The Dionysian Wild: The Bacchae

What might be the first installment in a short series

Maenad postcard, early 20th century

Euripides’s The Bacchae is a strange and disturbing Greek tragedy that is not unlike the eerily gory and erotic horror cinema of the Hammer franchise popular from the late-1950s through the early-1970s. Eros, thanatos—it’s got the whole package! It’s also chock-full of psychological and political import, not only for ancient Greece, but for the contemporary West as well.

The plot revolves around the arrival of a new god and his cult in Thebes and the social upheaval this creates. Women flock to the new cult and participate in its rites—what seem to be mostly improvised “ceremonies” (they are hardly formalized)—that include a frenzied loss of self-control and abandonment of all social decorum (Dionysus is, after all, the god of wine). The women—called maenads or bacchantes—are immersed (I’m using the passive voice intentionally here) in the primal energies of life and death, as a witness to their mysteries reports in the play:[1]

“I saw mothers who’d abandoned babies;
their breasts gorged with milk, they held
wolf cubs in their arms, or young 
gazelles, and were suckling them. 
Now they all put garlands on their heads,
Flowering myrtle and oak leaves.
Now one, with her thyrsus, strikes
a rock: living water fountains up.
Another drives her wand into the ground:
the god jets up a spring of wine.
If they wanted milk to drink,
they scratched at the earth with the nails
and milk streamed for them, and pure honey 
spurted from the tips of their wands.”

But this is not a story of fertility and nourishment only: it’s also a story of violence.

“They swooped down on our grazing
cattle: bare-handed, they attacked.
Watch: a bellowing heifer, udders
gorged—a woman picks it bodily up,
and tears it limb from limb.
Watch now: full-grown cows,
dismembered. Ribs,
hooves, flying this way, that way,
catching on pine boughs,
hanging there, dribbling gore.
Even bulls, all power and arrogance,
rage rising in their horns:
soft, young hands wrestle them
to the earth and flail them, faster
than your royal eyes could blink. . .
. . . . . They tear children
from their houses, and whatever they put
on their backs stays there, 
without straps, even bronze and iron…”

So like that.

Jane Harrison, in her classic text Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903—it’s an oldie but goodie), argues that the cult of Dionysus, whom she calls “an immigrant god,” arrived in Greece from Thrace where viticulture first began to thrive and from which its cultivation and cultus spread. For Harrison, the success of this cult was due to the dissipation of the power of antecedent cults:

“Just when Apollo, Artemis, Athene, nay even Zeus himself, were losing touch with life and reality, fading and dying of their own luminous perfection, there came into Greece a new religious impulse, an impulse really religious, the mysticism that is embodied for us in the two names Dionysus and Orpheus.”[2]

What we have in The Bacchae, then, is the story a religious culture in need of renewal, having grown fat and lazy through quotidian and perfunctory observance. Literally: Enter Dionysus. This new religion drums up lots of excitement and enthusiasm—think the Protestant-banger-to-Orthobro pipeline or the legions of Jordan Peterson devotees going FULL METAL MYTHOLOGY—and you can get the drift.

Curiously, in Euripides’s play it is the older generations who first take up an enthusiasm for the new religion. The retired King Cadmus and the blind seer Tiresias (who doesn’t see all that much in the play), for example, are all in on the worship of Dionysus and deck themselves out with ivy garlands on their bald heads and thyrsi in their wrinkled hands. On the other hand, the main obstacle to this new-fangled religion is the young king and grandson of Cadmus, Pentheus—and by “young” I mean not even twenty. This is counterintuitive, is it not, the old welcoming innovation in religion and culture and the young resisting innovation and holding to the old ways? Yet, The Bacchae is nothing if not a play about transgression.

Now, “transgression” is a word that gets bandied about quite a bit in our day and age, and nowhere more obviously than in the “LOOK HOW EDGY I AM!” school of attention-seeking for which the internet, alas, seems to have been created. In The Bacchae transgression abounds, from the social normativity abandoned by the maenads to the inversion of age stereotypes represented by Cadmus/Tiresias and Pentheus. But it also appears in transgressions of gender.

In The Bacchae, one instance of this transgression (fashionable to the point of boredom at our own cultural moment) is given in the report of the messenger, who tells that, after the maenads have wreaked havoc on cattle and stolen children, the menfolk get up in arms—and quite literally. But the maenads with their thyrsi deflect the spears of the men and turn the tables on them:

“The men throw their spears, and draw 
no blood; the women, though, let loose
their wands, and wound the men and 
the men run!... Women defeating men!
Certainly a god was in it.”

That’s right: Euripides invented the girl boss archetype.

More importantly, the dramaturgy of the play hinges on the transgression of gender in the way Dionysus enchants Pentheus into wearing women’s clothing (in the false promise of that being a good disguise for spying on the maenads). Of course, modern productions of the play no doubt emphasize this transgression as emblematic of some social good. That is not at all what the play is saying. In the play, the transgressions of Pentheus (in cross-dressing) and the maenads (in all that they do) is meant to humiliate the Thebans for ignoring and dismissing the cult of Dionysus. As the god (pretending he is not the god) admits in the play regarding his treatment of Pentheus:

“He’s in the net now, women. He’ll get to see 
his Bacchae. He’ll get what he deserves…to die. 
Dionysus, you are near now; your task, too, 
is near: your revenge, our vengeance. 
Make him insane. Give him ecstasy and madness. 
In his right mind, he’d never wear that woman’s dress, 
but driven from his senses, he’ll slide right into it.
I want him to be the laughing stock of Thebes,
led through the streets, costumed as a woman,
after all the bragging that made him seem so fearsome.
I’ll go in now. I’ll put him in his dress:
he’ll take it to Hades with him
when his mother slaughters him.”

Which is precisely what she does. Dionysus is not a god of mercy.

What Dionysus is, though, according to the Hungarian mythologist Carl Kerényi, is an “archetypal image of indestructible life,” the subtitle of his book Dionysos. That is to say that the denial of zöe, the Life behind life (bios), is to open oneself to ridicule because it is to deny the very structure of the Cosmos. To deny the very structure of the Cosmos, then, is to invite a perverted understanding of the Cosmos and, importantly, oneself. And such transgression can only be called a kind of mania. But here’s the thing: the humiliated, in their transgressive intoxication, do not even know they are being humiliated.

Not only does the madness afflict Pentheus in causing him to wear women’s clothing—he was not, to appropriate a phrase, “born this way”—but it also afflicts his mother, Agave, who tears her own child to pieces with her bare hands, a disturbing act of taboo:

“Agave was foaming at her mouth, though.
Her eyes were rolling, wild; she was mad,
utterly possessed by Bacchus: what Pentheus said 
was nothing to her. She took him by the arm,
the left arm, under the elbow, then she planted
a foot against the ribs and tore the arm off.
Not by herself: it was the power of the god
that put so much force into her hands.”

Surely an image of late-term abortion.

The Bacchae is without a doubt a disturbing play and the perspective I offer here is but one of myriads of interpretations the tragedy is able to disclose. But the issue of Life (zöe) is, I claim, central to the play. For to deny zöe is to invite madness because to deny zöe is to deny truth. To deny truth is to deny reality. To deny reality is to deny the structure of the Cosmos. And to deny the structure of the Cosmos is, by definition, to be mad. And to deny Life is to embrace death. As Kerényi so elegantly writes, “Zöe seldom if ever has contours, but it does contrast sharply with thanatos. What resounds surely and clearly in zöe is ‘non-death.’ It is something that does not even let death approach it.”[3]

In The Bacchae the problem with those who cannot recognize zöe is that they are unholy. The unholy can’t see. Not even their own humiliation. This is a spiritual truth of the psyche.

I don’t know where this came from, but it looks cool as all get out.

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[1] Here and elsewhere quoted from C. K. Williams’s powerful translation. See ‘The Bacchae’ of Euripides by C. K. Williams (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990).

[2] Jane Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903; reprt., New York: Meridian Books, 1955), 363-64.

[3] Carl Kerényi, Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton: Bollingen, 1976), xxxiv.