Final Draft - Preview Matter - Florida State University

The rites of Bacchic cult practice reflect the character of a liminal deity who transgressed
social norms. R.P. Winnington-Ingram, commenting on the Greek cult of Dionysos, states the
following, “His worship included wild rites, devoted to the production of ecstasy by music and
dancing, by bloody sacrifice, by the sheer intoxication of being one of a band of worshippers, a
thiasos.” 512 In this context, Dionysos represents an elemental force, a wildness sometimes
repressed by civilization. The mountain dances and the wild cries of “euhoi!” were outside the
daily experience of the Romans and Etruscans. Perhaps Dionysiac worship is a way for man to
come to terms with his animal, primal nature, and this may be the message of Euripides’
Bacchae. 513 E.R. Dodds states, “To resist Dionysos is to repress the elemental in one’s own
nature…” 514 Taurine imagery used to represent Dionysos, i.e. a man with bestial anatomy, could
have been chosen as a way of representing his fundamentally savage nature. 515 This animalistic
nature is reflected in Dionysos’ character in the Bacchae and also, most vividly, in the rites of
the ( and the t M , . 516 It is difficult for us to imagine a group of crazed
worshippers actually tearing apart a wild animal and consuming its flesh raw; on the other hand,
a symbolic representation of this act may serve the same function of blurring the boundary of
nature and culture and embracing man’s primal character. Due to its character as a mystery
religion, it is not clear what happened during the Bacchic rites. We do know that this cult was
popular in Etruria, and Livy states that the cult of Bacchus spread from Etruria to Rome where it
met with opposition from the ruling class. 517 Livy’s account is as follows:
The following year [i.e., 186 BCE] diverted the consuls, Spurius Postumius
Albinus and Quintus Marcius Phillipus from the army and the supervision of wars
and their provinces to the punishment of an internal conspiracy… The
investigation of secret plots was voted to both consuls. An unknown Greek priest
and soothsayer had first come into Etruria with none of those arts, many of which
512
Winnington-Ingram 1997, 1. De Grummond (2006a, 119-21) describes a scene on an Etruscan mirror in which
Fufluns is accompanied by Vesuna who is “perhaps meant to be understood as a maenad in ecstasy, since she is
dressed in an animal skin and seems to hold a thyrsus in her proper right hand…” Vesuna is thus dressed in the
traditional garb of the Bacchae.
513
Dodds 1960, xx.
514
Dodds 1960, xvi.
515
In reference to Jung’s interpretation of bull myths, Rice (1998, 262) dismisses the idea that “myths of the bull
represented attempts to recognize and by recognition to overcome man’s animal nature.” He does so by stating,
“This explanation hardly seems adequate.” I do not agree.
516
Dodds (1960, xviii) notes that the most common animal victim of the ( and the t M , was the
bull, and in this animal, we meet one of the animal incarnations of the god. He states, “We may regard the
t M , , then, as a rite in which the gods was in some sense present in his beast-vehicle and was in that shape
torn and eaten by his people.”
517
Livy. 39.8-9.1.
104