The Bacchae

an ongoing tragedy

Last summer, on Saturdays when I would drive an hour from our farm into the Detroit area to deliver vegetables for our CSA, about once or twice a month, I would catch some “No Kings” protestors on a corner just off the I-696 exit ramp in Oak Park. Two things struck me about the demographic of these protestors: 1) they were primarily women; 2) they were old—older than I am (I’m sixty-three). Quite a bit older than I am, definitely in their seventies, maybe even older. There were usually about fifteen or twenty of them. Of that number, fewer than three were men.

It struck me as odd.

The same thing has struck me in regard to the current “ICE Out” protests. The demographic skews very old, very female, and very white. Again, that just seems odd to me.

Rather than undertaking a laborious internet search, I decided to ask Grok, an AI that aggregates available information, to answer the question, “What is the average demographic of ICE protestors?” Here is what Grok had to say:

Age: Participants often skew older than in many other recent protest movements (e.g., compared to 2020 racial justice protests, which were younger and more diverse). Reports describe crowds as predominantly middle-aged to senior (e.g., many in their 50s–70s+), with median ages for some events or organizers around 60–67 in related anti-Trump actions. Younger people (under 30) appear underrepresented in some accounts, though students and youth do participate in others. This aligns with observations of “older women” and retirees being front and center in resistance efforts.

Gender: Frequently described as majority or heavily female, with women (especially older women) prominent as organizers and attendees.

Race/Ethnicity: Often predominantly white in many reported crowds, particularly in certain locations or events (e.g., some accounts note 90%+ white participants, with skews toward older white individuals). However, this varies significantly by city—protests in high-immigrant areas like Los Angeles draw more Latino and foreign-born participants due to local demographics (e.g., over 35% foreign-born in LA fueling turnout). Immigrant rights advocates, Latino communities, and people of color are central in affected areas, though some observers note people of color may feel less safe attending visible protests. Overall, crowds are multi-ethnic in diverse urban settings but less so in others.

Again, this all seems just very weird to me.

Another thing that really seems weird to me is the Greek tragedy, The Bacchae by Euripides. But I think it offers a key to the psychological (okay, magical) operations we see before us.

In the play, a new god has arrived in Thebes, Dionysus, god of wine and the vine. His cult is popular with women, particularly mothers and older women with grown children. These women, the maenads, in their possession by the god commit all manner of preternatural and often violent acts (taken from Paul Woodruff’s fine translation from Hackett Publishing):

“They attacked our livestock as they were grazing on new grass. No sharp weapons, but you’d have seen one woman tear apart of young cow with her bare hands—it was bellowing, its udder was swollen with milk. Others ripped cows to pieces. You’d see ribs and feet hurled every which way, hooves flying, pieces hanging in the pine trees, smeared with blood and dripping. Bulls in all their pride stumbled headlong: They once had rage tossing on their long horns; now more hands than you can count pull them down—young girls’ hands. And strip off the flesh that covered them, quicker than a king could wink one eye.”

The madness of the Bacchic frenzy even extends to human populations, as the women, “on a rampage, tore the town to shreds, stole children from the houses, put booty on their shoulders.” The village men are useless to resist:

“The men could not draw blood with their javelins, but the women hurled the thyrsus and injured them so badly they turned tail and ran—women over men! Only a god could make that happen.”

“Only a god could make that happen” is the operative phrase here.

While I have no way of discerning to what level women over men participate in violence, that the protests are often violent is unquestionable. In at least one incident, a protestor (I don’t know of it was a man or a woman) is reported to have bitten off the end of an ICE officer’s finger. I would suggest that such violence is likely due to some kind of mania or even demonic possession. Only a god could make that happen.

I’m trying to put my finger on just what the problem might be…

Men do participate in the new cult in The Bacchae, but older men, past their prime, even the blind seer Tiresias. The old codgers adopt a “go along to get along” ethos. As the blind man concedes, “The god won’t care who’s young, who’s old: we all must dance, because he wants honor from all of us, together.” Most men in the play are too old (or too weak) to resist the energy of the god (what we might call the zeitgeist).

The play’s one young man, King Pentheus, is the only one calling out the madness he sees before him—in which even his mother, Agavé, participates. He’s actually the hero of the play, but he ends up dead, torn apart and beheaded at the hands of the maenads (and his mother) in the midst of a frenzy after Dionysus enchants him and dresses him in women’s clothing (which certainly tracks with a sizable subset of the protestors in Minneapolis). In a real stroke of genius, Euripides frames the play in such a manner that we, the audience, initially dislike Pentheus, brilliantly showing how all of us can find ourselves caught up in the novelty and erotic energy of the cult. Those who resist the new religion will be called enemies of the state and destroyed. It’s an old story.

As many of you will know, I am very interested in the way what we have come to know as propaganda and mass formation are actually modern outgrowths of much older techniques of magic going back centuries if not millennia. And I am more than certain that very bad actors behind the scenes are intentionally deploying these techniques in pursuit of destruction and chaos. Anarchy is power to dark forces. Social order and hierarchy are of no use to demons.

But why women? Why is their role so significant in this social contagion?

First of all, as implied in The Bacchae, women have a unique psychic ability to draw down what some have called “astral forces” and secure the magical chain that harnesses them to their bodies and then the body politic. And when these women contribute their psychic energy in a group, the magical operation is even more successful. In addition, there’s a reason most psychic mediums throughout history have been women; it is a matter of physiology. The spiritual-biological reality is that women are designed by nature to be open to the arrival of spiritual-biological beings and that makes them likewise open to reception of astral beings. The sacramental degree to which so many women uphold abortion only adds a deeper dimension to the occult significance of this ongoing magical operation aimed primarily at women.

The nineteenth-century French occultist and magician Éliphas Lévi describes this phenomenon precisely in his book The Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic, here in a new translation by John Michael Greer and Mark Anthony Miktuk:

“Every enthusiasm propagated in society due to a series of communications and predetermined practices produces a magical current that is also conserved or augmented by that current. The effect of the current is to enchant and often overly stimulate impressionable and weak persons, excitable constitutions, and temperaments disposed to hysteria or hallucinations. These persons soon become powerful vehicles for magical power and strongly project the astral light in the same direction as the current; thus to oppose oneself to manifestations of power is in a way to fight against destiny.”

Writing in the 1850s, Lévi connects this phenomenon to the spiritualist movement then gaining popularity in the United States and elsewhere.

To extrapolate: what we see in Minneapolis and elsewhere is precisely this kind of magical operation. Unbeknownst to them, the post-menopausal women at the center of this movement, like the witches’ covens of old (but without the directed attention) have brought down this spiritual energy of chaos, which then attracts others into the magical chain. You can see this with the Antifa types who moved in, like moths attracted to a lightbulb, once this energy was released. I would wager that nearly everyone involved is a trauma “survivor” (scare quotes included because they haven’t really survived—they’re still acting it out): “impressionable and weak persons,” people with “excitable constitutions, and temperaments disposed to hysteria or hallucinations.” What happened over Covid with lockdowns—and the ongoing onslaught of psychological operations that have followed in its wake—only exacerbated an already seething spiritual affliction. Hell has literally been unleashed.

Antifa “General” Kyle. It’s textbook.

In The Bacchae, Pentheus tries to talk sense to his elders—his mother Agavé, grandfather Cadmus, and blind Tiresias—but, enchanted by the god, they ignore him, even ridicule him. That’s the thing with magical operations of this magnitude: no amount of reason can break the spell. In fact, those who even raise the question of the madness of the moment, who provide ample evidence, and who refuse to participate in the ritual of propitiation run the risk of the maddened Bacchae turning their rage upon them. But the Bacchae, though doing the god’s will, do not escape his vengeance and they are all turned to beasts.

The reason for Dionysus’s vengeance is because his cult was denied by the Thebans (it is the way with cults) and he infects the women with borrowed power as a punishment:

“That is why I have stung these women into madness, goaded them outdoors, made them live in the mountain, struck out of their wits, forced to wear my cult’s panoply. All the females, all the women of Thebes—I sent them crazy from their homes. Even the king’s daughters are running wild with them under fir trees, or seated on rocks in the open. This city must fully learn its lesson, like it or not, since it is not initiated in my religion.”

Magical operations don’t care if there are casualties, even among the Bacchae.