The Cult of Dionysus

My name is Richard Seaford,

and I am professor of ancient Greek at the University of Exeter.

I'm going to talk in these lectures

about tragedy, religion

and ritual.

Now tragedy at Athens was performed

in the theatre of Dionysus. The God

and the Theatre of Dionysus was in the sanctuary of Dionysus.

It was performed

in

the festival

for Dionysus,

and so there is an intimate collection connection

between

tragedy and religion.

Moreover, the festival of Dionysus

was a festival of the whole city state,

the whole policy. It was as if everybody was taking part.

And what that means is that not only is tragedy

religious but also

political,

and that's important to emphasise, because we

tend to think of drama as separate from

religion and separate from

political. And one of the reasons why

ancient Greek drama is so interesting

is that it is religious

and political

now

in order to understand Greek tragedy, and I'll be saying a lot more about it in

subsequent lectures.

It's important, first of all,

to say something about the God Dionysus. Who was he? What did he mean?

Whenever you're trying to understand an ancient Greek

deity, you have to think of

the human processes which that deity

embodies and represents, so that Aphrodite

is a goddess who represents sex. Zeus

is a God who represents political authority, monarchy and so on.

So what does Dionysus represent? Well, first of all, as most people know,

diagnosis is the god of wine,

and you will see Dionysus depicted very often on

Greek vases. Numerous vases in the British Museum, for example, have pictures

of Dionysus. And one reason for that, of course,

is

that those vases or many of them, were used

at symposia

at wine drinking parties.

And the vases often contain

the satyrs,

the companions of Dionysus.

These are men who are naked or almost naked, with some of the features

of animals. They love dance, they love sex

and so on.

And you frequently see them depicted along with Dionysus in Greek vase painting.

So Dionysus is the god of wine. But he's also

the god

of ecstasy,

the kind of ecstasy that's induced by music

and

dance of a certain kind, perfectly familiar

to our culture.

Now what do these two things have in common?

Wine

and ecstasy? Well, they both, of course, represent

the transformation of consciousness.

So

we're making progress here.

We can see that what diagnosis represents is the transformation

of consciousness.

And if you dress up as a satyr, as you might do in the cult of Dionysus,

that also involves

a kind of transformation

of consciousness.

Now there are two more things that diagnosis

is associated with,

and one of these is mystery cult. And unlike wine and

ecstasy, this needs

explanation because it's something that our culture

doesn't have and is quite unfamiliar with. But it was enormously important

in

the ancient world.

Now, what is mystery cult? And what is the point of mystery cult? Well,

to put it crudely,

mystery Cult is

a rehearsal for death

so that if you are initiated into

mystery cult,

then

you are undergoing a kind of death, Of course, is not a real death.

It's just a rehearsal for death.

And so, as a result of having been through death or a kind of death,

you no longer fear death.

There are various kinds of mystery cult.

There's the mysteries of elusiveness, which was a town quite close to Athens,

and there were the mysteries of Dionysus that was celebrated

in various parts of the Greek world, including

Attica.

Now that two

involves a transformation of consciousness,

death is a transformation of consciousness.

So people, when they were initiated, imagine they were undergoing death.

And this involved a very radical transformation of

consciousness.

Now, the fourth activity or process,

the fourth human experience that Dionysus is particularly associated with is,

of course, the theatre.

Now, let it be said immediately that, of course,

Theatre two is a transformation of consciousness that

if you're acting somebody who isn't you,

then of course you are having your consciousness transformed.

You're becoming Agamemnon or antigen E or whoever it is or a satyr.

Uh, and moreover, the audience, by witnessing this,

may also have their consciousness transformed.

And we know that

in the ancient theatre

the audiences were extremely emotional

and had difficulty in distancing themselves from the

drama and imagining that this was merely drama,

that it wasn't really happening.

So the God Dionysus, these transformative of consciousness,

and he remains an enormously popular

deity, right from

the earliest

evidence for Greek culture.

He's in texts of about 1200 BC,

and his

cult lasts all the way until after

the official foundation of Christianity so in the fourth or even fifth century a. D.

We're still finding

cults of Dionysus in the Greek or Roman world.

In fact, he was perhaps the serious and the most serious rival

to Jesus Christ

in the early

period of Christianity.

So he is enormously popular

as a God, and drama is always almost always performed

within his cult

and his cult, Uh, as I was indicating earlier,

is something that everybody can have access to.

On the one hand, you have mystery cult, which has to be secret,

though

many people can be initiated into it.

And it has to be secret, because

if you're going to undergo a fictitious death to think you're dying, but in the end,

not really dying at all,

then

the whole point of that is that you are you have to be terrified by the experience.

Now, if you know before you undertake the experience

that you're going to be all right in the end that it's all a fiction,

then you're not going to be sufficiently terrified.

So one reason for having the rituals of

mystic initiation

secret was that people wouldn't know as they went into it,

what they were in for and so might be terrified.

So on the one hand you have mystery cult, which is secret.

But on the other hand, you have the great festivals of Dionysus,

which are open to everybody which are open to the whole city state,

the whole policies, great processions,

processions to the theatre, processions through the marketplace,

processions bringing the God

into the city

and so on.

And

they are of enormous political, uh,

significance because, like other festivals involving the whole

palace,

they expressed the solidarity

of the city.

The city was was showing itself to itself and others as a cohesive political entity.

Slaves might take part women, men,

and so on, even

perhaps foreigners.

So

Dionysus is on the one hand secret

and on the other hand, open to everybody. And that's an interesting

combination,

which will be important

for when I come on to discussing the origins of tragedy out of the cult of Dionysus.

In the next lecture