III
We turn now to Greek sources; and here the material is as abundant as it is interesting; the examples to be given are therefore restricted in number, but they will be sufficient to illustrate the important part that this type of dance played in Greek religious ritual.
By way of introduction the following words of Farnell[194] will be found instructive; he is dealing with the earliest period of Greek religion, and in writing about the worship of Dionysos, says he was
vaguer in outline (than Apollo or Athene), a changeful power conceived more in accordance with daimonistic, later with pantheistic, thought, incarnate in many animal-shapes, and operative in the life-processes of the vegetative world; and an atmosphere of Nature-magic accompanied him;
then he goes on to say that
the central motives of this oldest form of ritual were the birth and death of the god—a conception pregnant of ideas that were to develop in the religious future, but alien to the ordinary Hellenic theology, though probably not unfamiliar to the earlier Cretan-Mycenaean creed. But the death of this god was partly a fact of ritual; he was torn to pieces by his mad worshippers and devoured sacramentally, for the bull or the goat or the boy that they rent and devoured was supposed to be his temporary incarnation, so that by this savage, and at times cannibalistic, communion they were filled with his blood and his spirit, and acquired miraculous powers. By such an act, and—we may suppose—by the occasional use of intoxicants and other nervous stimulants, the psychic condition that this worship evoked was frenzy and ecstasy, which might show itself in a wild outburst of mental and physical force, and which wrought up the enthusiastic feeling of self-abandonment, whereby the worshipper escaped the limits of his own nature and achieved a temporary sense of identity with the god, which might avail him even after death. This privilege of ecstasy might be used for the practical purposes of vegetation-magic, yet was desired and proclaimed for its own sake as a more intense mood of life. This religion preached no morality, and could ill adapt itself to civic life; its ideal was supernormal psychic energy.
It is only one aspect of the ritual of this religion with which we are now concerned, and which is to be illustrated by the examples given, namely, the ecstatic dance which played such an important part in it. Therefore we naturally think of the mythic Maenads[195], and more especially of their historical counterpart, the Thyiads, who are much the same as the female Bacchantes. According to the myth concerning the origin of the Thyiads, they were so called because the first priestess of Dionysos was named Thyia, and she performed orgiastic dances in his honour; hence all women who danced, or “went mad,” in honour of Dionysos were called Thyiads after her. The Maenads are depicted on many Greek vases and bas-reliefs, so that we can form a good idea of the kind of dances they were supposed to perform; and these were, of course, the actual form of the dances executed by the Thyiads. Thus, for example, on a vase in the Naples Museum four Maenads are represented dancing; two, with head thrown back, carry the thyrsus, a staff with vine-leaves, at the top of which was a pine-cone. One of them has also a torch; two others, while dancing, play, one a tambourine, the other a pipe[196]. Or again, on a cup in the Athens National Museum a Maenad is represented playing a tambourine, or timbrel, and dancing in wild fashion[197]. Another example is the dancing, accompanied by instrumental music, which is portrayed on the beautiful cylix of Hieron, “perhaps the most exquisite that ceramography has left us[198]”; the movements of the maidens are superbly executed. But instances of this kind could be greatly multiplied; they all exhibit one or other phase of orgiastic dance, “the same mad revelry, the utter exhaustion and prostrate sleep[199]”; and they represent the kind of dancing which historically was performed by the Thyiads. “Maenad,” as Miss Harrison says, “is the Mad One, Thyiad the Rushing Distraught One, or something of the kind ... Mad One, Distraught One, Pure One, are simply ways of describing a woman under the influence of a god, of Dionysos[200]”; and, of course, this madness could be caused by any other orgiastic divinity.
Those who took part in these dances are described as “raving and possessed”; their over-wrought state caused them to see visions[201]; the god was believed to be present, though invisible; and at the Dionysos festivals the maidens celebrated his presence[202], thus direct contact with him by his worshippers was effected[203].
In an interesting passage in Pausanias we read:
But I could not understand why he (i.e. Homer, in Od. XI. 581) spoke of the fair dancing grounds of Panopeus till it was explained to me by the women whom the Athenians call Thyiades. The Thyiads are Attic women who go every other year with the Delphian women to Parnassos, and there hold orgies in honour of Dionysos. It is the custom of these Thyiads to dance at various places on the road from Athens, and one of these places is Panopeus. Thus, the epithet which Homer applies to Panopeus seems to allude to the dance of the Thyiads[204].
The finest and most graphic description of this ecstatic dance is that given by Aristophanes in the Frogs, 325 ff. which is sung by the chorus of the Mystae:
Thou that dwellest in the shadow
Of great glory here beside us,
Spirit, Spirit, we have hied us
To thy dancing in the meadow!
Come, Iacchus; let thy brow
Toss its fruited myrtle bough;
We are thine, O happy dancer; O our comrade, come and guide us!
Let the mystic measure beat:
Come in riot fiery feet;
Free and holy all before thee,
And thy Mystae wait the music of thy feet!
Spirit, Spirit, lift the shaken
Splendour of thy tossing torches!
All the meadow flashes, scorches:
Up, Iacchus, and awaken!
Come, thou star that bringest light
To the darkness of our rite,
Till thine old men dance as young men, dance with every thought forsaken.
Of the dulness and the fear
Left by many a circling year:
Let thy red light guide the dances
Where thy banded youth advances,
To be joyous by the blossoms of the mere![205]
Iacchus was the name by which Dionysos was known at Eleusis[206].
Pindar, in the Pythian Ode, refers to the dancing of the Thyiads at the annual festival celebrated in honour of Pan, when, according to Herodotus, VI. 105, sacrifice was offered and a torch procession took place:
I would pray to the Mother to loose her ban,
The holy goddess to whom, and to Pan,
Before my gate, all night long,
The maids do worship with dance and song[207].
Reference may also be made to Pausanias, V. xvi. 5, where we read of the “Sixteen Women” who get up two choruses, that of Physcoa and that of Hippodamia; the former was loved by Dionysos, and she is said to have been the first to pay reverence to him; and therefore “among the honours which Physcoa receives is a chorus named after her and arranged by the Sixteen Women.”
The Thyiads are, as already mentioned, the same as the female Bacchantes often spoken of Pausanias, for example, makes a reference to them:
... Beyond the theatre is a temple of Dionysos; the image of the god is of gold and ivory, and beside it are female Bacchantes in white marble. They say that these women are sacred, and that they rave in honour of Dionysos[208].
It is to these that Euripides refers in the Bacchae[209]. Diodorus speaks of them thus:
... In many towns of Greece every alternate year Bacchanalian assemblies of women gather together, and it is the custom for maidens to carry the thyrsus and to revel together, honouring and glorifying the god; and for the (married) women to worship the god in organized bands, and to revel in every way to celebrate the presence of Dionysos, imitating thereby the Maenads who from of old, it is said, constantly attended the god[210].
The male correlatives of Maenads, or rather Thyiads, are the Kouretes, who took their part in the Orphic mysteries. They were
the young population considered as worshipping the young male god, the Kouros; they were “mailed priests” because the young male population were naturally warriors. They danced their local war-dance over the new-born child, and, because in those early days the worship of the Mother and the son was not yet sundered, they were attendants (prospoloi) on the Mother also ... they are divine (theoi), and their dancing is sacred[211].
Clement of Alexandria refers to them thus:
The mysteries of Dionysos are wholly inhuman; for while he was still a child and the Kouretes were dancing their armed dance about him, the Titans stole upon him, deceived him with childish toys, and tore him to pieces[212].
A typical instance of myth regarded as reality. We are only dealing here, however, with a few examples of the ecstatic dance among the Greeks. Those given will suffice for present purposes.
It will have been noticed that all these examples present the ecstatic dance in its milder form; it is comparable with the dance of the Israelite prophets, not with that of the Syrian prophets of Baal. The fact is that this latter form of worship was not popular among the Greeks. It is true, the worship of Attis, in which the ecstatic dance in its most barbaric form figured prominently, is mentioned in Pausan. VII. xvii. 9, XX. 3; but this is quite exceptional, for the rites, of Syrian origin, which were performed in honour of Kybele and Attis were un-Hellenic and did not appeal to the Greeks.
“The barbarous and cruel character of the worship, with its frantic excesses, was doubtless repugnant to the good taste and humanity of the Greeks, who seem to have preferred the kindred but gentler rites of Adonis. Yet,” continues the same writer, “the same features which shocked and repelled the Greeks may have positively attracted the less refined Romans and barbarians of the West. The ecstatic frenzies, which were mistaken for divine inspiration, the mangling of the body, the theory of a new birth, and the remission of sins through the shedding of blood, have all their origin in savagery, and they naturally appealed to peoples in whom the savage instincts were still strong[213].”
Among the Romans, under the Empire and onwards, this worship became prominent, and was still existent in the 4th century, for Symmachus tells of the celebrations of the festivals of Magna Mater[214]. Its special feature was the orgiastic dance of the priests[215], accompanied by song, which culminated in self-laceration. The third day of this festival of Kybele and Attis was known as the Day of Blood (Dies Sanguinis); the Archigallus or high-priest drew blood from his arms and presented it as an offering. Nor was he alone in making this bloody sacrifice:
Stirred by the wild barbaric music of clashing cymbals, rumbling drums, droning horns, and screaming flutes, the inferior clergy whirled about in the dance with waggling heads and streaming hair, until, rapt in a frenzy of excitement, and insensible to pain, they gashed their bodies with potsherds or slashed them with knives in order to bespatter the altar and the sacred tree with their flowing blood[216].
Thus, while among the Romans during the early centuries of the Christian era, and owing to the influx of oriental cults, the ecstatic dance in its most barbaric form was prominent, among the Greeks this form of it made but little appeal, and it is only rarely that reference is made to it. But although this extreme and sanguinary form was distasteful to the Greeks, the ecstatic dance was with them of a very wild character; and it is possible that the purpose of this type of dance among Greeks and Romans respectively may have had something to do with its form. Reference is made to this point below (see [p. 138]), but we must first take a brief glance at the ecstatic dance as practised among some of the uncultured races.