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Ecstasy and Possession: The Attraction of Women to the Cult of Dionysus

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2011

Ross S. Kraemer
Ross S. Kraemer
Affiliation:
Stockton State College, Pomona, NJ 08240
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Extract

Among the cults of classical antiquity, the worship of the Greek god Dionysus is one of the most intriguing, ranging in form from rural agricultural festivals in Greece and Asia Minor to complex mystery rites established throughout the Roman Empire. While various aspects of Dionysiac religion have received detailed scholarly treatment, existing studies have paid surprisingly little attention to the extent to which women appear to predominate in the cult as it may be reconstructed from the available sources. The frequent references to the involvement of women in the mythographers and historiographers have usually been explained away in modern scholarship by unsubstantiated appeals to the “emotional” needs of women, and by the association with fertility themes and fertility magic which are considered more appropriate to women than to men.

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 72 , Issue 1-2 , April 1979 , pp. 55 - 80
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1979

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References

1 The best cataloguing of Dionysiac references is still that of Farnell, L., The Culls of the Greek States (1908; reprinted ed., Chicago: Aegean, 1971) 5Google Scholar. 281–301. References to Dionysus and his worship occur as early as Homer, Hesiod and the Homeric Hymns, while his rites are described by writers well into the imperial Roman period. Among the major literary sources for the cults of Dionysus are Euripides’ drama Bacchae, selections from the writings of Plutarch, Diodorus Siculus, Pausanius, ApoUodorus, the Roman historian Livy and Nonnus, whose rambling Dionysiaca occupies three full volumes of the LCL series. There are extant significant inscriptions for the cults of Dionysus, as well as a rich iconography (Philippart, H., “Iconographie des Bacchantes d'Euripide,” Revue Beige de Philologie el d'Histoire 9 [1930] 5–72Google Scholar). Representations of Dionysus and his worship range from the almost ubiquitous red-figure Attic vase paintings, to sarcophagi bas-reliefs (Erling, Olsen, Dionysiac Sarcophagi in Baltimore [New York: New York University, 1942Google Scholar]) to Roman wall paintings. The total range of evidence for the multiform worship of Dionysus in its evolution from ancient Greece to imperial Rome is considerable and can only be alluded to in a paper of such relatively narrow focus as this.

2 For general studies of Dionysus, see Otto, W. F., Dionysus, Myth and Cult (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University, 1965Google Scholar); Slater, Philip, The Glory of Hera: Greek Mythology and the Greek Family (Boston: Beacon, 1968Google Scholar); Jeanmaire, Henri, Dionysos, Histoire du Culte de Bacchus (Paris: Payot, 1951Google Scholar); Nilsson, M. P., The Dionysiac Mysteries of the Hellenistic and Roman Age (Lund: Gleerup, 1957Google Scholar); Nilsson, M. P., Geschichte der Griechischen Religion (Munich: Beck, 1941–1950Google Scholar); Deubner, Ludwig, Attische Feste (Betiin: Keller, 1932Google Scholar); on the Attic Dionysiac festivals: Farnell, Cults, 5; and Kerenyi, C., Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructable Life (Bollingen 65. 2; Princeton: Princeton University, 1976Google Scholar). See also the pertinent chapters on Dionysus in Guthrie, W. K. C., The Greeks and Their Gods (1950; reprinted., Boston: Beacon, 1962Google Scholar); Rose, H. J., Religion in Greece and Rome (New York: Harper & Row, 1959Google Scholar), as well as encyclopedic articles in the Oxford Classical Dictionary (2d ed.; Oxford: Oxford University, 1970Google Scholar) and other classical encyclopedias.

3 E.g., Dodds, E. R., “Introduction” in his edition of the Bacchae (Oxford: Oxford University, 1959) xxviGoogle Scholar; Farnell, L., “Sociological Hypotheses Concerning the Position of Women in Ancient Religion,” ARW 7 (1904) 81Google Scholar; Nilsson, M. P., Greek Folk Religion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1972Google Scholar; first published as Greek Popular Religion [New York: Columbia University, 1940]) 25Google Scholar; Nilsson, M. P., History of Greek Religion (Oxford: Oxford University, 1925Google Scholar; reprint ed., New York: Norton, 1964) 206. Similarly, scholars who do perceive some of the mechanics involved invariably stop with a relatively pat explanation: Guthrie writes that, “In Greece, it was the women, with their normally confined and straitened lives to whom the temptation of release made the strongest appeal” (Greeks, 148). He correctly suspects that much of the appeal to Greek women was rooted in the strictures of their lives, but he seems to feel that mere ecstatic release was sufficient to attract them, without examining what if anything need be attributed to the specific Dionysiac symbols and rituals.

4 In another version of this paper, delivered at the SBL Annual Meeting, St. Louis, October 1976, I briefly explored the roles of women in the Roman Bacchanalia, as reported by the historian Livy, in his Annals 39. 8–19(R. Kraemer, “Women in the Cult of Dionysus: The Bacchanalia of Livy and Their Antecedents”). There I suggested that despite significant differences between the Bacchanalia, as reported by Livy, and the evidence for the Greek orgia (as well as between the status of Greek women in classical Athens and Roman women in the republic), certain common elements of the various forms of the god's worship emerge in clear relief. These include the extensive participation of women; the predominance of young men; an emphasis on sexuality and aggression; severe official resistance to the cult and the attribution of the cult's entrance into the area to a foreigner. These common elements may well reflect similar functions of the cult for its participants, while the difference between the Greek and Roman Dionysia suggest avenues of further research. If the various manifestations of such worship are viewed as a continuum, it should become possible to have a better understanding of their similarities, of the historical relationships between them and of the process which instituted the differences observable between them. How did a cult which was almost exclusively restricted to women, with male participation severely circumscribed, become one which, while maintaining its high degree of female initiates, permits the fuller participation of men, even possibly to the point of excluding women from certain Bacchic associations? A detailed comparison of the Roman Bacchanalia, with the Greek evidence, should prove instructive; it should also prove instructive to consider what effects changes in social structures; and, in particular, changes in the relative position of women in the society may have contributed to the changing forms of the Bacchic cults.

5 The “Origins” of the worship of Dionysus are more difficult to reconstruct. Some scholars have noted that Dionysus is not part of the Homeric pantheon, although he is clearly known in Homer as divine. The general consensus is that the agricultural worship is fairly old. The myth recounted by Euripides associated the founding of the rites with the dynasty of Cadmus, who is supposed to have founded Thebes in the distant past. Of course, this indicates little about the actual age of the worship but does reveal the Greek conception of the worship as ancient history already in the fifth century.

6 Farnell, Cults; Deubner, Attische Feste.

7 Nilsson, Dionysiac Mysteries, 33.

8 The exact date is the subject of dispute.

9 The best edition is that of E. R. Dodds. Among the many translations, those of Vellacott, P., The Bacchae and Other Plays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954Google Scholar); Arrowsmith, W., The Bacchae, in Greek Tragedies (ed. Grene, David and Lattimore, Richmond; Chicago: University of Chicago, 1960) 3Google Scholar; and Kirk, G. S., The Bacchae (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1970Google Scholar) are recommended.

10 A.-J. Festugière, “Les Mystères de Dionysos,” Etudes de Religion Grecque et Helténistique, (Paris: Vrin, 1972) (2; Dodds, “Introduction to Bacchae,” xxv.

11 Apollodorus Bibliotheca 2. 23–26; Diodorus Siculus 3. 62–74; 4. 2–4.

12 Bacchae 680–711.

13 Ibid. 728–68.

14 The Greek word here is ὀργία. Unfortunately it is often rendered in English translations by the term “mysteries.”

15 Bacchae 208–9.

16 Dodds, “Introduction to Bacchae” xxii; xxv; Guthrie, Greeks, 178. Dodds offers no substantiation for his claim that there were no trieteric rites in Athens in the fifth/fourth century; Guthrie bases his remarks on Dodds’ statement and passages in Pausanius’ first-century report that the women of Athens sent a delegation to Delphi for the biennial festival (Description of Greece 10.4.2; 10.32.5).

17 See above, n. 10. See also Rohde, Erwin, Psyche (London: Kegan Paul, 1925Google Scholar; reprint ed., New York: Harper & Row, 1966) 2. 262.

18 Dodds himself held both views. The relationship of the cult of Dionysus to that of Sabazios will be discussed below.

19 Demosthenes De Corona 258–59.

20 On the association of the liknon with Dionysus, see Nilsson, Mysteries, 38–45.

21 Festugière, Mystères, 17 (translation mine).

22 Diodorus Siculus 4.4.1.

23 Hymn 49.

24 Guthrie, Greeks, 45.

25 “Sabazius” in the Oxford Classical Dictionary, 941.

26 Nilsson, Mysteries, 23.

27 Dodds, “Introduction to Bacchae,” xxxix-xxv.

28 From the French summary in L'Année Philologique (1967) of Masiello, P., “L'idiologia messianica e le rivolte servile,” Annali della Facolta di Lettere e Filosofla. Bari Vniversita xl (1966) 176–96Google Scholar.

29 For a recent summary of the state of Sabazius research see Johnson, Sherman E., “A Sabazius Inscription from Sardis” in Religions in Antiquity: Essays in Memory of Erwin Ramsdell Goodenough (ed. Neusner, Jacob; Leiden: Brill, 1968) 542–50Google Scholar. See also Erling, Sarcophagi, esp. 20–45; also the entries under Sabazius in W. H. Roscher, Ausführliches Lexicon der griechischen und römischen Mythologie, and in PW. I intend to discuss the cults of Dionysus and Sabazios more fully in a future paper.

30 Jeanmaire, Dionysos, 95.

31 Although, perhaps arbitrarily, evidence for Sabazius seems more fruitful for our study of Dionysus than vice versa. Methodologically and perhaps evidentially there are problems here. But this kind of paper is oriented as much to posing the questions and provoking response as to offering definitive solutions.

32 Principally an inscription from Miletus on cult regulations, in Sokolowski, F., Lois Sacrées de L'Asie Mineure (Paris: Ecole Française d'Athenes, 1955) 48Google Scholar.

33 Although Jeanmaire (Dionysos, 59–60) argues for the probability of such a connection.

34 Hesiod Theogony 940ff.

35 Hymn I, 1.17.

36 See the introduction to the Loeb edition, edited by H. G. Evelyn-White.

37 As indicated in the beginning of this paper, the evidence offered here is a selective representation of the Dionysiac references, rather than any attempt at exhaustive coverage. Many Dionysiac references do not pertain specifically to the cults and practices under examination. The references in nn. 1 and 2 above offer a starting place for additional research into the range of Dionysiaca.

38 Antigone 1126; Ion 1125, 540; Clouds 603.

39 The vividness of Euripides’ description has led to much debate over whether real women actually performed the rites depicted in the Bacchae, and if so where and when. See Jeanmaire, Dionysos; Dodds “Introduction to Bacchae” and also his “Maenadism in the Bacchae” (appendix to The Greeks and the Irrational, Sather Classical Lectures 25 [Berkeley. University of California] 1951); Guthrie, Greeks; Rohde, Psyche, 2; Festugière, Mystères; and Farnell, Cults, 5.

40 Lillian B. Lawler, The Dance in Ancient Greece (London: Black, 1964). For a general discussion of Dionysiac iconography, see also H. Philippart, “Iconographie.”

41 Lawler, , “The Maenads: A Contribution to the Study of the Dance in Ancient Greece,” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 6 (1927) 79Google Scholar.

42 The problem of the cult of Sabazios becomes relevant again here. See above, n. 29.

43 Nilsson (Mysteries, 7) favors the former view. See also Diodorus 3. 62 ff.

44 Diodorus 4.3.

45 Plutarch De primo frigido 953 D.

46 De mulierum virtutibus 249 E.

47 Plutarch De Iside et Osiride 364 E. For a recent study of the roles of women in the cult of Isis, see Heyob, Sharon Kelly, The Cult of Isis among Women in the Greco-Roman World (Leiden: Brill, 1976Google Scholar).

48 Plutarch Life of Alexander 2.5–6. This passage is extremely intriguing, for it purports to describe Macedonian and Thracian rites from the fourth century. Plutarch's remark that women's snake-handling terrified the men may suggest something about the social mechanism of such activities.

49 Pausanius Description of Greece 10.4.3.

50 Pausanius Description 2. 2.6; 9.20.3; 7.37.3; 7.18.3, et al.

51 The text may be found in Kern, Otto, Die Inschriften von Magnesia am Meander (Berlin: Königliches Museum, 1900) 215Google Scholar.

52 Farnell, Cults, 5.

53 Text of the tomb inscription in Nilsson, Mysteries, 6, n. 7. For the cult inscription, see n. 32 above.

54 For references by geographic location, see Farnell, Cults, 5. 324–33.

55 Jeanmaire, Dionysos, 173–74.

56 The Miletus inscription (n. 32 above) regulates a ritual sacrifice, but the text is unclear.

57 Bacchae 195–96.

58 Ibid. 699–702.

59 Ibid. 487; 222–25.

60 Ibid. 314–18; Plutarch, De mulierum virtutibus.

61 Bacchae 1232–38; translation from Arrowsmith.

62 Victor Turner, The Ritual Process (Chicago: Aldine, 1970) 172–77. See also 183–85 on the sexes and status reversal.

63 πόλλοι μὲν ναρθκοφόροι Bάκχοι δέ τε παῦροι, Plato Phaedo 69D. The use of the masculine plural neither guarantees nor rules out feminine participation, as Smyth (Greek Grammar [Cambridge: Harvard University, 1920]) notes that whole classes are denoted by the masculine, but unless Greek gender usage is unusual in thi s respect, it implies male participation, or the possibility of it, since many languages which use the masculine to include the feminine rarely use the feminine to denote the masculine. Thus the feminine plural Bacchae would probably refer to female Bacchics, while Bacchoi could refer either to men alone, or to both men and women. It is, I suppose, possible that at least in specific cases Bacchoi might refer only to women, but this would be highly improbable.

64 Euripides Ion 550ff.

65 Ibid. 554.

66 Bacchae 195–96.

67 “But the god wishes to receive honor from all alike” (άλλ’ ἐξ ἁπάντων βούλεται τιμαῖς ἕχειν κοιναῖς) Bacchae 208.

68 Ibid. 32–36.

69 Bacchae 35–36 when taken together with the described activities of Cadmus and Teiresias may lend further credence to this suggestion. Dionysus states that “Every woman in Thebes—but the women only—I drove from home, mad” (πᾶν τὸ θῆλυ σπέρμα Kασμείων, ὅσαι γυναῖκες ἦσαν). The second Greek phrase raises some problem of interpretation and translation, which Dodds discusses in his commentary on the Bacchae, as part of his edition of the play, 67. He rejects the reading of ὅσαι γυναῖκες as excluding married women (although γυναῖκες may have that meaning in the passage in Diodorus). Dodds argues that the phrase is essentially tautological and meant to stress the exclusion of men. But since the play clearly notes that men perform some Dionysiac ritual, this seems to me to strengthen the notion that, although men may pay homage to Dionysus, it is only the women who are possessed and who, in the state of ecstatic possession, perform the higher rites.

Additional evidence for levels of cultic initiation comes from Lawler's observation that not all the maenads in the vase paintings are depicted in fawnskins but only some, from which Jeanmaire suggests that the fawnskin may have been a sign of cultic initiation, to be worn henceforth only by initiates, and possibly being the skin of the animal actually sacrificed at the initiation (Dionysos, 170). Additionally, Diodorus' description of the Bacchic rites may be taken to mean that married women and unmarried maidens performed different rituals which may have carried with them levels of cultic differentiation, but the text may be read in a variety of ways (Diodorus 4.3).

70 As Aeschines is said to have done in the Sabazian rites, according to Demosthenes (De corona 259). See also Dodds, Bacchae, 86.

71 Diodorus 4.2.5.

72 Ibid. 3.64.7.

73 Cited in Nilsson, Mysteries, 8, n. 11.

74 Nilsson, Mysteries, 8.

75 “There still remains here [in Bryseae] a temple of Dionysus with an image in the open. But the image in the temple women only may see, for women by themselves perform in secret the sacrificial rites” (Pausanius Description of Greece 3.20.4). This prompts Farnell to remark that “This is indeed the only example of the exclusion of men in this worship, in which the priest is after all more common than the priestess, and one hears frequently of the male votary, the βάκχoς, as well as of the Bacchai. But the woman ministrant was more essential generally to this cult than to that of any other male divinity, and was never excluded as she frequently was in others” (Cults, 5. 160). Farnell's observations here are to be taken with at least a grain of salt.

76 Burridge, Kenelm, New Heaven, New Earth (New York: Schocken, 1969Google Scholar).

77 On the subject of the status of women in ancient Greece, and often antiquity in general, see Leipoldt, J., Die Frau in der antiken Welt und im Urchristentum (Gütersloh: Mohn, 1962Google Scholar); Flacelière, Robert, “Histoire de la femme antique en Crète et en Grèce,” in Histoire Mondiale de la Femme (ed. Pierre Grimal; Paris: Nouvelle Libraire de France, 1965) 1Google Scholar; Bardeche, Maurice, Histoire desfemmes (Paris: Stock, 1968Google Scholar); Zinserling, Verena, Women in Greece and Rome (New York: Schrara, 1973Google Scholar); O'Faolain, Julia and Martines, Lauro, Not in God's Image: Women in History from the Greeks to the Victorians (New York: Harper & Row, 1973Google Scholar); Bullough, Vern, The Subordinate Sex: A History of Attitudes towards Women (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois, 1973Google Scholar); Lacey, W. K. C., The Family in Ancient Greece (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 1968Google Scholar). Numa Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws and Institutions of Greece and Rome (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1864Google Scholar) discusses the place of women in ancient society in the course of his broader treatment. Kitto, H. D. F.(The Greeks [Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1951Google Scholar]); Post, L. A. (“Women's Place in Menander's Athens,” TAPA 71 [1940] 420–59Google Scholar); and Gomme, A. W., (“The Position of Women in Athens in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries,” Classical Philology 20 [1925CrossRefGoogle Scholar] Iff.) offer a somewhat more positive description of the position of women in ancient Greece. See also Meeks, Wayne, “The Image of the Androgyne: Some Uses of a Symbol in Earliest Christianity,” HR 13 (1974) 165–208Google Scholar; and Pomeroy, Sarah B., Goddesses, Wives, Whores and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity (New York: Schocken, 1975Google Scholar).

78 Although Slater was apparently unaware of Burridge's work and did not himself view the precipitating factor behind the fervor of Dionysiac religion as due to any perception of disparity between the standards of male and female worth, he proposed a modified Freudian theory, influenced heavily by the work of Karen Horney, to account for the dynamics of the Dionysiac orgia and their attraction to women. There are many substantial problems with Slater's work, which would require an unwarranted digression to discuss here; nevertheless, his basic observation that the cult of Dionysus provided the perfect symbols for the expression and resolution of socio-sexual tensions within a sanctioned context is highly significant. A good critical review of Slater's work and the lack of response it has received among classicists may be found in Marylin B. Arthur's review essay on the study of women in the field of classics, in Signs 2 (1976) 395–97Google Scholar.

79 Prior possession and cure are often preliminary qualifications for the role of shaman. In the cult of Dionysus, where the god plays the role both of afflictor and of healer, it is perhaps not insignificant to note that Dionysus was himself considered in the myths to have been originally driven mad by Hera, prior to his affliction of Greek women. It is further interesting to note that psychoanalytic theory, based on nonempirical constructs of id, ego and superego, or in the Jungian system, anima and animus, appears to be not so much objective reality based on our scientific advancement and superiority so much as the only acceptable explanation for such activities and phenomena, given a rationalistic society in which demons and dead ancestors no longer fit the bill. Perhaps the most interesting connection here is that just as the shaman or exorcist is usually (as a preliminary qualification) the prior victim of possession and presumably cured, so also do we require our modern day analysts themselves to undergo the process of analysis before they are qualified to treat others. The notion of the curing cured remains with us.

80 Jeanmaire, Dionysos, 120–23.

81 Ibid.; Lewis, I. M., Ecstatic Religion: An Anthropological Study of Spirit Possession and Shamanism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971) 72–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

82 Lewis, Ecstatic Religion, 32.

83 Ibid., 88.

84 Ibid., 86.

85 Jeanmaire, Dionysos, 173, 186, 219.

86 A distinction which Rohde supports, Psyche, 2. 304–35 n. 2.

87 Among others, the finding of a name taken to be that of Dionysus in the Linear B tablets.

88 It seems impossible to determine whether the foreign ascription was imposed of necessity on a god about whom such a cult centered, or whether the cult attached itself to Dionysus in part because of the foreign ascription.

89 Jeanmaire, Dionysos, 174, 186.

90 Most of Lewis’ women were married; the category of socio-biologically “threatened” or “marginal” is my own modification of Lewis’ work. Unmarried women were definitely involved in the Hellenistic cult, according to Diodorus. But Lewis himself remarks that “Successful wives and mothers may occasionally succumb to possession, but they are unlikely to be drawn into permanent involvement in the possession cult groups. The keenest recruits and the most committed enthusiasts are women who, for one reason or another, do not make a success of their marital roles, or who, having fulfilled these roles, seek a new career in which they can give free rein to the desire to manage and dominate others” (191).

91 Lewis, Ecstatic Religion, 66–69.

92 Jeanmaire, Dionysos, 208.

93 Lewis, Ecstatic Religion, 32.

94 Cited in Jeanmaire, 125.

95 Ibid, 127.

96 Or, as often depicted in the vase paintings, the sexuality between the maenads and the satyrs. See for example plate 12c “Silen seizing a Maenad” in Duell, Prentice, “La Tomba del Triclinio,” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 4 (1927) 5–68Google Scholar.

97 Such activity becomes explicit in the myth of Krishna and Radha the gopi, a legend and cult which seems to me to have clear-cut parallels to the Dionysiac-the gopis are called irresistibly away from their homes, flocks and husbands in order to attain union with Krishna, a union which is expressed in sexual-physical terms.