In the search for miraculous phenomena we should visit the
ancient cult of the Greek god Dionysos.
Nietzsche’s first book was about this god and the birth of tragedy. The
very wild nature mysticism of Dionysos appealed to the young Nietzsche, no
doubt bored by the pieties of his religious upbringing.
The cult of Dionysos was in fact a prolonged “Me Too
Movement”; for the chief clientele, the god’s devoted base , were women. The new
Dionysiac religion was a dance cult that attracted women disposed to cut loose
from their ordinary reality, confined, tedious, and oppressed as it was. The
sound of the flute was a call to uncoil and express themselves freely. And the
ladies rocked! All the pent up
resentment triggered the nocturnal mountain dances that became increasingly
frenzied.
The peak of the dance rite was the point where the mostly
women participants are in a state of ecstasis—completely out of their normal
minds. The group in an altered
state makes possible an epiphany of Dionysos. The ecstatic women, enthralled by the music and dance magic
of Dionysos, acquire uncanny powers, physical and mental.
Their behavior is weird and terrifying. With superhuman
strength they tear trees up by their roots. They seize deer and leopards, rip
them apart or suckle them. They are immune to fire and pain and poison, and
will not be bound by chains. The rocks and the streams around them come to life
and milk and honey commence gushing from the earth. Everything is unlocked, the
hidden becomes manifest, the impossible rips into reality.
These orgies of ecstasy were ultimately healing rites. The women were called maenads. Meaning something like ‘manically
inspired.’
Strange things happened during these collective frenzies. The
following is a very early experiment in the parapsychology of religion. The story is about what happened at a
festival that celebrates a wine god and where wine is repeatedly said to materialize during the
festivals. In one case, Walter
Otto writes: “. . . three empty basins were put into a room in the presence of
citizens and any foreigners who happened to be present. The room was then locked and sealed,
and anyone who wanted to could bring his own seal to add to the seal on the
door. On the next day the seals
remained unbroken, but those entering the room found that the three basins had
been filled with wine. Pausanias . . .
assures us that the citizens and the foreigners vouched under oath for
the reliability of the report”.
This happened during the seasonal festivals of the wine god. Otto continues: “The most amazing miracle, however, was
that of the so-called ‘one-day vines’ (ephemeroi
ampeloi). These flowered and bore fruit in the course of a few hours during
the festivals of the epiphany of the god.”
As for reactions to the Dionysiac Me Too Movement, conservatives
found it problematic having to deal with ecstatic women dancers taking to the
mountain trails, abandoning their normal subservient posts at home. The more conservative Olympian
religionists were not comfortable with a religion that encourages wives,
mothers, and sisters to go out of their minds and perform miracles. By Zeus! It’s all so utterly irregular!
Euripides’ great play was about this war between rationalistic
male dominance and female rebels powered by a dance cult. Called Bacchantes, it’s about Pentheus who wants to keep the maenads under
control. Much of the action
consists of dialogue between Dionysos himself and Pentheus who argues that the
maenads had no right to their socially disruptive and morally suspect ecstasies.
But Dionysos strongly disagrees;
the god must be obeyed..
Pentheus attempts to spy on the maenads during their sacred dances;
but they turn on him and tear him limb from limb. This is capped by more tragic irony: one of the inspired
madwomen who dismembers Pentheus is his own mother.
The cult of Dionysos began in the 8th century BCE
and persisted in one form or another into the common era. That long recurrent life of Dionysiac consciousness
served the needs of maenadic women
whose creative potential was squelched to the point of exploding
The question to ask today: how to liberate the miracle
potential of women with maenadic dispositions? This seems like a topic for a
new science of the future. Given the possibility of unleashing extraordinary
transformations of nature, we should ask: are there enough maenads among us
that can be enlisted in the attempt to accelerate human evolution? Clearly, the dominant male shapers of
civilization have bungled it, literally turning the planet into a hell on earth. So perhaps the maenads of the world
need at nightfall to scurry to the mountain top and dance with the god of
indestructible life. May they come
back down the mountain and enlighten the spiritually retarded half of the
species.
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