they had been overwhelmed in a great snow blizzard, and the rescue-party which climbed up to look for them had all their clothing frozen stiff. Another time Thyiads lost their way one night after they had been ranging the mountain, and came down unwittingly to the township of Amphissa, where the citizens found them next morning asleep from sheer exhaustion in the marketplace.
Such is the picture, as far as we can draw it, of the winter orgia in all their dire austerity, and the Athenian Thyiads knew only these; but there is other evidence for springtime orgia on the Corycian plain and round the sacred cave when the Delphian Thyiads climbed the mountain without their Athenian sisters. Then there were goats to be milked in the flowered meadows, and the male participants with tied-on satyr-tails carried skins of wine. No doubt exists that at this season there was sexual freedom. Euripides in another play, the Ion—the scene of which is laid in Delphi—held it to be natural. The hero, Ion, considers it to be a convincing account of his birth that his reputed father Xuthos came as a visitor to Delphi and took part with a throng of Thyiads in the Bacchic festival there.
Ion.—Did you stay in a hostel?
Xuthos.—Yes, and with Delphian girls.
I.—Do you mean you were one of their throng?
X.—They were Mænad girls of Bacchos.
I.—Were you sober or wined?
X.—Under the pleasant influence of Bacchos.
I.—That indeed was my begetting!
But along with this one must ponder another passage from Euripides’ Bacchæ: “Dionysos compels no woman to be chaste. Chastity is a matter of character, and she who is naturally chaste will partake of Bacchic rites without being touched.” Their state of ecstasis left the Bacchai free to follow either the instincts or the restraints of Nature. No inhibitions stopped the satisfaction of desire; no exhibitionist urge drove them towards promiscuous folly.
Even to the end the cult of Dionysos was something of a mystical and terrifying incursion from the outside invisible world—an incursion from the dizzy heights beyond the limits of conscious personal men, and when this cult, reaching out to Central Italy, was suddenly discovered to exist underground in Rome, it was suppressed by a horrified Senate, which promulgated in 187 B.C. its famous ‘Decree about Bacchanals’. But the Greeks had done better by the well-devised partnership of the brother-gods Apollo and Dionysos. In 432 B.C., when the Parthenon was complete, the latter had become the twelfth Olympian god, replacing Hestia, a gentle and self-effacing goddess.
In the myths about Dionysos the most important is the tale of his birth. His mother was Semele, a name almost certainly taken from Thraco-Phrygian religion, because in the language of that region the word ‘Zemelo’ meant Earth. In fact, she was an earth-goddess whose cult must have come to Bœotian Thebes with that of her son, and there been built into local legend. The usual form of the story is that Zeus loved Semele and consorted with her, but that Hera discovered the intrigue. Jealous, as was her wont, the goddess disguised herself as Semele’s old nurse and urged her to obtain from her lover a promise to reveal himself to her in the fullness of his godhead. And so one night she got him to swear by the River Styx—that oath which no god or mortal dare break—to grant her one request, and when he had sworn she asked to see him. Stories have already been told about young hunters of whom one saw Athene, the other Artemis bathing, and about the evils that befell them. It is fatal to look upon a deity against his will; and even so heroic a leader as Moses could be vouchsafed no more than a glimpse.
And he [Moses] said, “I beseech thee, show me thy glory.”
And He [the Lord] said, “I will make all my goodness pass before thee, and I will proclaim the name of the Lord before thee; and will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy.”
And He said, “Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live.”
And the Lord said, “Behold there is a place by me, and thou shalt stand upon a rock:
And it shall come to pass, while my glory passeth by, that I will put thee in a clift of the rock, and will cover thee with my hand while I pass by:
And I will take away mine hand, and thou shalt see my back parts; but my face shall not be seen.”{119}
Semele saw Zeus the all-terrible, even as he was; but that meant massed thunderbolts, which are inseparable from Zeus. Here in this legend was the shock and shudder of an ineffable occasion, which comprehended the majesty of deadly violet lightning and presaged the efficiency of atomic fission. At the very moment when the mother was destroyed by the levin bolt, Zeus snatched the unborn infant from her womb, cut open his own thigh, hid the child therein, and sewed it up, until, after the nine months were accomplished, Dionysos was born from the thigh of his divine father. It was this story that gave Dionysos a strange title, ‘Insewn’, by which he was sometimes addressed. His title of ‘Iacchos’, specially associated with his part in the Eleusinian Mysteries, has already been mentioned in the last chapter,{120} in which it was already made clear that he was pre-eminently a god of the open air, meadow and woodland, glen and mountain.
No divine type shows more diversity in art than does Dionysos. At first he was depicted as bearded and wearing flowing garments; but already in the fifth century B.C. another type is coming in, youthful, beardless, his thick hair confined by a band, naked but for a pair of hunting-boots; a fine athletic type, as we see him on a bronze made about 470 B.C. and found at Olympia (Plate IX). This delightful figure, now in the Louvre in Paris, is one of the very earliest youthful and naked versions of the god; but by the Hellenistic age this type was destined to undergo deterioration, and many a museum now contains marble statues of a deity soft, degenerate, and weak with effeminacy, which are a token of queer tastes in the Græco-Roman age. Despite this, however, the bearded, long-robed Dionysos was still represented, and even the young athletic type was sometimes retained, especially when Dionysos was equated with Alexa
nder the Great. Euripides knew stories of a triumphant procession of the Giver of Wine through the East. The god himself speaks in the opening lines of The Bacchæ:
I left the golden lands of the Lydians and Phrygians and traversing the sun-baked plains of the Persians, the towns of Bactria, the wintry country of the Medes, happy Arabia and all Asia that lies beside the salt sea, with her towered cities full of mingled Greeks and barbarians, I have come to this city first among the Greeks; there too have I set up my dances and established my mysteries, that I might be a god manifestly to mortals.
With this in mind it is easy to see how Alexander, and his triumphant sweep through Asia deep into India, bringing civilisation to the lands of strangers, seemed to parallel the adventures of Dionysos. Did not Alexander also become a god? And were not both these divine creatures sons of Zeus?
XIV—OLYMPUS
THE engaging and wayward gods of Greece, being the concepts of a humane and fastidious people, were not cold, distant, astral gods. Even Helios and Selene, the Sun and Moon, received very little cultus among the Greeks and were not Olympians, because it was observed that the heavenly bodies moved in their own courses and were indifferent to—perhaps ignorant of—men. But the Olympian gods concerned themselves intimately with mankind, to help, to encourage the good and fine, and to punish folly and vainglorious behaviour. They were like men, though endowed with vast power, energy, and mobility; yet they were imperfect, comprehensible, and finite. They had sex, but not only one sex. These Olympians were mighty, but not almighty; they were probably eternal, but not of necessity all twelve co-eternal. A Greek might have asserted that the Twelve were One, and that the One was Twelve; but this would have seemed an academic point, the asseveration or rebuttal of which could not have attracted a charge of heresy—for no such thing as heresy existed.
The Twelve Olympians Page 18