Who was this god who could intoxicate the mighty as well as the poor, who dared to challenge the power of men over women? Modern scholars have often looked at Dionysus with the same bafflement and dismay that European travelers brought to the “savage” rites they witnessed in distant lands. In his introduction to The Bacchae , written in 1954, Philip Vellacott opined that this is not a god whom “decent people will be prepared to worship.”38 Walter Otto, in his book on Dionysus, exclaimed: “A god who is mad! A god, part of whose nature it is to be insane! What did they experience or see—these men on whom the horror of this concept must have forced itself?”39
The facts, such as they are, about the god are first that he was beautiful, in an androgynous way, to both men and women. Euripides describes him with “long curls … cascading close over [his] cheeks, most seductively.”40 Cross-dressing was a part of Dionysian worship in some locales.41 Although he had occasional liaisons with women, like the Cretan princess Ariadne, he is usually portrayed as “detached and unconcerned with sex.”42 In vase paintings he is never shown “involved in the satyrs’ sexual shenanigans. He may dance, he may drink, but he is never shown paired with … any of the female companions.”43
As one of the few Greek gods with a specific following, he had a special relationship to humans. They could evoke him by their dancing, and it was he who “possessed” them in their frenzy. He is, in other words, difficult to separate from the form that his worship took, and this may explain his rage at those who refused to join in his revels, for Dionysus cannot fully exist without his rites. Other gods demanded animal sacrifice, but the sacrifice was an act of obeisance or propitiation, not the hallmark of the god himself. Dionysus, in contrast, was not worshipped for ulterior reasons (to increase the crops or win the war) but for the sheer joy of his rite itself. Not only does he demand and instigate; he is the ecstatic experience that, according to Durkheim, defines the sacred and sets it apart from daily life.44
So it may make more sense to explain the anthropomorphized persona of the god in terms of his rituals, rather than the other way around. The fact that he is asexual may embody the Greeks’ understanding that collective ecstasy is not fundamentally sexual in nature, in contrast to the imaginings of later Europeans. Besides, men would hardly have stood by while their wives ran off to orgies of a sexual nature; the god’s well-known indifference guarantees their chastity on the mountaintops. The fact that he is sometimes violent may reflect Greek ambivalence toward his rites: On the one hand, from an elite male perspective, the communal ecstasy of underlings (women in this case) is threatening to the entire social order. On the other hand, the god’s potential cruelty serves to help justify each woman’s participation, since the most terrible madness and violence are always inflicted on those who abstain from his worship. The god may have been invented, then, to explain and justify preexisting rites.
If so, the Dionysian rites may have originated in some “nonreligious” practice, assuming that it is even possible to distinguish the “religious” from other aspects of a distant culture. E. R. Dodds conjectured that the rites originally arose as “spontaneous attacks of mass hysteria,”45 and indeed, there are mythic accounts of manic dancing in ancient Greece unrelated to Dionysus or any other god. Lawler suggests that waves of “dance mania” may have swept through the Myceneaen culture of prehistoric Greece and relates the myth of the three princesses of Tiryns, who, when the time came for them to marry, conveniently went mad: “They rushed out of doors, and in a frenzied dance ranged over the countryside, singing weird songs, and tearing their garments, unable to stop dancing.”46 Now possibly there were such spontaneous outbreaks of “madness” predating Dionysian ritual, but something must have set them off and given them their form. One person can go “mad” spontaneously, but what was the signal that called scores or hundreds of women from their homes at the same time? Who provided the music, for example, or remembered to bring the wine?f
There is a possible historical basis for the Dionysian rite and indeed for the god himself. The classicist Walter Burkert mentions the existence, in ancient and—earlier than that—archaic Greece, of itinerant charismatics, men who traveled from place to place, serving as healers, priests, and seers.47 As early as the fifth century BCE, men called orpheotelestae traveled through Greece offering to cure illnesses, including mental ones, by dancing around the sick person, “not infrequently in the form of a ring-dance.”48 Dionysus arrives in the city of Thebes in the form of such a traveler, and when Dionysian worship comes to Rome about two centuries after Euripides’ time, it is brought by a wandering magician-priest. As a healer, the itinerant charismatic cured by drawing the afflicted into ecstatic dances49—which may well have been effective in the case of psychosomatic and mental illnesses—suggesting that he was a musician and dancer as well as a priest. It was probably his arrival, announced by the beating of the tympana, that drew the women out from their houses and into the “madness” that was also a cure for madness.
These itinerant musicians and masters of ecstatic ritual may well have been the prototype for the god Dionysus. As one scholar writes, the god in many ways resembles a certain kind of wandering musician in our own time, one who is also capable of inspiring “hysteria” in his devotees: the “male leader of the pop group, who for all the violence of music, gestures, and words is neither traditionally masculine nor yet effeminate. To the established order he may be a threat but not to the adoring young, especially the young women.”50 With his long hair, his hints of violence, and his promise of ecstasy, Dionysus was the first rock star.
2
Civilization and Backlash
Almost as soon as ecstatic rituals appear in the historical—that is, written—record, a note of ambivalence enters into the story, a suggestion of social tensions surrounding these rituals, and even violent hostility toward their participants. Euripides’ play The Bacchae, for example, both records these tensions and expresses what seems to be a tormented ambivalence on the part of the playwright. In the play, Pentheus, the king of Thebes, greets the god with derision and determines to suppress him by force. “Go at once to the Electran gate,” he commands his officers. “Tell all my men who bear shields, heavy or light, all who ride fast horses or twang the bowstring, to meet me there in readiness for an assault on the Bacchae [maenads]. This is past all bearing, if we are to let women so defy us.”1 At first the play seems to take the god’s side—mocking the uptight Pentheus and showing the community elders piously joining the maenads in their revelry. After all, if the beautiful young stranger is indeed a god, it is incumbent on good citizens to observe his rites. But things end badly for both sides: Pentheus is killed and dismembered by his own mother, who—in her god-given ecstasy—mistakes him for a lion.
The ambivalence and hostility found in ancient written records may tell us more about the conditions under which writing was invented than about any long-standing prior conflict over ecstatic rituals themselves. Writing arises with “civilization,” in particular, with the emergence of social stratification and the rise of elites. In fact, writing was probably invented, along with arithmetic, as a means of keeping track of the elite’s possessions: herds, stored grain, and slaves. From an elite perspective, there is one inherent problem with traditional festivities and ecstatic rituals, and that is their leveling effect, the way in which they dissolve rank and other forms of social difference. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to retain one’s regal dignity in the mad excitement of the dance. Masks and other forms of costuming may render participants equally anonymous or equally “special.” The deity may choose to possess—and speak through—a lowly shepherdess as readily as a queen.
We have some evidence—from a very different part of the ancient world—of the dampening effect of civilization and social hierarchy on traditional rituals. Recent carbon-14 dating of an archaeological site in Oaxaca suggests that the earliest residents, who were hunter-gatherers living about nine thousand years ago, met on a cleared “danc
e ground” for rituals that included the entire community. Later, with the rise of agriculture, rituals appear to have been enacted solely by initiates who were “social achievers,” or members of an elite, and most likely men. Finally, with the emergence of organized and militarized states two thousand years ago, the archaeologists deduce that “many important rituals were performed only by trained full-time priests using religious calendars and occupying temples built by corvée labor.” In the Oaxacan case, only a few thousand years appear to have elapsed between the archaic danced rituals of Paleolithic bands and their refinement into the formal rituals of the civilized state.2
The rise of social hierarchy, anthropologists agree, goes hand in hand with the rise of militarism and war, which are in their own way also usually hostile to the danced rituals of the archaic past. Possibly the first social elite consisted of men who specialized in fighting the men of other tribes or villages and who could thus impose a kind of “protection racket” on their fellow citizens: Feed us, or else we will leave you to the mercies of the thugs from neighboring settlements; do the planting and herding for us, or we will turn our weapons on you, our own clanspeople. Through raiding and more prolonged forms of warfare, this early elite would have further enriched itself, until we have the kind of state Dionysus threatened in The Bacchae—one ruled by a warrior-king.3
In ancient Israel, both militarism and concerns about the maintenance of hierarchy seem to have worked against the old ecstatic rituals. After Michal, King Saul’s daughter and the wife of King David, sees her husband perform his near-naked victory dance through the streets of Jerusalem, she “despises him in her heart” and greets him with sarcasm: “How glorious was the king of Israel today, who uncovered himself! … today in the eyes of the handmaids of his servants, as one of the vain fellows shamelessly uncovereth himself.” To dance—especially ecstatically—in the company or even the presence of one’s inferiors was to upset the increasingly rigid hierarchy of wealth and status.
But the most common explanation for the ancient Israelis’ hostility to group ecstatic rites is a military one. Harassed by the Philistines from the west, Egyptians from the south, and Hittites and others from the north, the Hebrews could ill afford to lose themselves in collective rapture—or so the reasoning goes. As Robert Graves put it:
It became clear that if Judaea, a small buffer state between Egypt and Assyria, was to keep its political independence, a stronger religious discipline must be inculcated, and the people trained to arms. Hitherto most Israelites had clung to the orgiastic Canaanite cult in which goddesses played the leading role, with demigods as their consorts. This, though admirably suited to peaceful times, could not steel the Jews to resist the invading armies of Egypt and Assyria.4
Their god Yahweh was the perfect disciplinarian—a war god known as Yahweh Sabaoth, Lord God of Hosts, with hosts referring to armies. The religious scholar Karen Armstrong also explains the Hebrews’ religious vacillations in terms of military pressures: “They remembered [their covenant with Yahweh] in times of war, when they needed Yahweh’s skilled military protection, but when times were easy they worshipped Baal, Anat and Asherah in the old way.”5
A concern for military preparedness seems also to have soured the Greek view of ecstatic rituals. In The Bacchae, Euripides posed a basic incompatibility between the warrior-king Pentheus and Dionysus, who is descibed as a “lover of peace.” Arthur Evans, in his book on Dionysus, argues that he is the antiwar god, citing among other things the fourth-century BCE Greek philosopher Diodorus’s praise of Dionysus for founding festivals “everywhere” and “in general resolv[ing] the conflicts of nations and states, and in place of domestic strife and war … la[ying] the grounds for concord and great peace.”6 Dionysus could be violent, but not in a warrior’s way. At their first encounter, Pentheus taunts Dionysus for his effeminacy: “Those long curls of yours show that you’re no wrestler.”
But the ancient Greek elite did not abandon the old ecstatic rituals; instead, they simply took them underground, where they could be indulged in out of sight of the hoi polloi. As early as the sixth century BCE, there emerges a strange new form of religious grouping in Greece: mystery cults, drawing on social elites, whose members gathered periodically for secret rites apparently aimed, above all, at engendering collective ecstasy. The secrets were well kept, leaving scholars to guess at what exactly went on at the cults’ gatherings. Surely there was dancing, since the ancients admitted this much, as well as wine drinking and possibly the ingestion of hallucinatory drugs, along with striking sound and light effects. “We hear of frenzied nocturnal dances, with crazed outcries, to the stirring accompaniment of shrill flutes, tympana, metal cymbals, castanets … ‘bull-roarers,’ and rattles,” Lawler reports. “We hear of snake-handling, of trances, of prophesying, even of self-mutilation.” 7
In his book Ancient Mystery Cults, Walter Burkert infers a sequence of activities not unlike that which anthropologists have observed in many “primitive” societies, in which new initiates to the cult are first isolated and deliberately terrified, then finally embraced by the whole group in dance.
The initiands, seated, are … smeared with a mixture of clay and chaff; from the dark the priestess appears like a frightening demon; clean again and rising to their feet, the initiates exclaim “I escaped from evil, I found the better,” and the bystanders yell in a high, shrieking voice (ololyge) as though in the presence of some divine agent. In the daytime there follows the integration of the initiates into the group of celebrants … people are crowned with fennel and white poplar; they dance and utter rhythmic cries … some brandishing live snakes.8
Because the participants were members of a literate elite, some subjective reports of the rituals’ effects have survived. Initiates described the experience as purifying, healing, and deeply reassuring; certainly it was transformative. “I came out of the mystery hall feeling like a stranger to myself,” said one participant of the mystery rites held at Eleusis in honor of the goddess Demeter.9 In fact, it is to this kind of experience that we owe the very word ecstasy, derived from Greek words meaning “to stand outside of oneself.”
Repression in Rome
Where the Greek elite had dithered—looking askance at the disorderly maenads while celebrating their own secret ecstatic rites—the Romans took a firm stand. In Roman culture, militarism triumphs over the old traditions of communal ecstasy; the god of war—here called Mars—finally vanquishes Dionysus, who, in his Roman form, has already been diminished to Bacchus, the fun-loving god of wine. It is in Rome that the Greek word orgeia, for ecstatic religious rites, takes on its modern connotations of grossness and excess, of too much food, drink, and sex promiscuously indulged in all at once, while the Greek word ekstasis itself often gets translated into Latin as superstitio.10
Even those elementary ingredients of ecstatic traditions—music and dance—were “alien,” as one historian of dance put it, to the “sober, realistically minded Roman, certainly by the time of the empire.”11 True, the Romans had their annual Saturnalia, which involved drinking, feasting, and a so-called ritual of inversion in which masters and slaves briefly exchanged roles. But apparently even more so than among the ancient Hebrews and Greeks, social inequality served both to inhibit the powerful and to make them distrustful of exuberant outbursts from below. Max Weber observed that “the nobles, who constituted a rational nobility of office of increasing range, and who possessed whole cities and provinces as client holdings of single families, completely rejected ecstasy, like the dance, as utterly unseemly and unworthy of a nobleman’s sense of honor.”12 So thorough was the official Roman condemnation of the dance that the Roman scholar Cornelius Nepos, writing in the time of Augustus, had to explain to his readers why a prominent Greek might indulge in such an unseemly activity: “Readers should not judge foreign customs by their own … We do not need to be told that, by Roman convention, music is unbecoming to a person of prominence, and dancing is thought to be positively vicious.
In Greece, on the other hand, these are held to be agreeable and laudable diversions.”13 Just as Roman architecture and statuary projected the implacable calm of absolute power, the individual Roman patrician sought, in his everyday demeanor, to impress observers with his personal authority. Public ecstasy of any kind was not a temptation, because it “involves the loss of that dignity that was so carefully projected by the honorific statues which enshrine so much of the civil elite’s behavioural ideal.”14
Certainly dancing occurred, at least indoors, within the wealthy Roman household, but it was regarded with ambivalence and usually relegated to professionals of dubious reputation. In 150 BCE we find the consul Scipio Aemilianus Africanus ordering that dancing schools for Roman children be closed.15 A couple of hundred years later there are references to women dancing for guests within their homes, though these women were likely to incur criticism if their dancing was thought to be too “professional,” meaning overly skillful or perhaps indecent.16 The satirist Juvenal, for example, saw in the dancing of highborn Roman women only a display of sexual lust, calculated to “warm the age-chilled balls” of elderly men.
Ah, what a vast mounting passion fills their spirits
To get themselves mounted! Such lustful yelps, such a copious
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