Ripping Off Limbs, Dancing Maenads and Evergreen Ivy - The God Dionysos and His Sacred Band12/29/2011 I grew up in a place where everything was overgrown. The fences around houses stooped under the burden of vegetation. This is the essence of Dionysos and this is what makes him so powerful: he embodies unrestrained nature, growing freely, reaching all places; nature fertile and untamed. The Greeks worshipped Dionysos, among others things, as a tree god (Plutarch Moralia 675). He is also the god of all vegetation, including fruits and flowers, and most importantly, the vine. He is everything that is abundant and overflowing. "The unrestrained joys of nature", however, says Richard Seaford in his book Dionysos (Routledge, 2006), "are an urban vision. For most people in ancient societies life was a struggle to control nature" (p. 15). So Dionysos is an ambivalent deity (one of his cult epithets is dimorphos, 'dual-formed'). He is associated with the seasons, the unruliness and vitality of unchecked growth, the cyclical rebirth of green vegetation, but also with the danger present in all of this. Wine, Dionysos' gift to humankind, is a mixed blessing. It promotes social bonding but can be destructive if drunk undiluted or in excess. At the same time, resisting Dionysos is not a good idea. When the god comes (and he is a god very much given to appearing suddenly), you'd better join him in his revels voluntarily. In the myth of the daughters of Minyas, they refuse to do this, choosing to remain in the house instead of dancing with the god in the meadows as his maenads. They decide to go on with their weaving: "[...] the girls worked on, Scorning the god, dishonouring his feast, When suddenly the crash of unseen drums Clamoured, and fifes and jingling brass Resounded, and the air was sweet with scents Of myrrh and saffron, and - beyond belief! - The weaving all turned green, the hanging cloth Grew leaves of ivy, part became a vine, What had been threads formed tendrils, from the warp Broad leaves unfurled, bunches of grapes were seen, Matching the purple with their coloured sheen." (from the Metamorphoses by Ovid, trans. by A. D. Melville, Oxford World's Classics, 2008, p. 86) Dionysos makes his presence felt. Nature finds its way into a man-made construct, the oikos, twirling tendrils of ivy and vine around it. Authors differ as to what the women's punishment is. Ovid says the house gets shaken by an earthquake and the lamps that are knocked over by it set the house on fire, while the women turn into bats. In another version, the women are frightened by the epiphany of the god, and by casting lots decide whose son should be torn into pieces (the lot falls to Leukippe's son). After the deed is done, they join the maenads in the mountains and are turned into birds by Hermes (Antonius Liberalis). Rather a hotchpotch version of the myth, but it preserves the human sacrifice element. Tearing someone's son into pieces also features (and is described in harrowing detail) in Euripides' Bacchae. In that case, however, the mother, Agaue, is driven mad by Dionysos and doesn't recognise her son, Pentheus, the king of Thebes: "His mother was first to attack him, initiating as priestess the bloody rite. He threw the headband from his hair, so that the wretched Agaue might recognize him and stay her murderous hands. Touching her cheek, he spoke these words: 'Mother, it is I, your son, Pentheus, whom you bore in the house of Echion! O Mother, pity me, and do not kill your son because of my offences!' But Agaue, foaming at the mouth and rolling distorted eyes, her senses gone, was in the grip of Bacchus and deaf to his entreaties. She grabbed his left arm below the elbow, set her foot against the doomed man's ribs and tore out the shoulder, not by strength but by ease of hand that was the gift of the god. Ino worked away at the other side, tearing at his flesh, while Autonoe and the whole horde of Bacchants pressed home their attack. All was one confused shout - he screaming with the little breath he had left, the women yelling in triumph. One of them was carrying an arm, another a foot, still covered by its sandal; his ribs were stripped bare by the clawing nails, and every woman had blood on her hands, as she tossed Pentheus' flesh in sport like a ball." (from the Bacchae by Euripides, trans. by John Davie, in: The Bacchae and Other Plays, Penguin Classics, 2005, pp. 156-157) We have the same scene here as with Minyas's daughters: three women dismembering a hapless young man (a son). There is a difference, though: the Minyades refuse to worship the god, and the fate of Leukippe's son is rather unfair, while in the case of Agaue and Pentheus, it is Pentheus who mocks the god, not his mother. But the bottom line is that both of them are punished anyway: the mother destroys her own son. The core myth gets interpreted in different ways, but the main characters (3 women, 1 young man) and the main action (dismemberment of said young man by the women) remains the same. Dionysos might only serve as a plot device here, and as we have seen, can be easily replaced by Hermes. Women seem to be the powerful ones here: they are at the beginning of life (Pentheus reminds Agaue of her giving birth to him), they also stand at the end of it (rather brutally). The Fates are women too and three in number. For this reason, I do not believe this myth was originally associated with Dionysus. In another myth Dionysos gets dismembered himself, so that may have been the link. Seaford connects this with Dionysiac mystic rituals: "Dionysiac mystic initiation is projected in the experiences of Pentheus in Bacchae. One of his experiences is to be dismembered, and have his dismembered body reconstituted by his mother. Dismemberment is not uncommon in initiation rituals of various cultures, as an imagined ordeal of the initiand. But one would expect it to be followed by restoration to wholeness and life. Pentheus is restored by his mother to wholeness, but - being a mortal - cannot be restored to life. Dionysos, on the other hand, after being dismembered by the Titans, is restored (in one version by his mother: Diodorus 3.62.6) to life as well as to wholeness" (p. 72). (Actually, the piecing together of Pentheus' limbs is only alluded to in the extant text of the Bacchae. Agaue, after regaining her senses and realising what she has done, asks her father, who has collected Pentheus' remains: "Is it all decently arranged, limb to limb?" But there is no answer. Richard Rutherford thinks at least twenty lines are missing here, The Bacchae and Other Plays, p. 310). I would personally much rather think of Dionysos as the god that makes ivy appear on houses and grapes grow on the loom. I think of this as the deeper, older layer, the original concept of who Dionysos is. Dionysos is sometimes represented as an older man with a beard and sometimes as a beardless, young man. He is very much prone to changing into animals or changing others into animals. He doesn't seem to have one fixed form. What he has, though, is a group of followers, his thiasos or 'sacred band'. It is composed of satyrs and maenads (or Bacchants). The maenads carry a thyrsos, a staff in the form of a giant fennel topped with a pine cone and sometimes covered in ivy. The thyrsos is a sacred instrument, a fertility symbol, uniting the forest (pine) and the farm (fennel). The main activity of the maenads is dancing, while the satyrs have pipes to make music. On some vase paintings the maenads use the thyrsos to fend off the satyrs, but these tend to be humorous scenes. The satyrs are half-human and half-animal, the maenads are ordinary women in Dionysiac frenzy, Dionysus is a god of vegetation, always dying and renewing, and at the end of the day, surviving everything (symbolised by the evergreen ivy). In this carnival of all sorts, we can find flora and fauna, humans and a divinity. The shapeshifting tendencies of Dionysos make it obvious that the god somehow unites all creation in one huge, ever-changing whirl of dancing and ecstasy. It celebrates nature teeming with life and all the forms this life can take: Dionysos himself likes changing into a bull, a lion or panther, he is associated with wine, ivy, pine, fennel, honey and milk; his retinue is composed of wild creatures of the forest and he drives women (themselves symbolizing fertility and life) crazy and compels them to join him in this dance. "One aspect of the development of humankind", writes Seaford, "has been (uneven) progression towards the alienation of individuals from nature and from each other. The ancient Greeks, who in their earliest recorded history were experiencing this progression in a rapid form, were thereby left with a sense of loss, of absence. [...] [T]he absence and presence of the transcendent power that unites us with nature and with each other is projected onto an imagined person, Dionysos. [...] In particular, he retains an association with plants and animals. [...] Besides transforming himself and mortals into various animals, he is identified with the embodiment in nature of our transformability, the plant that dissolves the boundaries of the individual mind, the vine. Dionysiac ecstasy, whether or not sustained by wine, dissolves the identity of the individual so as to enhance the sense of belonging to a group, in particular to the thiasos, the cohesive sacred band - probably of prehistoric origin - that imagines itself to be the companions of the god" (pp. 144-5). At the Anthesteria festival in Athens (the opening and drinking of new wine), everybody celebrated together: free men, slaves and children. Dionysos is the god of group cohesion, facilitated - or not - by wine drinking, and his thiasos composed of the whole spectrum of life on earth symbolizes man's longing to be one with nature and one with others. Dionysos dissolves boundaries - between nature and culture, animal and human, human and god, human and human, male and female (when represented as a young man, he is quite effeminate). The dissolution of boundaries between human and human was emphasized in the Anthesteria, in the mingling of free men and slaves, but it is not difficult to imagine a prehistoric "sacred band" of hunters, who have to work together and feel they are one in order to be successful. They can't have a big argument and go their separate ways. I can see the thiasos growing out of the mystic-religious aspect of "teamwork", the sacredness of social cohesion. When the shared experience of the dangers of the hunt create communality, this is when Dionysos appears out of nowhere and unites the group as his sacred retinue. Here, the dismemberment of Dionysos can be interpreted as that of the group: the threat of disintegration, the loss of the divine, cohesive presence. (The myths retain this aspect of Dionysiac worship; however, in the Dionysiac mystery-cult developed later in antiquity, Dionysos is seen as dissolving the boundaries of the human soul, thereby liberating the individual rather than the group.) As I mentioned at the beginning, Dionysos is a god of contradictions. He is benign and also cruel; his rapture culminates in sparagmos ("tearing apart") and the dancers collapse exhausted to the ground when the god leaves them. Jean Shinoda Bolen, a Jungian analyst, describes Dionysiac frenzy and its aftermath in her book Gods in Everyman (HarperCollins, 1990): "Something Dionysian can happen at rock concerts, especially when the star suddenly appears on stage, and the audience goes mad. There is the frenzy, the drugs, the dancing, and on faces in the audience, expressions of ecstasy and rapture. Occasionally, as at the Rolling Stones concert in Altamont, there is also violence and terror. I like the idea that there is a god who embodies these extreme experiences. I like Dionysos' freedom to run wild with ecstasy and then sometimes just to feel empty and guilty. He is the god of the moment, so he is completely overwhelmed by each state of mind. Dionysos is definitely the god to stir you up from ordinary banal living. Jean Shinoda Bolen chose the following quote for the chapter on Dionysos in her book: "To affirm the Dionysian is to recognize and appreciate the place of pain and death in life, and to tolerate the full range from death to life and from pain to ecstasy, including the wounding in which one is 'delivered' from the flat ennui of numbing conformity to cultural and familial expectations" (Tom Moore, in James Hillman, ed., Puer Papers, quoted in Gods in Everyman, p. 251).
2 Comments
(m)
3/8/2013 03:04:38 pm
The miracles of sprouting ivy are oft overlooked. (My favorite instance is from the Homeric Hymn recounting the abduction by pirates when he turns into a lion;)
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(m)
3/8/2013 03:18:46 pm
Your point about Dionysus as the dissolver of boundaries is quite astute (an attribute represented in the Christian mythology by the "crux" or cross). Literally he is the "limen" or doorway between worlds.
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AuthorHave studied A219 Exploring the Classical World and A275 Reading Classical Greek at the Open University. Currently studying for a Psychology degree. ImagesPlease click on any image to be taken to its source.
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