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

by Erwin Rohde

§ 2

It was no longer simply the old Thracian Dionysos who now took his place beside the other great gods of the Greek Olympos as one of themselves. He had become Hellenized and humanized in the meantime. Cities and states celebrated him in yearly festivals as the giver of the vine’s inspiring fruit, as [285] the daimonic patron of vegetation, and the whole of Nature’s rich and flourishing growth. He was worshipped as the incarnation of all natural life and vigour in the fullest and widest sense: as the typical exponent of the most eager enjoyment of life. Even Art, the highest expression of the courage and pride of life, drew much of its inspiration and its aspiration towards the infinite from the worship of Dionysos; and the drama, that supreme achievement of Greek poetry, arose out of the choruses of the Dionysiac festival.

Now the art of the actor consists in entering into a strange personality, and in speaking and acting out of a character not his own. At bottom it retains a profound and ultimate connexion with its most primitive source—that strange power of transfusing the self into another being which the really inspired participator in the Dionysiac revels achieved in his ekstasis. The essential features of the god as he first arrived in Greece from foreign lands, in spite of much alteration and transformation of the primitive type, were thus not entirely lost. There remained also, in addition to the cheerful festivity of the daylight worship of Dionysos, as it was celebrated more particularly in Athens, certain vestiges of the old ecstatic worship which drove men and women over the mountains in nocturnal revelry. In many places there were still celebrated the trieteric festivals[10] in which at recurrent intervals the “Epiphany” of Dionysos, his appearance in the world of men and ascent from the underworld, was solemnized by night. The primitive character of Dionysos the Lord of Spirits and of the Souls of the dead—a very different figure indeed from the tender and delicate Wine-God of later times—was still obscurely present in many features of the Dionysiac festivals, in those of Delphi especially, but even to some extent at Athens too.[11] The ecstasy and the violence, even the dark savagery of the ancient cult did not quite die out in the midst of all the refinements of Greek civilization; recognizable traces of such things were preserved in the Nuktelia and Agrionia and in the various trieteric festivals that were offered to the god in many different localities.[12] In Greece the awful god received the blood of human victims.[13] Nor did the outward signs of delirious frenzy, such as the eating of raw flesh, the killing and tearing in pieces of snakes, entirely disappear.[14] So little indeed, did the Bacchic frenzy that could exalt and lift the worshipper to communion with the god and his train, disappear before the gentler attractions of the gracious wine-god and his festival, that the raving and “possession” which characterized the cult of Dionysos were [286] now actually regarded by foreign peoples as the essentially Hellenic form of the worship of the god.[15]

Thus, a sympathetic understanding of the orgiastic cult and its tremendous capabilities lived on. The “Bacchants” of Euripides still preserves for us a breath of its magic, a trace of the enthusiasm and exaltation that overwhelmed the senses and enthralled the will and consciousness of those who gave themselves up to the powerful Dionysiac influence. Like an irresistible current that overwhelms a swimmer or like the mysterious helplessness that frustrates the dreamer, the magic power emanating from the neighbourhood of the god took complete possession of the worshipper and drove him whither it willed. Everything in the world was transformed for him; he himself was altered. Every character in the play falls under the spell as soon as he enters into the magic circle. Even the modern reader who turns over the pages of Euripides’ poem feels something of that strange power to subdue the soul wielded by the Dionysiac mysteries and experiences in his own person a faint reflexion of these extraordinary states of mind.

Probably as a result of this profound Dionysiac fever which had once raged through Greece like an epidemic and was liable to periodic returns in the nocturnal festivals of the god, there remained in the constitution of the Greek people a certain morbid weakness, a susceptibility to suddenly appearing and as suddenly disappearing crises in which the normal powers of perceiving and feeling were temporarily overthrown. A few stray accounts have come down to us in which we read how such brief attacks of passing insanity ran through whole cities like an infectious disease.[16] The Korybantic form of the malady, which was religious in character[17] and took its name from the daimonic companions of the Phrygian Mountain Mother, was a phenomenon quite well-known to doctors and psychologists. Those affected by such fevers saw strange figures that corresponded to no objective reality, and heard the sound of invisible flutes, until at last they were excited to the highest pitch of frenzy and were seized with a violent desire to dance.[18] The initiation festivals of the Phrygian deities were specially directed to the discharge and so eventually to the cure and “purgation” of such emotional states; the means employed being principally dance and music—more especially the music composed for the flute by the old Phrygian masters; music that could fill the soul with inspiration in suitably disposed natures.[19] By such methods the ecstatic element was not simply suppressed or expelled, it was taken [287] up as a special disciplinary process by the physician-priesthood who recognized in it a vital movement and added it to the regular worship of the god.

In a similar fashion Greece in its most enlightened period accepted and practised the “enthusiastic” cult of Dionysos. Even the tumultuous night-festivals of the Thracian god—festivals closely related to those of Phrygia from which they had borrowed and to which they had given so many features—were made to serve the “purgation” of the ecstatically exalted soul. The worshipper in such festivals “initiated his soul into the company of the god in holy purifications, while he raged over the mountains in Bacchic frenzy”.[20] The purification consisted in this case, too, of violent excitement in which the soul was stimulated to the highest pitch of religious ecstasy. Dionysos as “Bakcheus” awoke the holy madness which he himself again, after it had reached its highest point of intensity, stilled and tranquillized as Lysios and Meilichios.[21] The old Thracian cult of ecstasy has here been modified in a fashion that belonged only to Greek soil and to Greek modes of thought. Legend, allegorizing the facts, threw back this final development of the Dionysiac worship into the remotest antiquity. Even Hesiodic poems[22] related how the daughters of King Proitos of Tiryns wandered in the holy frenzy of Dionysos[23] over the mountain of Peloponnesus, until at last they and all the multitude of women who had joined them were healed and “purified” by Melampous the Seer of Pylos famed in legend.[24] The cure was effected through the intensification of the Dionysiac frenzy “with loud crying and inspired dancing,”[25] and, further, by the use of certain special purificatory devices.[26] Melampous did not put an end to the Dionysiac cult and its “enthusiasm”; he rather regulated and developed it. For this reason Herodotus can even call him the “Founder” of the Dionysiac cult in Greece.[27] Legend, however, always recognized in this “founder” of the Dionysiac festival an adherent of the specifically Apolline form of religion. “Apollo had favoured him especially,” and bestowed upon him the Seership which became ancestral in his family.[28] Legend used him as a type in which the reconciliation between the Apolline and the Dionysiac was figuratively expressed. The reconciliation is an historical fact, but it did not happen in the primitive past of legend.

It is a fact, however, that Apollo did at last, doubtless after prolonged resistance, enter into the closest alliance with this remarkable divine brother of his, the Hellenized Dionysos. [288] The covenant must have been made at Delphi. There at least on the heights of Parnasos, in the Korykian Cave, the trieteric festival of Dionysos was held every second year in the close neighbourhood of Apollo the Lord of Delphi. Nay, more, in Apollo’s own temple the “grave” of Dionysos was shown,[29] and at this grave, while the Thyiades of the god rushed over the mountain heights, the priests of Apollo celebrated a secret festival of their own.[30] The festal year of Delphi was divided, though unequally it is true, between Apollo and Dionysos.[31] To such an extent had Dionysos taken root at Delphi,[32] so closely were the two gods related, that while the front pediment of the temple showed the form of Apollo, the back pediment represented Dionysos—and the Dionysos of the nocturnal ecstatic revels. Apollo, too, shared in the trieteric festival of Dionysos,[33] while Dionysos in later times at the penteteric festival of the Pythia, received, as well as Apollo, his share of sacrifice and the contests of cyclic choruses.[34] The two divinities have many of their titles and attributes in common; in the end the distinction between them seems to disappear entirely.[35]

Antiquity never forgot that at Delphi, the radiating centre of his cult, Apollo was an intruder. Among the older deities whom he supplanted there, the name of Dionysos also occurred;[36] but the Delphic priesthood thought it wise to tolerate the Thracian god and his ecstatic cult that at first seemed so opposed to that of their own deity. Dionysos may have been too vigorous a spirit to allow his worship to be suppressed like that of the Earth divinity who sent the prophetic dreams. Apollo is the “Lord of Delphi”; but the priesthood of the Delphic Apollo, following in this the tendency to religious syncretism which is so recognizable in them, took the worship of Dionysos under their protection. The Delphic Oracle in fact introduced Dionysos into localities where he had hitherto been a stranger, and nowhere so successfully or with such momentous consequences as at Athens.[37] It was this promoting of the Dionysiac form of religion by the great corporation which had the leadership in Greece in all matters of religion, that did more than anything else to secure for the god and his worship that profound, wide-reaching influence on Greek religion that Homer, who knows little even of the Delphic Oracle, completely ignores.

But it was a gentler and more civilized Dionysos whom Delphi popularized and even helped to re-shape; the extravagance of his ecstatic abandonment was pruned and moderated [289] to suit the more sober temper of ordinary city-life, and the brighter, daylight festivals of urban and countryside worship. Hardly a trace of the old Thracian worship of ecstasy and exaltation is discoverable in the Dionysiac worship of Athens. In other places, and especially in the districts ruled over by the Delphic Apollo himself, Dionysiac worship preserved more of its primitive nocturnal wildness. Even Athens, in obedience to an oracular command, sent a religious embassy of elected women to the Delphic Trieteria. It is plain enough however, that in all this there was nothing but a dim counterpart of the former tumultuous mountain-worship of the god, and its profound soul-stirring ceremonies; the worship of Athens and Delphi had reduced all that to a vague ritual traditionalism.[38]