In Euripides’ Bacchae the women of Thebes, compelled to dance in the mountains for Dionysus, are called mainades, ‘‘mad women.’’ E. R. Dodds interpreted this noun as a ritual title and the plot of the play as a historical account of a religious movement (Dodds 1960:xv, xx-xxii). He described oreibasia as a series of rites where women roamed the mountains and actually tore apart wild animals (sparagmos). Dodds presents sparagmos as preparation for a sacrifice where the worshiper ate the flesh of the sacrificial victim raw, omophagia. His interpretation, delivered with fervor in the introduction to his deservedly admired commentary on Euripides’ play, still convinces some, but it is not clear that ‘‘maenad’’ was a ritual title or that spontaneous attacks of frenzy incited females to mass exodus to the mountains for dancing and the rending of wild animals (Henrichs 1978). Rather, the myths of resistance describing excessive frenzy inflicted by a punitive Dionysus show the dangers of refusing to honor the god and therefore explain the local rituals designed to meet his approval.
It is important to notice that there are two different groups of ‘‘maenads’’ in Euripides’ play, the women who accompany the god from Asia, successfully performing his solemn rituals, teletai, and the women of Thebes, harshly punished for refusing to recognize him as a god. Euripides also distinguishes two kinds of mania, ‘‘madness.’’ The first is the positive ritual experience of identification with the god as described by the Chorus of Lydian Bakkhai when it enters the orchestra. The second is the transgressive and frenzied behavior inflicted by the god on the three daughters of Kadmos and their cohorts, the corrupt and polluted Bakkhai.
The first Bacchic experience is induced by willing participation in teletai and orgia, where the worshiper yields to union with Dionysus and achieves simultaneous spiritual community with the Bacchic group ( thiaseuetai psukhan: Euripides, Bacchae 75). In this process Dionysus (also called Bromios) is the one who decides. As Herodotus puts it when describing the effects of Bacchic teleltai on Skyles, the Scythian king, Dionysus ‘‘takes hold of’’ (lambanei) the one performing Bacchic ritual (4.79). The second experience, described in Euripides’ Bacchae by the messenger, first to Pentheus (675-774) and then to the horrified Chorus (1043-1152), is something else altogether. It is a painful affliction. The first is enacted in a regular ritual celebrated every two years ( trieterides: Bacchae 33); the second is inflicted as a divine punishment in which Dionysiac mania is no longer the result of communal ritual, but a consequence of delusion controlled by the god. ‘‘To the mountain, to the mountain [eis oros, eis oros]’’ is a ritual cry used by Euripides, but it is only the second group of mad women that actually climbs Mount Kithairon.
World History
