The Bacchantes. Leon Daudet
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a talent early in life for driving people mad, whch he was forced to use on a frequent basis when he grew up and began traveling the world, in company with a strange entourage that included a group of bacchantes, or maenads, who had apparently started out as his nurses but were now his sexual partners; they were prone to frenzy and to tearing people apart. His entourage also included the satyr-like Silenus, who later achieved fame in the singular as a protagonist of the farcical “satyr-plays” that provided early comedy relief from theatrical tragedies, although some Classical accounts refer to sileni in the plural and have difficulty distinguishing them from satyrs or fauns, although they were generally imagined as older, fatter and generally more repulsive. While being harassed by Hera, Dionysus was allegedly aided by the mother-goddess Cybele, who had a similar retinue of male followers, the Corybantes, similarly famed for dancing and wild behavior.
Exactly how Dionysus the demigod was awarded his promoton of full godhood, as the god of wine, is unclear, but he appears to have been in an ambiguous position in many of the tales of his wanderings, which mostly involve hostility on the part of mortal kings, either by virtue of disputes relating to Semele’s family or insults leveled at his supposedly-effeminate costume, and usually end with mass epidemics of madness and people being torn apart; the best-known of those stories is, inevitably, the one dramatized by Euripides in the tragedy The Bacchae. His travels apparently took him to many remote parts of the world before he finally took up his permanent abode in Olympus.
Anthropologists tend to account for this “original” account of the mythical Dionysus by hypothesizing that he was originally a Thracian or Phrygian god whose worship spread into Greece and whose native properties had to be accommodated into the Greek traditions by means of mythical invention, along with explanations for the conflicts associated with the ideological invasion. There was, however, a drastic transformation of the idea and image of Dionysus when his name became associated with the Orphic Mysteries, a new cult that emerged in the sixth century B.C., whose beliefs and rites were kept secret. Scholarly opinions vary widely—as they usually do in the absence of any reliable information—as to what the Orphic Mysteries actually involved, and how important they were as inflences on the burgeoning philosophy of their era, but whatever view is taken, the citation of Dionysus and his hectic rites in association with the new cult by late Classical commentators, who were probably also working in an informational void dusted and cobwebbed with rumor, is not only odd but intriguingly paradoxical.
Orpheus was a Thracian minstrel famous for his musical acumen; his patron deity was Apollo, who was said to have taught him to play the lyre. He features in some of the best-known stories of Greek myth, including his participation in the voyage of the Argo and, most famously of all, his ill-fated descent into the realm of Hades in the attempt to recover his lost love Eurydice. Orpheus died by virtue of being torn to pieces by women, for reasons that remain unclear, although one of the explanations offered in that they were bacchantes annoyed by some insult to Dionysus. The Orphic cult that developed to honor him—even though he was never promoted to godhood—presumably had a heavy emphasis on music, and is thought by some anthropologists to have been a considerable influence on Pythagorean philosophy, whose theory of numerical wisdom is said to have been initially based on the observation of mathematical relationships in music. That association suggested to some scholars that the cult might have been inclined to thoughtful asceticism, but the reputation it developed in the latter part of the Classical Era was very different, alleging that its rites were Dionysiac—albeit involving a considerable revison of the history of Dionysus.
The “Orphic” version of Dionysus’ life-story is mostly derived from Nonnus’ forty-eight-book epic Dionysiaca, written in the late fourth or early fifth centuy A.D. The story told by Nonnus identifies Dionysus with another, previously obscure, god named Zagreus, supposedly fathered by Zeus on the Underworld goddess Perspehone, who was torn to pieces by Titans. In order to conflate the two, Zagreus/Dionysus was said to have subsequently reincarnated by Zeus via Semele (thus being twice-born in a literal manner). Persephone, the daughter of the fertility goddesss Demeter, was sometimes included in rites addressed to her mother, specifically those celebrated at Eleusis, in which Persephone was known as Kore [the Maiden], and which became famous as the Eleusian Mysteries. Converting Dionysus into the child of Persephone/Kore and involving him in the Orphic Mysteries thus forged a link of supposition between the two sets of rites, of a kind typical of attempts to compile all-embracing “secret histories” of mysticism and magic, enthusiasm for which does not seem to have wavered over the last three thousand years.
Whatever the Orphic cult might have amounted to in its Hellenic origins, subsequent “revivals” of it in the Roman Empire were, in essence, lifestyle fantasies akin to those used to dress up many orgiastic instutitions, typified in English history by the so-called Hellfire Clubs of the eighteenth century. It was, obviously, the supposed Dionysiac associations of the Orphic Mysteries that recommended them to Romans (and, later, to Frenchmen and Englishmen) desirous of ennobling their drunken and licentious revels with some kind of antique and quasi-mystical gloss, thus adding to their piquancy. If, therefore, there had been any echoes of the Orphic Mysteries in Pompeii in 79 A.D. other than merely decorative wall-decorations, they would undoubtedly have adopted the Dionysiac form.
The association of Dionysus with the Orphic mysteries forged an unlikely link between Dionysus and Apollo, two gods that would seem to have so little in common as to be intrinisically antagonistic—a thesis and antithesis crying out, as it were, for an explanatory synthesis. As to whether or not the odd couple in question played any significant role in inspiring Pythagorean philosophy (and thus, by extension, Platonic, neo-Platonic and Gnostic philosophy, and, by further extenson, the entire tradition of modern occultism) we can only speculate. Inevitably, people have—and no one in modern times took up that invitation more determinedly and elaborately than Friedrich Nietzsche, who reshaped the myth of Dionysus yet again, for his own imaginative purposes.
In Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Muzik (1872; tr. as The Birth of Tragedy [from the Spirit of Music]) Nietsche proposed that there is a crucial dichomotmy between Apollinian and Dionysian modes of thought, the former superimposing an element of formal differentiation on sensory experience while the latter seeks to receiver its allegedly-ecstastic rawness. Life, according to Nietzsche, involves a perpetual struggle between the two tendencies, in which either may get the upper hand, either individually or culturally. In his view, Greek tragedy was the highest form of art becuae it contrived to fuse the two quests into a seamless synthesis, exposing its aficionados to the full range of the human condition. Nietzsche hypothesized that the Dionysian element was represented by the chorus, originally consisting, in this conjecture, of satyrs, and the Apollinian element by the actors, whose performance he views as a kind of dream vision, involving the ecstatic ritual dismembering of Dionysus by the Bacchantes. In Nietzche’s proposed historical schema, however, this synthesis withered and died after the era of Aschylus and Sophocles, under the baleful influence of Euripides and Socrates, and the advent of rationality, whih suppressed the Dionysian element and detached the Apollinian from its dream compponent—a suppression that lasted into the modern era, when music, especially that of Richard Wagner, began once again to offer some hope for a redemption of the synthesis.
By 1886, when a new edition was issued, Nietzche had changed his mind about the book, and all-but-repudiated it argument in a new preface, but he subsequently went back, at least partially, on the recantation. In his later works his references to the Dionysian seem to refer to the synthesis or resynthesis of the Apollinian and the Dionysian rather than to the separate and antithetical Dionysian—perhaps understandably, since the latter was the element in need of recovery following the victory of narrow rationality and the primacy of “differentiative” experience over “raw” experience.
In Les Bacchantes Daudet is clearly following in Nietzsche’s footsteps in his depiction of the Master’s attempts to recover a new synthesis that will marry (or at least couple) the creative aspects of science with what he considers to be the ultimate source of all creativity. Having one been “killed” by jealousy of his talents, and then miraculously reborn, he still requires a dramatic resynthesis of his creativity, which is conceived, in an ecentrically elaborate fashion, in terms of Orphic/Dionysian initiation. Although the two painings by Gustave Courbet cited in the story (the second of which appears to be fictitious) do not include the famous image of “The Origin