Civilization and Backlash
Almost as soon as ecstatic rituals appear in the historical—that is, written—record, a note of ambivalence enters into the story, a suggestion of social tensions surrounding these rituals, and even violent hostility toward their participants. Euripides’ play The Bacchae, for example, both records these tensions and expresses what seems to be a tormented ambivalence on the part of the playwright. In the play, Pentheus, the king of Thebes, greets the god with derision and determines to suppress him by force. “Go at once to the Electran gate,” he commands his officers. “Tell all my men who bear shields, heavy or light, all who ride fast horses or twang the bowstring, to meet me there in readiness for an assault on the Bacchae [maenads]. This is past all bearing, if we are to let women so defy us.”1 At first the play seems to take the god’s side—mocking the uptight Pentheus and showing the community elders piously joining the maenads in their revelry. After all, if the beautiful young stranger is indeed a god, it is incumbent on good citizens to observe his rites. But things end badly for both sides: Pentheus is killed and dismembered by his own mother, who—in her god-given ecstasy—mistakes him for a lion.
The ambivalence and hostility found in ancient written records may tell us more about the conditions under which writing was invented than about any long-standing prior conflict over ecstatic rituals themselves. Writing arises with “civilization,” in particular, with the emergence of social stratification and the rise of elites. In fact, writing was probably invented, along with arithmetic, as a means of keeping track of the elite’s possessions: herds, stored grain, and slaves. From an elite perspective, there is one inherent problem with traditional festivities and ecstatic rituals, and that is their leveling effect, the way in which they dissolve rank and other forms of social difference. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to retain one’s regal dignity in the mad excitement of the dance. Masks and other forms of costuming may render participants equally anonymous or equally “special.” The deity may choose to possess—and speak through—a lowly shepherdess as readily as a queen.
We have some evidence—from a very different part of the ancient world—of the dampening effect of civilization and social hierarchy on traditional rituals. Recent carbon-14 dating of an archaeological site in Oaxaca suggests that the earliest residents, who were hunter-gatherers living about nine thousand years ago, met on a cleared “dance ground” for rituals that included the entire community. Later, with the rise of agriculture, rituals appear to have been enacted solely by initiates who were “social achievers,” or members of an elite, and most likely men. Finally, with the emergence of organized and militarized states two thousand years ago, the archaeologists deduce that “many important rituals were performed only by trained full-time priests using religious calendars and occupying temples built by corvée labor.” In the Oaxacan case, only a few thousand years appear to have elapsed between the archaic danced rituals of Paleolithic bands and their refinement into the formal rituals of the civilized state.2
The rise of social hierarchy, anthropologists agree, goes hand in hand with the rise of militarism and war, which are in their own way also usually hostile to the danced rituals of the archaic past.
Possibly the first social elite consisted of men who specialized in fighting the men of other tribes or villages and who could thus impose a kind of “protection racket” on their fellow citizens: Feed us, or else we will leave you to the mercies of the thugs from neighboring settlements; do the planting and herding for us, or we will turn our weapons on you, our own clanspeople. Through raiding and more prolonged forms of warfare, this early elite would have further enriched itself, until we have the kind of state Dionysus threatened in The Bacchae—one ruled by a warrior-king.3
In ancient Israel, both militarism and concerns about the maintenance of hierarchy seem to have worked against the old ecstatic rituals. After Michal, King Saul’s daughter and the wife of King David, sees her husband perform his near-naked victory dance through the streets of Jerusalem, she “despises him in her heart” and greets him with sarcasm: “How glorious was the king of Israel today, who uncovered himself! … today in the eyes of the handmaids of his servants, as one of the vain fellows shamelessly uncovereth himself.” To dance—especially ecstatically—in the company or even the presence of one’s inferiors was to upset the increasingly rigid hierarchy of wealth and status.
But the most common explanation for the ancient Israelis’ hostility to group ecstatic rites is a military one. Harassed by the Philistines from the west, Egyptians from the south, and Hittites and others from the north, the Hebrews could ill afford to lose themselves in collective rapture—or so the reasoning goes. As Robert Graves put it:
It became clear that if Judaea, a small buffer state between Egypt and Assyria, was to keep its political independence, a stronger religious discipline must be inculcated, and the people trained to arms. Hitherto most Israelites had clung to the orgiastic Canaanite cult in which goddesses played the leading role, with demigods as their consorts. This, though admirably suited to peaceful times, could not steel the Jews to resist the invading armies of Egypt and Assyria.4
Their god Yahweh was the perfect disciplinarian—a war god known as Yahweh Sabaoth, Lord God of Hosts, with hosts referring to armies. The religious scholar Karen Armstrong also explains the Hebrews’ religious vacillations in terms of military pressures: “They remembered [their covenant with Yahweh] in times of war, when they needed Yahweh’s skilled military protection, but when times were easy they worshipped Baal, Anat and Asherah in the old way.”5
A concern for military preparedness seems also to have soured the Greek view of ecstatic rituals. In The Bacchae, Euripides posed a basic incompatibility between the warrior-king Pentheus and Dionysus, who is descibed as a “lover of peace.” Arthur Evans, in his book on Dionysus, argues that he is the antiwar god, citing among other things the fourth-century BCE Greek philosopher Diodorus’s praise of Dionysus for founding festivals “everywhere” and “in general resolv[ing] the conflicts of nations and states, and in place of domestic strife and war … la[ying] the grounds for concord and great peace.”6 Dionysus could be violent, but not in a warrior’s way. At their first encounter, Pentheus taunts Dionysus for his effeminacy: “Those long curls of yours show that you’re no wrestler.”
But the ancient Greek elite did not abandon the old ecstatic rituals; instead, they simply took them underground, where they could be indulged in out of sight of the hoi polloi. As early as the sixth century BCE, there emerges a strange new form of religious grouping in Greece: mystery cults, drawing on social elites, whose members gathered periodically for secret rites apparently aimed, above all, at engendering collective ecstasy. The secrets were well kept, leaving scholars to guess at what exactly went on at the cults’ gatherings. Surely there was dancing, since the ancients admitted this much, as well as wine drinking and possibly the ingestion of hallucinatory drugs, along with striking sound and light effects. “We hear of frenzied nocturnal dances, with crazed outcries, to the stirring accompaniment of shrill flutes, tympana, metal cymbals, castanets … ‘bull-roarers,’ and rattles,” Lawler reports. “We hear
of snake-handling, of trances, of prophesying, even of self-mutilation.” 7
In his book Ancient Mystery Cults, Walter Burkert infers a sequence of activities not unlike that which anthropologists have observed in many “primitive” societies, in which new initiates to the cult are first isolated and deliberately terrified, then finally embraced by the whole group in dance.
The initiands, seated, are … smeared with a mixture of clay and chaff; from the dark the priestess appears like a frightening demon; clean again and rising to their feet, the initiates exclaim “I escaped from evil, I found the better,” and the bystanders yell in a high, shrieking voice (ololyge) as though in the presence of some divine agent. In the daytime there follows the integration of the initiates into the group of celebrants … people are crowned with fennel and white poplar; they dance and utter rhythmic cries … some brandishing live snakes.8 Because the participants were members of a literate elite, some subjective reports of the rituals’ effects have survived. Initiates described the experience as purifying, healing, and deeply reassuring; certainly it was transformative. “I came out of the mystery hall feeling like a stranger to myself,” said one participant of the mystery rites held at Eleusis in honor of the goddess Demeter.9 In fact, it is to this kind of experience that we owe the very word ecstasy, derived from Greek words meaning “to stand outside of oneself.”
Where the Greek elite had dithered—looking askance at the disorderly maenads while celebrating their own secret ecstatic rites—the Romans took a firm stand. In Roman culture, militarism triumphs over the old traditions of communal ecstasy; the god of war—here called Mars—finally vanquishes Dionysus, who, in his Roman form,
has already been diminished to Bacchus, the fun-loving god of wine. It is in Rome that the Greek word orgeia, for ecstatic religious rites, takes on its modern connotations of grossness and excess, of too much food, drink, and sex promiscuously indulged in all at once, while the Greek word ekstasis itself often gets translated into Latin as superstitio.10
Even those elementary ingredients of ecstatic traditions—music and dance—were “alien,” as one historian of dance put it, to the “sober, realistically minded Roman, certainly by the time of the empire.”11 True, the Romans had their annual Saturnalia, which involved drinking, feasting, and a so-called ritual of inversion in which masters and slaves briefly exchanged roles. But apparently even more so than among the ancient Hebrews and Greeks, social inequality served both to inhibit the powerful and to make them distrustful of exuberant outbursts from below. Max Weber observed that “the nobles, who constituted a rational nobility of office of increasing range, and who possessed whole cities and provinces as client holdings of single families, completely rejected ecstasy, like the dance, as utterly unseemly and unworthy of a nobleman’s sense of honor.”12 So thorough was the official Roman condemnation of the dance that the Roman scholar Cornelius Nepos, writing in the time of Augustus, had to explain to his readers why a prominent Greek might indulge in such an unseemly activity: “Readers should not judge foreign customs by their own … We do not need to be told that, by Roman convention, music is unbecoming to a person of prominence, and dancing is thought to be positively vicious. In Greece, on the other hand, these are held to be agreeable and laudable diversions.”13 Just as Roman architecture and statuary projected the implacable calm of absolute power, the individual Roman patrician sought, in his everyday demeanor, to impress observers with his personal authority. Public ecstasy of any kind was not a temptation, because it “involves the loss of that dignity that was so carefully projected by the honorific statues which enshrine so much of the civil elite’s behavioural ideal.”14
Certainly dancing occurred, at least indoors, within the wealthy Roman household, but it was regarded with ambivalence and usually relegated to professionals of dubious reputation. In 150 BCE we find the consul Scipio Aemilianus Africanus ordering that dancing schools for Roman children be closed.15 A couple of hundred years later there are references to women dancing for guests within their homes, though these women were likely to incur criticism if their dancing was thought to be too “professional,” meaning overly skillful or perhaps indecent.16 The satirist Juvenal, for example, saw in the dancing of highborn Roman women only a display of sexual lust, calculated to “warm the age-chilled balls” of elderly men.
Ah, what a vast mounting passion fills their spirits
To get themselves mounted! Such lustful yelps, such a copious
Downflow of vintage liquor splashing their thighs!
Off goes Saufeia’s wreath, she challenges the call-girls
To a contest of bumps and grinds, emerges victorious,
Herself admires the shimmy of Medullina’s buttocks.17 Official Roman religion was, not surprisingly, a “cold and prosaic” affair,18 designed to reinforce the social hierarchy rather than to offer the worshipper an experience of communion with the deities. Instead of a specialized priesthood, men of noble rank were appointed to perform the rites; and once the emperor had achieved divinity, starting when Augustus declared himself a god, the connection between religious and secular authority was indissoluble. As for the rites themselves, no one expected them to transform, excite, or in any way appeal to the emotions. Rather, the emphasis was on exact and perfect performance, down to the smallest detail. In animal sacrifice—the most common form of religious observance—the animal had to be physically perfect and, ideally, willing to die, which it demonstrated by obligingly stretching forth its neck for the knife. If the sacrificial rite was marred in any detail, it had to be repeated until the presiding officials got it right. One man acting as
priest was forced to quit because his hat fell off while he was sacrificing. 19 The gods, and not the humans present, were the true connoisseurs of the Roman rites, and they were known to be sensitive to the least liturgical lapse.
But there was a risk inherent in the aristocratic formality of Roman religion. Maybe the tedious official rites did serve to reinforce hierarchy and obedience, but they also left the Roman gods vulnerable to repeated challenges from more emotionally accessible foreign deities. And with an empire embracing so many subjugated peoples—from the tribal Gauls and Britons to the urbane Greeks and Egyptians—there was no way to insulate Rome from the ecstatic rites of alien gods. Historians until recently referred to these ecstatic alternatives somewhat pejoratively, as “oriental religions,” in the usual attempt to locate the sources of the “irrational” somewhere far outside the West, and blamed them in part for the empire’s eventual decadence and decline. Geographically, though, the term oriental applies only to the cult of Cybele, the Great Mother, which was introduced to Rome from Anatolia in 204 BCE. The goddess Isis, whose worship was widespread in Rome at the start of the Christian era, hailed from Egypt; and Dionysus/Bacchus was hardly foreign at all.
On the whole, the Romans were remarkably tolerant toward the gods of their subject peoples, to the point of adopting particularly attractive or efficacious ones. But insofar as these imported deities drew their adherents from marginalized groups within Roman society—women and slaves—the “oriental” cults of Isis, Cybele, and Dionysus carried a hint of political menace. The public worship of Cybele was particularly outrageous, as the historian Mary Beard reports: “With their flowing hair, extravagant jewelry, and long yellow silken robes, they [the devotees of Cybele] offered an image of mad religious frenzy involving not only ecstatic dancing but frenetic self-flagellation and … [in the case of male worshippers] the act of self-castration performed in a divine trance.”20 This was the ultimate challenge to Roman masculine propriety: Not only did Cybele call forth bands of female worshippers on her holy days;
she demanded that her male priests, or galli, lop off their testicles in public. Since a man could perform that act of obeisance only once, he was expected, on future occasions of worship, to slash his skin with a knife and proceed through the streets bleeding as he danced in what must have looked, to the status-conscious Romans, like an inexplicable display of self-abasement. Modern historians agree that the worship of Cybele constituted a form of “resistance to dominant elite goals.”21 As Beard puts it:
On the one hand was the routinized, formal approach of the traditional priesthood, embedded in the political and social hierarchies of the city. On the other hand were the claims of the galli that they enjoyed direct inspiration from the gods—an inspiration that came with frenzy and trance, open to anyone, without consideration of political or social status … By challenging the position of the Roman elite as the sole guardians of access to the gods, the eunuch priests were effectively challenging the wider authority of that elite and the social and cultural norms they have long guaranteed.22 But, on account of her alleged assistance to the Romans during the Punic Wars, there wasn’t much the authorities could do about Cybele and her followers—except to mock them, as Juvenal did with glee.
… Now here come the devotees
of frenzied Bellona, and Cybele, Mother of Gods,
with a huge eunuch, a face for lesser obscenities
to revere. Long ago, with a sherd, he lopped off his soft genitals:
now neither the howling rabble nor all the kettledrums can outshriek
him.
A Phrygian mitre [or bonnet, a kind of headgear associated with
Dionysian worship in Greece] tops his plebeian cheeks.23 Dionysus, or Bacchus, however, did not enjoy the official protection accorded Cybele. He had not helped Rome militarily or
offered any other service to the state. As a result, his devotees could be forcibly suppressed and were in fact eradicated with a viciousness comparable to the repression of Christians a few centuries later. One thing that bothered the authorities was the simple fact that people were gathering without official authorization. To quote the consul who convened the assembly where the Dionysian rites were first denounced: “Your ancestors did not wish that even the citizens should assemble fortuitously, without good reason: they did not wish you to assemble except when the standard was set up on the citadel, or when the army was called out for an election, or when the tribunes had proclaimed a council of the plebs.”24 “Freedom of assembly” was not yet even a distant aspiration; Romans were to express their desire for social contact only at the level of the family or that of the entire mass, and then only when that mass was duly convened by the state. Anything in between was politically suspect. Thus when Pliny the Younger became governor of Bithynia, in Asia Minor, he hesitated to permit the formation of a volunteer fire department. “Will you consider whether you think a company of firemen might be formed, limited to 150 members?” he wrote to the emperor Trajan. “It will not be difficult to keep such small numbers under observation.” Even so, Trajan refused to grant permission, responding that “if people assemble for a common purpose, whatever name we give them and for whatever purpose, they soon turn into a political club.”25
At the time of the crackdown on Bacchic rites, the worship of Dionysus/Bacchus had been widespread and deeply rooted in Italy for decades.26 According to the Roman historian Livy, the trouble begins with the arrival of a charismatic stranger, just as in Euripides’ play The Bacchae. In the Roman case, the stranger is an itinerant, no-account Greek who “dealt in sacrifices and soothsaying.”27 At first he recruits only women, who observe the rites by day; only when men are included do the rites move to nighttime.
When the license offered by darkness had been added, no sort of crime, no kind of immorality, was left unattempted. There were
more obscenities practised between men than between men and women. Anyone refusing to submit to outrage or reluctant to commit crimes was slaughtered as a sacrificial victim … Men, apparently out of their wits, would utter prophecies with frenzied bodily convulsions: matrons, attired as Bacchantes, with their hair dishevelled and carrying blazing torches, would run down to the Tiber, plunge their torches into the water and bring them out still alight.28 The allegations of male homosexual activity were alarming enough to the Romans, who shared none of the Greeks’ enthusiasm for same-sex love. But perhaps equally alarming, from a pragmatic Roman point of view, the cult was allegedly “a source of supply of false witnesses, forged documents and wills, and perjured evidence.” 29
It was the latter kind of chicanery that provided the excuse for forcible suppression. In 186 BCE—just eight years after the unsettling introduction of the cult of Cybele—the widow of an elite cavalryman plotted to somehow defraud her grown son Publius Aebutius of his inheritance by having him initiated in the Bacchic rite. According to Livy, Publius agreed to prepare for his initiation and confided as much to his girlfriend, Hispala, a former slave who had become a wealthy prostitute. Having been initiated herself years ago as a slave, she knew the horrible violations that awaited Publius and pleaded with him to ignore his mother’s wishes and forgo the initiation. When his mother insisted, Hispala broke her vow of secrecy to the cult and, despite the “trembling [that] seized every part of her body,” revealed the cult’s activities to the Roman authorities.
Their response was little short of hysterical; an assembly was called to denounce the “conspiracy” represented by Bacchic forms of worship and order its complete uprooting. Informers were to be rewarded; no one was to leave the city until the investigations were complete. Apparently Rome was crawling with secret Bacchists, since the announcement of the purge plunged the city into “extreme
terror,” with thousands attempting to escape before the authorities could get to them. In the ensuing crackdown, about seven thousand men and women were detained, and the majority of them executed—males by the state, women handed over to their families to be killed in private.
We cannot of course know how much of Livy’s story, and the lurid allegations contained within it, are true. Did the Roman worshippers of Dionysus really engage in homosexual orgies in addition to the standard Greek practice of dancing to ecstasy? And how did they manage to carry on the painstaking work of forging wills, brewing poisons, etcetera, in the midst of their frenzied rites?
At most, we can deduce from Livy’s story some of the anxieties that afflicted the Roman elite—if not in 186 BCE, then at least near the time of Christ’s birth, when Livy was writing. Clearly, concern over the integrity of Roman manhood was chief among them: A young man, a warrior’s son, was to be cheated of his inheritance by a woman, his mother, and women in general “are the source of this evil thing,” meaning the entire Bacchic “conspiracy.” Homosexual rape was among the crimes attributed to the male cult members, who were, in Livy’s words, “scarcely distinguishable from females.”30 There is no question, though, that whatever went on in the secret rites rendered men unfit for the Romans’ militaristic idea of manhood. “Citizens of Rome,” demands the consul who led the attack on the Bacchic “conspiracy”:
Do you feel that young men, initiated by this oath of allegiance, should be made soldiers? That arms should be entrusted to men called up from this obscene shrine? These men are steeped in their own debauchery and the debauchery of others; will they take up the sword to the end in defence of the chastity of your wives and your children?31 Scholars still debate whether the Bacchic cult suppressed in 186 BCE constituted a protest movement of some kind or an
actual conspiracy with political intentions. No doubt the Roman male elite had reason to worry about unsupervised ecstatic gatherings: Their wealth had been gained at sword point, their comforts were provided by slaves, their households managed by women who chafed—much more noisily than their sisters in Greece—against the restrictions imposed by a perpetually male political leadership. Two centuries after the repression of Dionysian worship in Italy, in 19 CE, the Roman authorities cracked down on another “oriental” religion featuring ecstatic rites: the cult of Isis. Again there was a scandal involving the use of a cult for nefarious purposes, though this time the victim was a woman, reportedly tricked, by a rejected lover, into having sex with him in the goddess’s temple. In another seeming overreaction, the emperor Tiberius had the priests of Isis crucified and the goddess’s followers exiled to Sardinia along with four thousand other “brigands.”32 There would be no secrets in Rome, and no communal thrills other than those sponsored and staged by the powerful—at their circuses and gladiatorial games, for example.
So it is tempting to divide the ancient temperament into a realm of Dionysus and a realm of Yahweh—hedonism and egalitarianism versus hierarchy and war. On the one hand, a willingness to seek delight in the here and now; on the other, a determination to prepare for future danger. A feminine, or androgynous, spirit of playfulness versus the cold principle of patriarchal authority. This is in fact how Robert Graves, Joseph Campbell, and many since them have understood the emergence of a distinctly Western culture: As the triumph of masculinism and militarism over the anarchic traditions of a simpler agrarian age, of the patriarchal “sky-gods” like Yahweh and Zeus over the great goddess and her consorts. The old deities were accessible to all through ritually induced ecstasy. The new gods spoke only through their priests or prophets, and then in terrifying tones of warning and command.
But this entire dichotomy breaks down with the arrival of Jesus,
whose followers claimed him as the son of Yahweh. Jesus gave the implacable Yahweh a human face, making him more accessible and forgiving. At the same time, though—and less often noted—Jesus was, or was portrayed by his followers as, a continuation of the quintessentially pagan Dionysus.