Chapter VIII: Dionysos (4)

Again, with the Maenad worshippers there is the same transformation.

The delicate red-figured kotylos[1143] in fig. 141 from the National Museum in Athens is like a little twofold text on the double aspect of the worship of Dionysos. On the obverse is a Maenad about to execute her old savage ritual of tearing a kid asunder. In a moment she will raise her bent head and chant[1144]:

‘O glad, glad on the Mountains
To swoon in the race outworn,
When the holy fawn-skin clings
And all else sweeps away,
To the joy of the quick red fountains,
The blood of the hill-goat torn,
The glory of wild-beast ravenings
Where the hill-top catches the day,
To the Phrygian, Lydian mountains
’Tis Bromios leads the way.’

On the reverse for counterpart is a sister Maenad. She dances in gentle ecstasy, playing on her great timbrel. She is all for the service of the Muses, and she might sing[1145]:

‘But a better land is there
Where Olympus cleaves the air,
The high still dell, where the Muses dwell,
Fairest of all things fair.
O there is Grace, and there is the Heart’s Desire,
And peace to adore thee, thou Spirit of guiding Fire.’

* * * * *

There are some to whom by natural temperament the religion of Bromios, son of Semele, is and must always be a dead letter, if not a stumbling-block. Food is to such a troublesome necessity, wine a danger or a disgust. They dread all stimulus that comes from without, they would fain break the ties that link them with animals and plants. They do not feel in themselves and are at a loss to imagine for others the sacramental mystery of life and nutrition that is accomplished in us day by day, how in the faintness of fasting the whole nature of man, spirit as well as body, dies down, he cannot think, he cannot work, he cannot love, how in the breaking of bread, and still more in the drinking of wine, life spiritual as well as physical is renewed, thought is re-born, his equanimity, his magnanimity are restored, reason and morality rule again. But to this sacramentalism of life most of us bear constant, if partly unconscious, witness. We will not eat with the man we hate, it is felt a sacrilege leaving a sickness in body and soul. The first breaking of bread and drinking of wine together is the seal of a new friendship; the last eaten in silence at parting is more than many words. The sacramental feast of bread and wine is spread for the newly married, for the newly dead.

Those to whom wine brings no inspiration, no moments of sudden illumination, of wider and deeper insight, of larger human charity and understanding, find it hard to realize what to others of other temperament is so natural, so elemental, so beautiful—the constant shift from physical to spiritual that is of the essence of the religion of Dionysos. But there are those also, and they are saintly souls, who know it all to the full, know the exhilaration of wine, know what it is to be drunken with the physical beauty of a flower or a sunset, with the sensuous imagery of words, with the strong wine of a new idea, with the magic of another’s personality, yet having known, turn away with steadfast eyes, disallowing the madness not only of Bromios but of the Muses and of Aphrodite. Such have their inward ecstasy of the ascetic, but they revel with another Lord, and he is Orpheus.