Follow-up of the loose translation/recap of the article I began covering here.
Voluptuousness and cruelty
In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche associates those two words to define “Dionysism”. Indeed, they are the two faces of drunkenness, and thus the two aspects of the magic of the god. While he is able to create flows of milk, honey and wine for the prosperity of mankind, Dionysos can also cause disaster-and-misfortune-inducing metamorphosis. The daughters of Minyas, that refused to leave their husbands to follow Bacchus, are terrified when milk and wine starts pouring from the ceiling above them.
The women that follow Dionysos become Maenads or Bacchants: under the influence of the “mania” (the divine possession) they become invulnerable, with an enormous strength, and they are plunged in a murderous delirium that forces them to rip into pieces the young beasts they just breastfed – sometimes they even kill their own children. The Bacchic “orgia” (rite, ritual) happens in three steps. First the oribasia, the disheveled race of the women through the mountain ; then the disparagmos, the sacrifice by ripping apart. This is the part of the ritual that is illustrated by Euripides’ Bacchants (405 BCE), with the murder of Pentheus by his mother Agave. “Foaming at the mouth, with rolling eyes, having lost her mind, possessed by Bacchus […] she took with both hands his left arm and, pushing with her foot against the flank of the unfortunate one, she disarticulated and ripped away the shoulder, not just with her sole strength, but with the power the god offered her.” The third time of the ritual is the omophagia, the devouring of the raw, barely dead, meat that was just lacerated.
The Dionysian cult introduces a ritual cruelty. In Arcadia, women are flagellated. In Boeotia, women are chased by the priest of Dionysos, who is armed with a sword ; and as a substitute to a human victim, a young veal wearing cothurnus and symbolizing a child is killed for the god. Through the “mania”, Dionysos imposes upon his followers the cruelty of which he was a victim: he was chased by Lycurgus, he was ripped apart and devoured by the Titans. From this arises the voluptuousness that is tied to the cruelty of the Bacchants, as they can, by satisfying their darkest instincts, life again the suffering of the god that possesses them.
Between life and death: contradictions
The ambiguity of the Dionysian intoxication, bringing joy and fury, life and death, is reflected in the animals that follow the god. On one side, animals of fecundity, such as the goat, the donkey, the bull. On the other side, ferocious and murderous beasts, such as the lion, the lynx or the panther. This contradiction is a symbol of what Nietzsche calls the “deadly-silent clatter”, the Dithyrambes of Dionysos. This god, nicknamed Bromios (the roaring one) is followed by a parade of loud music made by tambourines, flutes and cymbals, loud music that makes the Maenads dance to the point of convulsions. But, the god can also suddenly impose a strong silence, where even the Maenads stay immobile and frozen, as if petrified.
Even the origins of the god are placed in this contradiction, since his birth mixes life and death. Which is probably why the dead have such an important place in both his cult and myth. Horace tells of how Dionysos went into the Underworld to fetch back his mother. In Aristophane’s parody The Frogs (405 BCE), he goes in the realm of Hades to bring back Euripides. The third day of the Anthesteria, is dedicated to the dead, who are supposed to come back to haunt the living. The affinities of Dionysos with dead will even allow Heraclite to identify Dionysos to Hades, saying they both were the “Plouton”, the “giver of riches”. The various versions of Dionysos’ romance with Ariadne also prove this oscillation between life and death: sometimes Dionysos is the one that consoles and comforts Ariadne after Theseus abandonment, other times (such as in Homer’s Odyssey) he is rather a jealous lover who sends death to Ariadne through Artemis. The many contradictions of the Dionysism, and especially its unstoppable cruelty, made it very difficult to locate it within a political system, and it explains as such its subversive role in Greek society.
Disturbing the social and political order
If Dionysos is presented as a foreign god, it is because such an exoticism translates the strangeness of a god with no fixed place, of a cult that disdains temples to rather have a mobile and open worship. The “thiasis”, the very basis of the Dionysian religion, is found outside of all the social norms, since this group gathers without recognizing any distinction between men and women, poor and rich, citizens and slaves. On another hand, Dionysos is composed of a feminine strength and a subversive power that makes the effeminate god a champion of the “dark” or “nocturnal side”, as a counterpart to the diurnal, ordered and masculine power of Apollo. This god, that drags women away from their loom to hunt them down the mountains, can only break down the familial order – and thus, by extension, weaken the political order. The paroxysm of this disturbance is reached within The Bacchants, where the social, then political, dislocation of Thebes is crowned by the destruction of the palace, the very symbol of the royal power.
But even beyond all this, it is the very human values that are disturbed by Dionysos’ very existence: he is a god born from a mortal woman, a deity that stays close to humans and that allows them to be assimilated to him. Unlike the cult of all the other Greek gods, the Dionysian religion destroys the frontier between humanity and divinity.
As such, the cult of Dionysos had a cathartic role in Ancient Greece: it set mankind free (at least for a time) from his civic past and duties, as well as from his cruel desires and instincts. Imported in Rome, the “orgia” degenerated into a licentious feast and will soon be forbidden. Rome will rather honor Bacchus through art, by highlighting his role as a god of wine, and as the joyful musician of the bacchanals, which will be a loved subject of the European classical painting. It is this “weakened” or “watered-down” version of Dionysism that will survive in European culture until the end of the 19th century, when the philosophers and the poets will rediscover the true roots of the god.
