Dionysian Dance

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Dionysian Dance

Ecstatic Dance.

Dance and song were a part of every religious festival, but in some, dance was an instrument with which the dancer could achieve a closer communion with divinity by entering into a state of rapture. The violent whirls and leaps of the dance brought the dancer into a state of ecstasy. The goddess Cybele, known as the Great Mother, whose cult center was in Phrygia in western Asia Minor, was attended by eunuch priests called Corybantes, devotees of the goddess who castrated themselves with flint knives after dancing to the accompaniment of cymbals and castanets until they attained a state of utter rapture. Among the twelve Olympian gods and goddesses of Greece, the nearest counterpart of Cybele was Demeter, who presided over the fertility of the earth, and the dances performed in her honor were generally full of lively movements. In the ancient festival of the Thesmophoria, which the women of Athens held over a period of three days, one dance that was performed was the oklasma. During the oklasma a dancer crouched down, with her knees on the earth, and then swiftly leaped up as high as she could from her crouching position, trying to reach the perfect image of the god to achieve rapture. It was the god of wine, Dionysus, who presided over the ecstatic dances that are best known. Dionysus was accompanied by a thiasos—a company that parades through the streets singing and dancing—and the thiasos of Dionysus was made up of maenads (frenzied women) and satyrs. Dionysus and his thiasos were frequent subjects for Athenian vase painters working in the black-figure and red-figure techniques.

Defining the Maenads.

The maenads were female devotees of Dionysus who went up into the mountains and there engaged in a frenzied, ecstatic dance in honor of the god of wine. Sometimes they caught wild animals and tore them limb from limb with their bare hands and ate the animals' raw flesh. The myth of Dionysus relates that he was born in Thebes, the chief city in Boeotia, the region of Greece northwest of the city-state of Athens. His father was Zeus and his mother was Semele, daughter of King Cadmus of Thebes, who was destroyed by Hera's jealous hatred. Once Dionysus was fully grown, he made a campaign into India that lasted two years and then returned in triumph to introduce his new religion. For historians of religion, there is much about the Dionysiac cult that is hard to understand. Dionysus was a latecomer to Greek religion, as the myths about him seem to suggest, for he was not originally one of the Twelve Olympian Gods, and when he was added to the list, he displaced Hestia, the goddess of the hearth. He was worshipped in the Mycenaean period, for his name appears on the Linear B tablets found in the so-called "Palace of Nestor" at Pylos, which was destroyed in 1200 b.c.e. Apparently dance was an important part of his cult. On Keos a prehistoric temple has been found, which was erected in the fifteenth century b.c.e., and continued in use for a thousand years. In it were the remains of twenty terracotta statues, all of them women, shown with their breasts bared and their hands resting on their hips, resembling Dionysian dancers. An inscription on a votive offering found in the excavation and dating to early classical times identifies Dionysus as the lord of this sanctuary. The terracotta dancers indicate that dance was an important part of the rites practiced in reverence to Dionysus, and scholars have suggested that these dancers were also priestesses of the cult of Dionysus.

Maenads in the Classical World.

Diodorus of Sicily, a Greek historian who wrote in the mid-first century b.c.e., noted that in Boeotia and other parts of Greece, as well as in Thrace, which stretched into modern Bulgaria and Romania, sacrifices were held every second year in Dionysus' honor to commemorate his triumphal return from India. Consequently, in many Greek cities, every other year, bands of women gathered for rites that honored Dionysus. Diodorus called these bands of women baccheia and the rites they performed orgia ("frenzied dances"). These women of the baccheia included not only unmarried girls but also respected married women. The baccheia danced to the music of the tambourine and the reed pipe known as the aulos, and as they danced they flung their heads back and raised the cry "euhoi" that sounded like "ev-hi." Evidence from literature and from temple inscriptions show that biennial festivals of this sort took place in a number of cities, such as Delphi, Thebes—which claimed to be Dionysus' birthplace—Rhodes, and Pergamum, as well as Mytilene on the island of Lesbos. As part of the festival, which always took place in midwinter, women would climb a nearby mountain and there, during the night, they would dance an oreibasia—a dance or procession in the mountains. The rite involved real hardship and sometimes danger. Plutarch, a writer in the second century c.e., reported that at Delphi, for instance, a group of women were cut off by a snowstorm at the top of Mt. Parnassus and a rescue party had to be sent out to bring them down the slopes.

The Evidence of Euripides' Bacchae.

The most graphic description that exists of the maenads comes from Euripides' play, the Bacchae or the Bacchants, as the title is sometimes translated. It was written at the end of Euripides' life, while he spent the years 408–406 b.c.e. in Macedon, and the play was not produced in Athens until after his death. The plot tells how Dionysus returned to his birthplace, Thebes, and there his new religion encountered resistance as it did at a number of places in Greece. Dionysus brought with him a thiasos of maenads from Phrygia in Asia Minor, who formed the chorus of the play, and they danced into the theater orchestra to the music of the aulos and the tambourine. The Dionysiac rite is taking hold of the city. Pentheus, king of Thebes, who had been away, arrives back home to find maenads dancing on Mt. Cithaeron, and in the middle of each group, a wine bowl added to the general intoxication. Pentheus' own mother Agavé has joined the maenads. Pentheus vows to put an end to this madness. A herdsman arrives to describe the wild dance of the maenads that he and his fellow herdsmen have witnessed on the slopes of Mt. Cithaeron. Pentheus is persuaded by a stranger who is the god Dionysus in disguise to go to see the maenads himself, and when the maenads discover him, they tear him to pieces. In the final scene, Pentheus' mother Agavé enters, frenzied and blood-stained, bearing Pentheus' head, which she imagines is a lion's cub. She has killed her own son in her madness, and as her mind clears, she is overcome with horror. Dionysus has brought tragedy on the royal house of Thebes.

THE ECSTASY OF THE MAENADS

introduction: According to Diodorus of Sicily, an historian who wrote a Universal History in Greek in the reign of the emperor Augustus (27 b.c.e.–14 c.e.), the god Dionysus made an expedition to India and after two years, he returned with a great deal of booty, and he was, so the story goes, the first Greek to celebrate a triumph seated on an elephant. To commemorate his return, the Greeks who lived in the region of Boeotia, where Dionysus was born, and other Greeks as well, made sacrifices to him every second year, and in some of the Greek cities, both married and unmarried women would go up into the mountainsides and act the role of maenads, women who were Dionysus' companions. We see them in Greek art, dancing rapturous dances and carrying the thyrsos: a wand wreathed with ivy and vine-leaves and with a pine cone on top. The classic description of the madness of the maenads is found in Euripides' Bacchae, which tells the myth of how Dionysus returned to Thebes in Boeotia where he was born and the mother of the king Pentheus and her sisters joined his throng of maenads. Pentheus, however, resisted the new cult, and when a herdsman pasturing his cattle on the mountainside brought him a report of how the maenads, including his own mother, Agavé, were dancing madly on Mt. Cithaeron, he determined to go and see them himself. They discover him and tear him apart, and in the final scene, Agavé comes on stage bearing the bloody head of her son whom she and her sisters, Autonoe and Ino, had torn apart, thinking he was a lion's cub. The excerpt quoted below is from the speech of the messenger who reports the madness of the maenads to Pentheus.

Our herds of pasturing cattle had just begun to ascend the steep to the ridge, at the hour when the sun shoots forth his rays to warm the earth. I saw three bands of women dancers; Autonoe was leader of the first choir, your mother Agavé of the second, and Ino of the third. They all lay in the sleep of exhaustion. Some were reclining with their backs against branches of fir, others had flung themselves at random on the ground on leaves of oak. …

Then your mother rose up in the midst of the bacchants and called upon them to bestir their limbs from sleep when she heard the lowing of the horned cattle. The women then cast the heavy sleep from their eyes and sprang upright, a sight of wondrous comeliness. There were young women and old women and maids yet unmarried. First they let their hair fly loose about their shoulders and tucked up their fawnskins, those whose fastenings had become unloosed, and girt the speckled skins about them with serpents that licked their cheek. Others held gazelles in their arms, or the untamed whelps of wolves, feeding them with white milk. These were young mothers who had left their infants behind and still had their breasts swollen with milk. Then they put on ivy wreaths and crowns of oak and flowering morning glory. One took her thyrsus and struck it against a rock, and there sprang from it a liquid stream of water. Another struck her thyrsus upon the ground and the god sent up a fountain of wine for her. Those that had a desire for snowy milk scraped the earth with the tips of their fingers, and had rich store of milk. From the wands of ivy there dripped sweet streams of honey. If you had been there to see, you would have approached with prayers the god whom you now revile. …

[The herdsman then told how he and his comrades tried to capture the maenads, and then found themselves in danger.]

We fled and escaped a rending at the bacchants' hands. But, with naked, unarmed, hands, the women attacked the heifers that were grazing on the grass. You could see one holding wide the legs of a well-fed calf which bellowed and bellowed. Others rent heifers apart. You could see the ribs and cloven hooves tossed here and there, and pieces smeared with gore hanging from the firs, dripping blood.

source: Euripides, The Bacchants, in Ten Plays by Euripides. Trans. Moses Hadas and John McLean (New York: Bantam Books, 1981): 296–297.

The Dance of the Maenads in Historical Times.

Euripides' Bacchae has haunted the study of the maenads' dance, and the speech of the herdsman that describes it is a classic account. It appears, however, that in most places where the biennial festival of Dionysus was celebrated, the rites of the maenads were not spontaneous explosions of dancing. They cannot be compared with the outbursts of dancing madness that affected communities in Europe from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, when people danced until they dropped. Nor was it the same as the tarantella, the whirling dance for couples from south Italy, danced to six/eight time, which was thought to be a cure for a nervous disorder known as tarantism. Rather the orgia seem to have been carefully regulated, and they were restricted to certain groups. The women who danced in the orgia played the role of maenads briefly and then returned to their everyday existence, which for many of them must have been humdrum. The maenads' dance in Euripides' Bacchae, culminating in the tearing apart of a victim, is mad and primitive, and Dionysus is a ruthless god, but to judge from the number of representations in Greek art it was a dance that haunted the Greek imagination.