Set Loose The Dark Bees
The Charisma and Terror of Dionysus
From Lorca a fortnight ago, I want now to move to Dionysus and especially The Bacchae, the play by Euripides where we receive a vivid (and terrifying) image of the deity. I’m working on a new version so it’s uppermost in my mind. As will become clear, he’s hard to pin down. He’s not all conch blows and manic revels, though because of the play’s fame it’s easy to freeze-frame him like that. Over the years I’ve spent more time brooding on him than any other of the Mediterranean pantheon. He won’t leave me alone.
I once heard that in the Irish myth-world, our stories––human stories––are the ones the Sidhe (fairy) storytellers tell around the fire at night. That our life is observed and commented on. That gives me a little bit of a chill, and an ambition to try and live a life worthy of being told round an Otherworldly fire. And in The Bacchae, our human ambitions and divine slandering have definitely got the attention of Dionysus. Whoops.
Much is made of Dionysus being a kind of early Christ figure, but other than some valid connections to the vine, John’s knowledge of the Greek world and a shared irritation at human hubris, I can’t be swallowing that particular Kool-Aid. The Beatitudes is surely not The Bacchae for one of many, many issues, though Dionysus has his gentler moments. There are occasional foreshadowings and Christ-themes (as we find in many myths), but Dionysus’s response to those themes is often way different. Books on these subjects and others are at the very bottom of the page.
Ok, let’s begin with the playwright.
We know barely a thing about Euripides’ life, he likely lived somewhere between 485–407 BC. Likely born on the island of Salamis, then resided mostly in the town of Phyla, and died in Macedonia. It seems that a great deal of Euripides’ creative work was as a playwright, and his plays––a solid ninety-two is the recorded estimate––were performed at the festival of Dionysus in Athens. This was no intimate affair for a few dozen sophisticates, the Dionysia was a festival that could attract an eye-watering fifteen to twenty-thousand spectators. These were masked plays, often with three male actors backed by a chorus.
The chorus had greater importance than we may expect––they did a lot of the heavy lifting when it came to the poetry, all sorts of ritual touches, a note of conservative objectivity as things got really nutty. We wonder about what kind of messages they were attempting to transmit to their huge and mostly male audiences. The Bacchae is hardly a conventional morality piece––it strains against Greek protocol, confuses, sends mis-signals, is horribly brutal and certainly does not culminate in a wedding.
Dionysus Dikerotes––the two-horned one
Dionysus Bromios––the roarer
Dionysus Bassarios––the fox
***
The Bacchae
(an excerpt)
Boom. I’m back.
Dionysus the shit kicker, pot stirrer, shuddering spirit, dashing vine, The Great Loosener.
Take me in.
I’ve squeezed into the bones and blubber of a human and returned to Thebes, where mother birthed me. As best she could. It was unconventional. And who’s mother, you ask? I’ll tell you.
She’s Semele, daughter of Cadmus. My father (as if you didn’t know) is Zeus, the cloud compeller. I’m casting my beady all over today––there’s the rivers Dirce and Isemus still crashing along, and tucked up by the palace is my mother’s tomb. Didn’t end well for mother. Grizzly.
She’s a Lightning Maiden. Got blown to smithereens mid-romp with Zeus. She wanted to see him with ‘no filter’. Not like a human sees him, but as a god does. It was father’s wife, Hera, who seeded that horrendous idea, and this whole place still has flaky white ashes of mother floating in the air. It never cools off, I mean never. Whole place got incinerated as a memento of quite what it means to screw the King of the Gods. This here was mother’s home back in the day.
Myself, I’m well-travelled, and have never required a passport.
I’ve wandered the corn-yellow desert of Phrygia and Lydia. Processed the majesty of Persia (horribly hot), past the fortresses of Bactria, and the Medes with their perpetual, endless wastes. Arabia didn’t phase me, and I saw Greeks and foreigners living cheek to jowl by high-towered settlements by the ocean. All this I saw, all this I experienced, I sucked into my mouth and slowly chewed on. Mastication they call it.
And wherever I went, I allowed myself to reveal myself. I became more and more of my naturalness. Wherever I went I set loose my rites, set loose my mysteries. All of Asia succumbed to the strange bark of my delirium, my archaic dance, my deep song, and now, finally it’s a home coming. I am here at the place of my birth, Thebes.
I’ve things to settle.
My aunts, of all people, are claiming I’m a sham. Trickster, smoke and mirrors. That mum had never slept with Zeus at all, and he blew her up as vengeance for her claiming such fame. That she was completely ordinary. Mundane even. That the whole thing was wayward chicanery. It’s not an opinion they’ve kept to themselves. They gossip about it over cupfuls of my very grape. Don’t they think I can hear them through the ear of the wine? Their slander blows ripples over the purple surface of my nature. They’ve done this over and over. Twitter twitter twitter.
I’m not having that. That’s my reputation at stake, y’know? So I stung the heretics up. Blam blam.
I’m going to bring some awe to this place. I want magical women in nothing but fawnskin and waggling green fennel wands tipped with a pinecone––with my pummelling spells smeared on the stem if they are surrounded by spears. I will stamp up the grapes of their blood to crazy red daggers of desire. It is I that curates the madness, I shape it, twist it, turn it up, dial it down, they shudder to my particular whims. By the time I’ve finished my efficacious masterclass, no one will doubt the legitimacy of my mother’s story, and exactly who I am. I can’t believe I’m having to do this.
Come my dear Bacchae!
Bang! bang! bang! You’ve never seen anything like this one.
Crete was where the songs first sprung, from the drumming, dancing warriors who surrounded Zeus in his dark cave as an infant. They passed those wild hymns to Rhea, the Great Mother, who slipped them to the Satyrs and now they charge in libellous wonder through us. It is the sound that raves as we writhe in the dust, tear the flesh, see the meadow:
Gushing with milk
Gushing with wine
Gushing with nectar
Even the mountain has a crush on Dionysus.
The one that shakes his dark curls in fresh dewy air, lifts flaming pine in his hands to smoke up the whole wild world. He runs jagged and loud and fast and thunderous, disrobing the ponderous, cautious, timid.
Set loose the dark bees
Set loose the dark bees
Set loose the dark bees
***
With the Great Loosener we are tracking something that is almost untrackable. The famed wine rituals and frenzied dancing are just the very tip of what Dionysus is, the vastness of himself is by necessity hidden from public view, underground, tucked away, chthonic. Despite a global following there was no centralised priesthood, and his rituals seem organic, reflexive and site specific. They are a movable phenomena, attached to the intuition of the participants rather than identical from country to country. The theatre and street revels are a fairly late addition, a jaunty flowering from an old root system, really entering their prime in the classical period.