The Greeks and the Irrational
Page 18
What is the meaning of this recoil, this doubt? Is it the hesitation before the jump, or the beginning of a panic flight? I do not know. On such a matter a simple professor of Greek is in no position to offer an opinion. But he can do one thing. He can remind his readers that once before a civilised people rode to this jump—rode to it and refused it. And he can beg them to examine all the circumstances of that refusal.
Was it the horse that refused, or the rider? That is really the crucial question. Personally, I believe it was the horse—in other words, those irrational elements in human nature which govern without our knowledge so much of our behaviour and so much of what we think is our thinking. And if I am right about this, I can see in it grounds for hope. As these chapters have, I trust, shown, the men who created the first European rationalism were never—until the Hellenistic Age—"mere" rationalists: that is to say, they were deeply and imaginatively aware of the power, the wonder, and the peril of the Irrational. But they could describe what went on below the threshold of consciousness only in mythological or symbolic language; they had no instrument for understanding it, still less for controlling it; and in the Hellenistic Age too many of them made the fatal mistake of thinking they could ignore it. Modern man, on the other hand, is beginning to acquire such an instrument. It is still very far from perfect, nor is it always skilfully handled; in many fields, including that of history,108 its possibilities and its limitations have still to be tested. Yet it seems to offer the hope that if we use it wisely we shall eventually understand our horse better; that, understanding him better, we shall be able by better training to overcome his fears; and that through the overcoming of fear horse and rider will one day take that decisive jump, and take it successfully.
NOTES TO CHAPTER VIII
Appendix I
Maenadism
"In Art, as well as in poetry, the representation of these wild states of enthusiasm was apparently due to the imagination alone, for in prose literature we have very little evidence, in historic times, of women actually holding revels1 in the open air. Such a practice would have been alien to the spirit of seclusion which pervaded the life of womankind in Greece. . . . The festivals of the Thyiads were mainly confined to Parnassus." Thus Sandys in the introduction to his justly admired edition of the Bacchae. Diodorus, on the other hand, tells us (4.3) that "in many Greek states congregations of women assemble every second year, and the unmarried girls are allowed to carry the thyrsus and share the transports of the elders ." And since Sandys's day inscriptional evidence from various parts of the Greek world has confirmed Diodorus' statement. We know now that such biennial festivals existed at Thebes, Opus, Melos, Pergamum, Priene, Rhodes; and they are attested for Alea in Arcadia by Pausanias, for Mitylene by Aelian, for Crete by Firmicus Maternus.2 Their character may have varied a good deal from place to place, but we can hardly doubt that they normally included women's op7ta of the ecstatic or quasi-ecstatic type described by Diodorus, and that these often, if not always, involved nocturnal or mountain dancing. This strange rite, described in the Bacchae and practised by women's societies at the Delphic down to Plutarch's time, was certainly practised elsewhere also: at Miletus the priestess of Dionysus still "led the women to the mountain" in late Hellenistic times;3 at Erythrae the title points to an on Mount Mimas.4 Dionysus himself is (Festus, p. 182), (Tryph. 370), (Anth. Pal. 9.524); and Strabo in discussing Dionysiac and other related mystery-cults speaks quite generally of (10.3.23). The oldest literary allusion is in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, 386:
These pages originally formed part of an article published in the Harvard Theological Review, Vol. 33 (1940). They are reprinted here with a few corrections and additions. I am indebted to Professor A. D. Nock, Dr. Rudolf Pfeiffer, and others for valuable criticisms.
1 For numbered notes to Appendix I see pages 278-280 below.
The took place at night in midwinter, and must have involved great discomfort and some risk: Pausanias5 says that at Delphi the women went to the very summit of Parnassus (which is over 8,000 feet high), and Plutarch6 describes an occasion, apparently in his own lifetime, when they were cut off by a snowstorm and a rescue party had to be sent out—when they returned, their clothes were frozen as stiff as boards. What was the object of this practice? Many people dance to make their crops grow, by sympathetic magic. But such dances elsewhere are annual like the crops, not biennial like the their season is spring, not midwinter; and their scene is the cornland, not the barren mountaintops. Late Greek writers thought of the dances at Delphi as commemorative: they dance, says Diodorus (4.3), "in imitation of the maenads who are said to have been associated with the god in the old days." Probably he is right, as regards his own time; but ritual is usually older than the myth by which people explain it, and has deeper psychological roots. There must have been a time when the maenads or thyiads or really became for a few hours or days what their name implies—wild women whose human personality has been temporarily replaced by another. Whether this might still be so in Euripides' day we have no sure means of knowing; a Delphic tradition recorded by Plutarch7 suggests that the rite sometimes produced a true disturbance of personality as late as the fourth century, but the evidence is very slender, nor is the nature of the change at all clear. There are, however, parallel phenomena in other cultures which may help us to understand the of the Bacchae and the punishment of Agave.
In many societies, perhaps in all societies, there are people for whom, as Mr. Aldous Huxley puts it, "ritual dances provide a religious experience that seems more satisfying and convincing than any other. ... It is with their muscles that they most easily obtain knowledge of the divine."8 Mr. Huxley thinks that Christianity made a mistake when it allowed the dance to become completely secularised,9 since, in the words of a Mohammedan sage, "he that knows the Power of the Dance dwells in God." But the Power of the Dance is a dangerous power. Like other forms of self-surrender, it is easier to begin than to stop. In the extraordinary dancing madness which periodically invaded Europe from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, people danced until they dropped—like the dancer at Bacchae 136 or the dancer on a Berlin vase, no. 247110—and lay unconscious, trodden underfoot by their fellows.11 Also the thing is highly infectious. As Pentheus observes at Bacchae 778, it spreads like wildfire. The will to dance takes possession of people without the consent of the conscious mind: e.g., at Liege in 1374, after certain possessed folk had come dancing half-naked into the town with garlands on their heads, dancing in the name of St. John, we are told that "many persons seemingly sound in mind and body were suddenly possessed by the devils and joined the dancers"; these persons left house and home, like the Theban women in the play; even young girls cut themselves off from their family and friends and wandered away with the dancers.12 Against a similar mania in seventeenth-century Italy "neither youth nor age," it is said, "afforded any protection; so that even old men of ninety threw aside their crutches at the sound of the tarantella, and as if some magic potion, restorative of youth and vigour, flowed through their veins, they joined the most extravagant dancers."13 The Cadmus-Teiresias scene of the Bacchae was thus, it would appear, frequently reenacted, justifying the poet's remark (206 ff.) that Dionysus imposes no age limit. Even sceptics were sometimes, like Agave, infected with the mania against their will, and contrary to their professed belief.14 In Alsace it was held in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that the dancing madness could be imposed on a victim by cursing him with it.15 In some cases the compulsive obsession reappeared at regular intervals, growing in intensity until St. John's or St. Vitus' day, when an outbreak occurred and was followed by a return to normality;16 while in Italy the periodic "cure" of afflicted patients by music and ecstatic dancing seems to have developed into an annual festival.17
This last fact suggests the way in which in Greece the ritual oreibasia at a fixed date may originally have developed out of spontaneous attacks of mass hysteria. By canalising such hysteria in an organised rite once in two years, the Dionysi
ac cult kept it within bounds and gave it a relatively harmless outlet. What the of the Bacchae depicts is hysteria subdued to the service of religion; what happened on Mount Cithaeron was hysteria in the raw, the dangerous Bacchism18 which descends as a punishment on the too respectable and sweeps them away against their will. Dionysus is present in both: like St. John or St. Vitus, he is the cause of madness and the liberator from madness, and We must keep this ambivalence in mind if we are rightly to understand the play. To resist Dionysus is to repress the elemental in one's own nature; the punishment is the sudden complete collapse of the inward dykes when the elemental breaks through perforce and civilisation vanishes.
There are, further, certain resemblances in points of detail between the orgiastic religion of the Bacchae and orgiastic religion elsewhere, which are worth noticing because they tend to establish that the "maenad" is a real, not a conventional figure, and one that has existed under different names at widely different times and places. The first concerns the flutes and tympana or kettledrums which accompany the maenad dance in the Bacchae and on Greek vases.20 To the Greeks these were the "orgiastic" instruments par excellence:21 they were used in all the great dancing cults, those of the Asiatic Cybele and the Cretan Rhea as well as that of Dionysus. They could cause madness, and in homoeopathic doses they could also cure it.22 And 2,000 years later, in the year 1518, when the crazy dancers of St. Vitus were dancing through Alsace, a similar music—the music of drum and pipe—was used again for the same ambiguous purpose, to provoke the madness and to cure it: we still have the minute of the Strassburg Town Council on the subject.23 That is certainly not tradition, probably not coincidence: it looks like the rediscovery of a real causal connection, of which to-day only the War Office and the Salvation Army retain some faint awareness.
A second point is the carriage of the head in Dionysiac ecstasy. This is repeatedly stressed in the Bacchae: 150, "flinging his long hair to the sky"; 241, "I will stop you tossing back your hair"; 930, "tossing my head forwards and backwards like a bacchanal"; similarly elsewhere the possessed Cassandra "flings her golden locks when there blows from God the compelling wind of second-sight" (I.A. 758). The same trait appears in Aristophanes, Lysist. 1312, and is constant, though less vividly described, in later writers: the maenads still "toss their heads" in Catullus, in Ovid, in Tacitus.24 And we see this back-flung head and upturned throat in ancient works of art, e.g., the gems figured by Sandys, pages 58 and 73, or the maenad on the bas-relief in the British Museum (Marbles II, pl. xiii, Sandys, p. 85).25 But the gesture is not simply a convention of Greek poetry and art; at all times and everywhere it characterizes this particular type of religious hysteria. I take three independent modern descriptions: "the continual jerking their heads back, causing their long black hair to twist about, added much to their savage appearance";26 "their long hair was tossed about by the rapid to-and-fro movements of the head";27 "the head was tossed from side to side or thrown far back above a swollen and bulging throat."28 The first phrase is from a missionary's account of a cannibal dance in British Columbia which led up to the tearing asunder and eating of a human body; the second describes a sacral dance of goat-eaters in Morocco; the third is from a clinical description of possessive hysteria by a French doctor.
Nor is this the only analogy which links these scattered types. The ecstatic dancers in Euripides "carried fire on their heads and it did not burn them" (757).29 So does the ecstatic dancer elsewhere. In British Columbia he dances with glowing coals held in his hands, plays with them recklessly, and even puts them in his mouth;30 so he does in South Africa;31 and so also in Sumatra.32 In Siam33 and in Siberia34 he claims to be invulnerable so long as the god remains within him—just as the dancers on Cithaeron were invulnerable (Ba. 761). And our European doctors have found an explanation or half-explanation in their hospitals; during his attacks the hysterical patient is often in fact analgesic—all sensitiveness to pain is repressed.35
An interesting account of the use, both spontaneous and curative. of ecstatic dancing and ecstatic music (trumpet, drum, and fife) in Abyssinia at the beginning of the nineteenth century is to be found in The Life and Adventures of Nathaniel Pearce, written by himself during a Residence in Abyssinia from the years 1810 to 1819, I.290 ff. It has several points in common with Euripides' description. At the culminating moment of the dance the patient "made a start with such swiftness that the fastest runner could not come up with her [cf. Bacch. 748, 1090], and when at a distance of about 200 yards she dropped on a sudden as if shot" (cf. Bacch. 136 and n. 11 below). Pearce's native wife, who caught the mania, danced and jumped "more like a deer than a human being" (cf. Bacch. 866 ff., 166 ff.). Again, "I have seen them in these fits dance with a bruly, or bottle of maize, upon their heads without spilling the liquor, or letting the bottle fall, although they have put themselves into the most extravagant postures" (cf. Bacch. 775 f., Nonnus, 45.294 ff.).
The whole description of the maenads' raid on the Theban villages (Bacch. 748-764) corresponds to the known behaviour of comparable groups elsewhere. Among many peoples persons in abnormal states, whether natural or induced, are privileged to plunder the community: to interfere with their acts would be dangerous, since they are for the time being in contact with the supernatural. Thus in Liberia the novices who are undergoing initiation in the forest are licensed to raid and plunder neighbouring villages, carrying off everything they want; so also the members of secret societies in Senegal, the Bismarck Archipelago, etc., during the period when their rites have set them apart from the community.36 This state of affairs belongs no doubt to a stage of social organisation which fifth-century Greece had long outgrown; but legend or ritual may have preserved the memory of it, and Euripides may have encountered the actuality in Macedonia. An attenuated ritual survival is perhaps to be seen even to-day in the behaviour of the Viza mummers: "in general," says Dawkins, "anything lying about may be seized as a pledge to be redeemed, and the Koritzia [girls] especially carry off babies with this object."37 Are these girls the direct descendants of the baby-stealing maenads of Bacch. 754 (who appear also in Nonnus and on vases)?38
Another obviously primitive element is the snake-handling (Bacch. 101 ff., 698, 768). Euripides has not understood it, although he knows that Dionysus can appear as a snake (1017 f.). It is shown on vases, and after Euripides it becomes part of the conventional literary portrait of the maenad;39 but it would seem that only in the more primitive cult of Sabazius,40 and perhaps in Macedonian Bacchism,41 was the living snake, as vehicle of the god, actually handled in ritual in classical times.42 That such handling, even without any underlying belief in the snake's divinity, may be a powerful factor in producing religious excitement is shown by a curious recent account,43 with photographs, of the rattlesnake ritual practised in the Holiness Church in remote mining villages in Leslie and Perry counties, Kentucky. According to this report the snake-handling (which is ostensibly based on Mark 16:18, "They shall take up serpents") forms part of a religious service, and is preceded and accompanied by ecstatic dancing and followed by exhaustion. The snakes are taken from boxes and passed from hand to hand (apparently by both sexes); photographs show them held high above the worshipper's head (cf. Demos. de cor. 259 or close to the face. "One man thrust one inside his shirt and caught it as it wriggled out before it could fall to the floor"—an oddly exact parallel to the ritual act of the Sabaziasts described by Clement and Arnobius,44 and one which may lead us to hesitate before agreeing with Dieterich45 that the act in question "can signify absolutely nothing else than the sexual union of the god with the initiate"!
It remains to say something of the culminating act of the Dionysiac winter dance, which was also the culminating act of the Columbian and Moroccan dances mentioned above—the tearing to pieces, and swallowing raw, of an animal body, and The gloating descriptions of this act in certain Christian Fathers may well be discounted, and it is hard to know how much weight to attach to the anonymous evidence of scholiasts and lexicographers on the
subject;46 but that it still had some place in the Greek orgiastic ritual in classical times is attested not only by the respectable authority of Plutarch,47 but by the regulations of the Dionysiac cult at Miletus in 276 B.c.,48 where we read The phrase has puzzled scholars. I do not think that it means "to throw a sacrificial animal into a pit" (Wiegand, ad loc.) or "to throw a joint of beef into a sacred place" (Haussoulier, R.E.G. 32.266). A bloodier but more convincing picture is suggested by Ernest Thesiger's account of an annual rite which he witnessed in Tangier in 1907:49 "A hill-tribe descends upon the town in a state of semi-starvation and drugged delirium. After the usual beating of tom-toms, screaming of the pipes and monotonous dancing, a sheep is thrown into the middle of the square, upon which all the devotees come to life and tear the animal limb from limb and eat it raw." The writer adds a story that "one year a Tangier Moor, who was watching the proceedings, got infected with the general frenzy of the crowd and threw his baby into the middle of them." Whether the last is true or not, the passage gives a clue to the meaning of also illustrates the possible dangers of unregulated The administration at Miletus was engaged in the ever-recurrent task of putting Dionysus in a strait waistcoat.