#maenadism

[mesonoxian-maxx]

Clash of Crowns episode 1 with @tex-xl 👑x

[jeannereames]

when they talk about things like Dionysian orgies in Ancient Greece, did they mean like… literal orgies? like sex parties? were those a thing in the ancient world and why? is it true that Alexander would participate in those types of things? (i ask with no judgment btw, i’m just genuinely curious. i hope this isn’t a stupid question)

Dionysiac Orgies….

…one of the weirder inventions of both ancient Roman and early modern Christian imagination, with a little help from ancient Greek fancy.

First, what the Greeks showed on pottery was not necessarily what they were DOING. It might represent what they’d like to do, but not necessarily even that. And when divine figures and nature spirits (such as satyrs) got involved, well, the realm of the gods didn’t run by the same rules as normal human life.

So, for instance, Zeus was married to his sister (Hera, and arguably Demeter before that). Greeks were hardly inclined to permit brother-sister marriage because Zeus and Hera did it. Ergo, we must recognize that the Greeks did not model human behavior on divine behavior.

Second, a Dionysiac thiasos (see above) was not an orgy. It was “exstasis” or ecstatic experience (an expression of zoë) where one was enveloped by divine mania. And while this mania could be good or bad, it wasn’t inherently sexual. Note that in Euripides’s Bakkhai, the maenads (Dionysos’s female worshipers) go out onto the mountain to dance in crazed fashion as punishment.

THAT ISN’T MEANT TO BE NORMAL.

They refused to recognize the god. So, he sent them mad (mania).

And sex wasn’t a part of it at all.

The play is called Bakkhai after Dionysos’s epithet, Bakkhaios, the Dark God. But Dionysos had dozens and dozens of epithets. That’s just one.

Some Dionysiac worship in ancient Greece was gender segregated, but public festivals weren’t, such as Greater and Rural Dionysias, or Anthesterias, etc. At these, the whole community would be present. And if Greater Dionysias at least had giant penis floats (I’m not joking, see below), they were not orgies. They were spring fertility festivals. It was at the Greater Dionysia in Athens that new plays for that year would be presented.

That said, some Dionysiac worship, including the Mysteries, were gender segregated. Women worshiped apart from men. That doesn’t mean they acted crazy while doing it. We have epigraphic evidence from (mostly) Hellenistic periods and later suggesting a great deal of regulation surrounding one’s role as a maenad—with threat of fines for misbehavior.

It certainly wasn’t about women running half-nude on mountainsides fucking anything that moved. 😉 That said, the entire point of Dionysiac worship was to take one out of one’s self for a while. It seems that many of these rites occurred in large worship halls with guarded doors (to keep men/others away). Although there is also evidence of worship outside in groves sacred to Dionysos, it still wasn’t a mixed crowd.

Also—of interest—according to our evidence, women did NOT drink at these. They danced themselves into ecstasy. (Men did drink.)* Women may well have used snakes (at least in Epiros and Macedon), but snakes occupied a curious place in Greek thought. Zeus Ktesios was the “house snake” meant to guard the larder. And temples to Asklepios, god of medicine, often had snakes (and dogs) present to assist with patient healings. Snakes wrap the medical caduces. To have a snake “lick” one’s face or ears was a GOOD thing, indicating the favor of the god, and among oracles, a snake might be the voice of the god. So snakes aren’t auto-bad, for Greeks.

Furthermore, nobody was eating meat raw at these Dionysiac festivals. There would have been an animal sacrifice, but any raw pieces were tossed into a special bowl before an altar for Dionysos. The women (or men) didn’t eat it.

Again, we can’t confuse MYTH with reality and actual worship.

Does this mean sex was never involved? Look at all those penises in Dionysiac worship!

Probably there was sexual activity, but it, too, was ritualized. Take the yearly Anthesteria festival. On the second day (Choës), the Basileus (king) of Athens (or of any Ionian city of Asia Minor) would be carried through the streets in a special “boat” float, meant to symbolize the coming of Dionysos to Naxos, where he’d find (and marry) Ariadne. By the historical era, the “king” was a magistrate office chosen by lot, not an actual king; his job was purely religious. Recall that kings had a role as priests, which separated them from later Greek tyrants.

Anyway, the king-as-Dionysos was taken into the Bouleuterion (the Athenian congress) in the agora or marketplace, where he underwent marriage to the basileia as Ariadne…who was his wife (already). This may be an echo of the ANE Sacred Marriage rite where the king and priestess played the roles of god and goddess (albeit for different deities). It could even date back into the Mycenaean period; we’re unsure, except that it’s very, very old. We’re also not sure they had sex, but probably so. Still, notice how the myth has been made proper via actors who are, in fact, already married (and could be in their 50s or 60s). It’s symbolic. Also, in Greek art of Dionysos and Ariadne, even if their nature spirit attendants are going crazy, the GOD never is. In fact, he's rarely even shown with an erection, as per below, from the Derveni Krater. It's his wedding night, but he's pretty languid as Ariadne removes her wedding veil. (I'd argue that's what the krater is about: good/divine marriage wrapping around to complete lack of control: bad mania.)

So where did this notion of orgies arise?

Romans.

Dionysos entered Italy via the Greek cities of S. Italy, and also via Etruria (as Fufluns). He reached Rome in the middle Hellenistic period, with the Bacchanalia, which they no longer seem to have celebrated gender segregated, either through deliberate choice or via misunderstanding.

The Romans had a horror of people off doing unregulated things. Oh, no! “Secrets” (like Mysteries) were therefore a problem. Romans didn’t like Greek morals (or institutions), even if they liked their art. Romans also liked to make up shit about their enemies. So between Greek pottery of Dionysiac thiasoi involving satyrs and maenads (e.g., not real worship but myth—more from the Derveni Krater below), and mixed-gender worship in Italy, the Roman Senate had a bit of a freak-out in 186 BCE, and tried to put Bacchanalia under senate control. I’m no Romanist, nor do I have time to chase down all the details from papers I wrote in grad school, so I won’t try. Find Balsdon, Romans and Aliens. Also MacMullen, Enemies of the Roman Order. As I recall, both discuss Bacchants, astrologers, Christians, and other (Eastern) groups/beliefs that Proper Romans looked down on (and feared).

The upshot is that Bacchic orgies are a Roman moral fiction. They may have had some basis in Roman attempts to appropriate Greek Things Done Badly, but don’t reflect Greek practice.

Early Christianity added another layer of demonic sinfulness, as Dionysiac Mysteries were one of Christianity’s great rivals. That moral fiction, combined with artwork and imagination, was picked up post-Renaissance to create new fantasies where men and women got wildly drunk and fucked like bunnies in a romanticized countryside. Or in a more sinister twist, got wildly drunk, tore apart poor innocent animals which they ate raw, then fucked like bunnies. Modern authors such as Donna Tartt in her The Secret History, pull on the same legends for modern Bacchanalias with wine, sex, murder, and mayhem. (I enjoyed the novel, but it’s not based on real ancient Greek Dionysiac Mysteries so much as on mid-century Gothic.)

Anyway, all that muddled mess is very far from actual Dionysiac worship in ancient Greece, even the “wild” Macedonian version.

So no, Alexander would not have been engaging in wine-soaked sex-parties.

At the end of Dancing with the Lion: Becoming, I wrote an initiation scene to the Mysteries of Dionysos, based on what I know of that, Orphaic cult, and mystery cults generally. It was fun to do but, as I always note, if informed by history, it’s fiction. Nonetheless, sex is nowhere in it. 😊

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*Throughout Greece, “nice” women didn’t drink wine, or not without the wine being heavily watered (1/4 or less wine to water). Drinking was only for hetairai and other prostitutes, as wine was strongly associated with the symposion, or drinking party, where proper women were not to show their faces—but prostitutes regularly did. Now, whether this ideal was anything close to the actual, your guess is as good as mine. I suspect that then, as now, some women were “good little girls,” while others thought, “Screw that, I need a drink!”

[thegrapeandthefig]

Maenadism, Artemis and Dionysus

(Warning: Very long. Sorry.)

This is a topic that has been requested by @aimee-maroux and prompted by this quote by Richard Seaford in "Tragedy, Ritual and Money in Ancient Greece: Selected Essays":

"Maenads leave home where they resist men, become like animals, and perform sacrifice. Hence the frequent association of Artemis with Dionysos. [...] They go rather to reject the men of their own household and polis. Accordingly, the Dionysiac thiasos contains married as well as unmarried women, whose departure disrupts the household in different ways. [...] In the Bacchae, the Theban maenads are compared to fillies that have LEFT the yoke."

There is actually a lot that can be said about this short 5-sentence quote. So much so that we will be focusing on two main points: First, we will address what Seaford refers to when he says "Hence the frequent association of Artemis with Dionysos." and then, I will comment briefly comment on the distinction between literary and cultic maenadism.

Dionysus and Artemis are mythologically and ritually connected, for they share an important common theme: wilderness. The term alone is muli-faceted. It can refer to the wildness of nature, animals and vegetation alike, or it can refer to the wilderness of spirit. Both deities know how to play with the duality of the concept. Because of their respective nature, neither were expected to be predictable. On a symbolic level, there is an union and contrast between the god of vegetal fertility and Artemis' link to virginity.

The city of Patras and human sacrifice

Pausanias tells us of the tale of how the city of Patras came to be freed from performing human sacrifice to Artemis Triklaria. According to him, the ancient custom of human sacrifice itself was a punishment from the goddess in response to the actions of one of her priestesses. The priestess, Comaetho, had made love with her lover in the sanctuary of the goddess. Insulted, Artemis sent pestilence upon the city. The Pythia is then consulted to figure out how to appease Artemis, and she tells them to ritually sacrifice Camaetho and her lover to the goddess and that this sacrifice must be repeated annually with the fairest maiden and young man as victims. A prophecy indicated that the sacrifices would cease when a foreign king  would bring with him a strange god. And so, it happened: when Troy was captured and the king Eurypylos recieved as war bounty a chest containing a statue of Dionysus crafted by Hephaestus himself. A statue so powerful that it would drive mad anyone who looked at it, and so it drove Eurpylos mad.

Trying to understand the source of his madness, he consults the Pythia as well, who proceeds to tell him that he will come across a city that performs strange sacrifices, and that this is where he should set down the chest and make his home. And indeed, the winds carried his ship to land in Patras. Upon landing, he comes across the couple that was to being carried to the altar that year and he understood the meaning of the oracle. The people of Patras, also recognizing the events of the prophecy, adopted the cult of of Dionysus (under the title of Aesymnetes) and stopped considered themselves fred from their bloody obligation to Artemis. As for Eurypylos, his madness faded away.

Still according to Pausanias, the cult of Dionysus Aesymnetes and Artemis Triklaria included that a procession of children led by a priest who would go down at night to the Meilichos River wearing wreaths made of ears of corn (not maize, corn as in some type of cereal). The children first wear this wreath of grain, a reminder of the wreath worn by the ancient sacrifical victims, and once they have bathed in the river, they change to wear a wreath of ivy and go to the temple of Dionysus Aesymnetes. This ritual thus symbolizes the city's the liberation from Artemis' punishement.

This ritual has been interpreted in various ways and we unfortunately probably don't know enough about the rest of the festival(s?) to pinpoint the exact meaning of the cult. It does seem that the rites to Artemis Trikalia and Dionysus Aesymnetes were not held simultaneously. We also know that by the second century AD the cult of Artemis Triklaria in Patras was no more. However, what is interesting to keep from this is that Dionysus and Artemis seemed to have been considered as sharing enough common features to be substituted for one another.

There seems to have been other Greek cities where the cult of Artemis and Dionysus where somehow closely linked and suggestions have been made (eg. Dionysus' absence in Sparta might be explained by the fact that Artemis held similar cultic functions), but the evidence is too sparse to make serious claims.

Other notable links

Now that we've seen the biggest chunk, I'll quickly go through some smaller elements:

In the Odyssey, Artemis kills Ariadne "Dionusou marturiêisin" (on the denunciation of Dionysus), which some have interpreted as “on Dionysus' indictment.” If this interpretation is correct, it would highlight Dionysus' and Artemis' role as destructive deities.  

The use of masks during the Spartan Ortheia

They are the only Olympians to ever have the epithet "polynumia" (of many names)

A common ability for natural madness.

Maenadism in the Bacchae vs. in cult So, we now have commented one (1) sentence of the original quote. Let's move on to the main topic, that is, maenadism. It's very important to point out what exactly Seaford is commenting on here: he is not making claims based on cultic reality. Rather, he is commenting on maenadism as portrayed in the Bacchae and, by extension, maenadism in the collective imagination of the Athenians.

The reason I'm bringing this up and making the clarification right away is because maenadism has been very discussed and debated, especially when asking the question of "does the Bacchae, and Greek art in general, portray a faithful image of a maenadic ritual?". The general consensus since Henrichs articulated his thoughts about it in the 70s leans more towards the no, in the case of Athens. Maenadic rites were for the most part organized celebrations to which only restricted groups could participate. They more likely belonged to the elite of society.

While the maenads in the Bacchae do reject the men of their households, the sources we have rather seem to indicate that women had to gain their husband's consent to participate in the ritual (as Plutarch tells us with the women of Amphissa). Of course nuance is needed also when handling those sources, which might have also tried to convey the idea that men were still in charge afterall, but it is also not impossible that men considered those rites as a necessity to please Dionysus. What is sure however, is that Greek women who participated in maenadic rites must have greatly enjoyed those short escapes from reality.

Sources: Pausanias, Description of Greece, 7. 19. 1 - 20. 1 (exerpt available on theoi.com) Bremmer J.N., Greek Maenadism Reconsidered, in; Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, Bd. 55, 1984 Henrichs, A., Greek Maenadism from Olympias to Messalina, in: Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 82, 121, 1978 Hughes D., Human Sacrifice in Ancient Greece, Routledge, 1991 Rangos, S., Cults of Artemis in Ancient Greece (Doctoral thesis), University of Cambridge, 1996

[mesonoxian-maxx]

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