Psyche: The Cult of Souls and Belief in Immortality among the Greeks

by Erwin Rohde

§ 2

In the spiritual life of men and nations, it is not by any means the extravagant or, in one sense or another, the abnormal that is most difficult for our sympathetic understanding to grasp. By clinging to a traditional and too narrow formula for the Greek spirit we make difficulties for ourselves; but it is not really a matter of serious perplexity, if we reflect upon it, to understand how Greek religion at the height of its development regarded “madness” (μανία) as a religious phenomenon of wide-reaching importance. Madness, in this sense, is a temporary destruction of physical balance, a condition in which the self-conscious spirit is overwhelmed, “possessed” by a foreign power, as our authorities explain it to us. This madness “which comes not from mortal weakness or disease, but from a divine banishment of the commonplace”[1] found effective application in the mantic and telestic arts. Its effects were so common and well recognized that the truth and importance of such religious madness (entirely distinguishable from bodily disease) was treated as a fact of experience not merely by philosophers, but by the doctors themselves.[2] For us it only remains obscure how such “divine mania” was fitted into the regular working order of the religious life; the sensations and experiences themselves belonging to this condition are made intelligible enough by a whole host of analogies. In fact if the truth were told we should rather have to admit that it is easier for us to sympathize with such overflowing of sensation and all that goes with it than with the opposite pole of Greek religious life, the calm and measured composure with which man lifted up heart and eye to the gods, as the patterns of all life and the patrons of a serenity as brilliant and unmoved as that of the clear heavens themselves.

But how came it that in the character of a single people such extravagance of emotion was combined with a fast-bound and regulated equilibrium of temper and behaviour? The answer is that these opposing features sprang from two [256] different sources. They were not originally combined in Greece. The Homeric poems hardly give any hint of that overflowing of religious emotion which later Greek peoples knew and honoured as a heaven-sent madness. It spread among the Greeks themselves in the train of a religious agitation, we might almost say revolution, of which Homer records, at most, only the first faint essays. It had its origin in the religion of Dionysos, and in company with this religion enters as something new and strange into Greek life.

The Homeric poems do not recognize Dionysos as belonging to the gods of Olympos, but they are aware of his existence. It is true they nowhere plainly[3] refer to him as the wine-god honoured in joyful festivals, but we read (in the narrative of Glaukos’ meeting with Diomedes) of the “frenzied” Dionysos and his “Nurses” who were attacked by the Thracian Lykourgos.[4] The Mainas, the frenzied woman of the Dionysos-cult, was such a well-known phenomenon, so familiar in men’s minds, that the word could be used in a simile to explain the meaning of something else.[5] In this form the worship of the god first came to the notice of the Greeks; this was the origin of all the other festivals of Dionysos that later Greece developed in so many different directions.[6] They learnt to know Dionysos Bakcheios, “who makes men frenzied,”[7] as he was worshipped in his own country.

That the original home of Dionysos-worship was in Thrace, that his cult, popular among many of the Thracian peoples,[8] was particularly honoured among the southernmost of the Thracian stocks who were best known to the Greeks and lived on the coast between the mouths of the rivers Hebros and Axios and in the mountainous country behind—to all this the Greeks themselves bore frequent and manifold witness.[9] The god whose name the Greeks knew in its Greek form “Dionysos” had, it appears, among the numerous and divided Thracian peoples various appellations of which those most familiar to the Greeks were Sabos and Sabazios.[10] The Greeks must have known and remarked on the nature and worship of the god at an early period of their history. They may have met with him in Thrace itself. At all periods they had an extensive and varied intercourse with this country and must in the early days of their wanderings have passed through it on their way to their future home. They may have had further opportunities of knowing it from the Thracian races or tribes who, according to a few isolated legends, had dwelt in primitive times in certain localities of Central Greece. The ethnographical material of these [257] legends was regarded as founded on fact by the great historians of the fifth and fourth centuries.[11]

The cult of this Thracian divinity differed in every particular from anything that we know of from Homer as Greek worship of the gods. On the other hand, it was closely related to the cult paid by the Phrygians, a people almost identical with the Thracians, to their mountain-mother Kybele. It was thoroughly orgiastic in character. The festival was held on the mountain tops in the darkness of night amid the flickering and uncertain light of torches. The loud and troubled sound of music was heard; the clash of bronze cymbals; the dull thunderous roar of kettledrums; and through them all penetrated the “maddening unison” of the deep-toned flute,[12] whose soul Phrygian aulêtai had first waked to life. Excited by this wild music, the chorus of worshippers dance with shrill crying and jubilation.[13] We hear nothing about singing:[14] the violence of the dance left no breath for regular songs. These dances were something very different from the measured movement of the dance-step in which Homer’s Greeks advanced and turned about in the Paian. It was in frantic, whirling, headlong eddies and dance-circles[15] that these inspired companies danced over the mountain slopes. They were mostly women who whirled round in these circular dances till the point of exhaustion was reached;[16] they were strangely dressed; they wore bassarai, long flowing garments, as it seems, stitched together out of fox-skins;[17] over these were doeskins,[18] and they even had horns fixed to their heads.[19] Their hair was allowed to float in the wind;[20] they carried snakes sacred to Sabazios[21] in their hands and brandished daggers or else thyrsos-wands, the spear-points of which were concealed in ivy-leaves.[22] In this fashion they raged wildly until every sense was wrought to the highest pitch of excitement, and in the “sacred frenzy” they fell upon the beast selected as their victim[23] and tore their captured prey limb from limb. Then with their teeth they seized the bleeding flesh and devoured it raw.

It is easy enough, by following poets’ descriptions and plastic representations of such scenes, to elaborate still further the picture of this nocturnal festival of fanatic enthusiasm. But, we must ask, what was the meaning of it all? We shall get nearest to the truth if we will exclude as far as possible all theories imported from unrelated provinces of thought and fix our attention solely on what, for the participants, was the result of it all—the result anticipated and consciously proposed by them, and therefore the recognized object, or, at least, one [258] of the recognized objects of these strange proceedings. The participators in these dance-festivals induced intentionally in themselves a sort of mania, an extraordinary exaltation of their being. A strange rapture came over them in which they seemed to themselves and others “frenzied”, “possessed”.[24] This excessive stimulation of the senses, going even as far as hallucination,[25] was brought about, in those who were susceptible to their influence, by the delirious whirl of the dance, the music and the darkness, and all the other circumstances of this tumultuous worship.[26] This extreme pitch of excitement was the result intended. The violently induced exaltation of the senses had a religious purpose, in that such enlargement and extension of his being was man’s only way, as it seemed, of entering into union and relationship with the god and his spiritual attendants. The god is invisibly present among his inspired worshippers. At any rate, he is close at hand, and the tumult of the festival is to bring him completely into their midst.[27] There are various legends about the disappearance of the god into another world and his return thence to mankind.[28] Every second year his return is celebrated, and it is just this Appearance, this “Epiphany” of the god, that gives the reason and the motive of the festival. The Bull-God, in the most ancient and primitive form of the belief, appeared in person among the dancers,[29] or else the imitated roaring of a bull produced by hidden “Mimes of Terror” served to suggest the invisible Presence.[30] The worshippers, too, in furious exaltation and divine inspiration, strive after the god; they seek communion with him. They burst the physical barriers of their soul. A magic power takes hold of them; they feel themselves raised high above the level of their everyday existence; they seem to become those spiritual beings who wildly dance in the train of the god.[31] Nay, more, they have a share in the life of the god himself; nothing less can be the meaning of the fact that the enraptured servants of the god call themselves by the name of the god. The worshipper who in his exaltation has become one with the god, is himself now called Sabos, Sabazios.[32] The superhuman and the infra-human are mingled in his person; like the frenzied god[33] he throws himself upon the sacrificial animal to devour it raw. To make this transformation of their nature outwardly manifest, the participants in the dance-festival wear strange dress: they resemble in their appearance the members of the wild thiasos of the god;[34] the horns they set on their heads recall the horned, bull-shaped god himself, etc.[35] The whole might be called a religious drama, since [259] everything is carefully arranged so as to suggest to the imagination the actual presence of the mysterious figures from the spirit world. At the same time, it is something more than mere drama, for it can hardly be doubted that the players themselves were possessed by the illusion of living the life of a strange person. The awe-inspiring darkness of night, the music, especially that of the Phrygian flute, to which the Greeks attributed the power of making its hearers “full of the god”,[36] the vertiginous whirl of the dance—all these may very well, in suitably disposed natures,[37] have really led to a state of visionary exaltation in which the inspired person saw all external objects in accordance with his fancy and imagination. Intoxicating drinks, to which the Thracians were addicted, may have increased the excitement;[38] perhaps they even used the fumes derived from certain seeds, with which the Scythians and Massagetai knew how to intoxicate themselves.[39] We all know how even to day in the East the smoke of hashish may make men visionaries and excite religious raptures[40] in which the whole of nature is transformed for the enthralled dreamer. “Only when thus possessed did the Bakchai drink milk and honey out of the rivers; their power ceased when they came to themselves again,” says Plato.[41] For them the earth flowed with milk and honey, and the air was filled with the sweet odours of Syria.[42] Hallucination was accompanied by a state of feeling in which pain itself was only an added stimulus to sensation or in which the visionary became completely insensible to pain, as is not unusual in such states of exaltation.[43]

Every detail confirms the picture of a condition of wild excitement in which the limitations of ordinary life seemed to be abolished. These extraordinary phenomena transcending all normal experience were explained by saying that the soul of a person thus “possessed”[44] was no longer “at home”[45] but “abroad”, having left its body behind. This was the literal and primitive meaning understood by the Greek when he spoke of the “ekstasis” of the soul in such orgiastic conditions of excitement.[46] This ekstasis is “a brief madness”, just as madness is a prolonged ekstasis.[47] But the ekstasis, the temporary alienatio mentis of the Dionysiac cult was not thought of as a vain purposeless wandering in a region of pure delusion, but as a hieromania,[48] a sacred madness in which the soul, leaving the body, winged its way to union with the god.[49] It is now with and in the god, in the condition of enthousiasmos; those who are possessed by this are ἔνθεοι; they live and have their being in the god.[50] While still retaining [260] the finite Ego, they feel and enjoy to the full the infinite powers of all life.

In ekstasis the soul is liberated from the cramping prison of the body; it communes with the god and develops powers of which, in the ordinary life of everyday, thwarted by the body, it knew nothing. Being now a spirit holding communion with spirits it is able to free itself from Time and see what only the spiritual eye beholds—things separated from it in time and space. The enthusiastic worship of the Thracian servants of Dionysos gave birth to the inspiration mantikê,[51] a form of prophecy which did not (like prophecy as it invariably appears in Homer) have to wait for accidental, ambiguous and external signs of the god’s will, but on the contrary entered immediately into communion with the world of gods and spirits and in this heightened spiritual condition beheld and proclaimed the future. This power belonged to men only in ekstasis, in religious madness, when “the God enters into men”. The Mainads are the official exponents of this mantikê of inspiration.[52] It is simple and intelligible enough that the Thracian cult of Dionysos, which was throughout a means of stimulating men to a condition of extreme exaltation that they might enter into direct communion with the spirit-world, also encouraged the prophesying of inspired seers, who in their rapt exaltation and frenzy became clairvoyant. Among the Thracian Satrai there was a tribe called the Bessoi who produced prophêtai, and these were in charge of an oracle of Dionysos situated on the top of a high mountain. The prophetess of this temple was a woman who gave prophecies like the Pythia at Delphi, that is to say, in a state of rapt ecstasy. This, at least, is what Herodotos says,[53] and we have many other accounts of Thracian mantikê and its close connexion with the orgiastic cult of Dionysos.[54]