The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [138]
We first-world moderns are not like everybody else. Historically, the average person expected to be a little miserable most of the time, and ecstatic on festival days. We now expect to be happy all the time, but never riotously so. Does the attempt to be happy all the time imply a real loss of the more extreme ends of the emotional spectrum? As a generalization, yes. Agony and ecstasy are linked. Daily comfort does not inspire holiday bursts of jubilation; daily trouble does. As the comedian Eddy Izzard has joked, you’ll never hear a more mournful version of “Hallelujah” as when it is sung by an upper-middle-class church; meanwhile, the poorest community, singing the same song, raises the roof with it. Communities that suffer together party together; and community partying is a very different life experience than partying in little hand-picked groups; or, to put it another way, partying within your private life. Partying with a broad community is especially powerful when people know that the party makes possible the sustenance and betterment of the group. This may be imagined as magical but need not be: enactment creates reality. On a private level we understand this. Thanksgiving with the family is not just something an objective group called “your family” does every November. In reality, the definition of “your family” is the people with whom you have Thanksgiving. Showing up at public parties is a similarly foundational act. Taking part in public worry and grief over a news story creates and reinforces the “public private life.”
The way this works for us today is most dramatically illuminated by looking at the way it worked in ancient Greek festivals and at medieval Europe’s carnivals. Finding out what actually went on at these huge, raucous parties brings a very strong light to what it is that we do today. This section begins with a look at ancient Greeks abandoning themselves in wine, dance, sex, violence, and some weird behavior you didn’t know was possible.
17
Greek Festival
Public madness and jubilation in history has been male and female, and has played a similar role for men and women. Still, it is more often performed by women. From Middle Eastern dancers spinning to holy ecstasy to the gospel-singing, hands-waving jubilation at an African American Southern Baptist church, a lot of public ecstasy is heavily female.
The ideal citizen of the Greek democracy was male. The ideal celebrant was female. This has not been pointed out as such, to my knowledge, but my claim is by no means controversial. Women wail and whirl. Nor is it controversial that, as much as the democratic assembly kept Athens great, the festivals kept Athens great, and made her what she was. Democracy was male. Festival was female. So is the enacted madness of mourning in these same cultures. Public ecstasy is heavily poor, too, and heavily powerless. The meek inherit the bacchanal.
In the record of history, the use of the term ecstasy is not common. People speak of religious ecstasy, drug ecstasy, sex ecstasy, and ancient festival ecstasy. That’s about it. The high at the festival was created by excitements of religion, drugs, and eroticism, but it was mostly about the crowd, and the stories it acted out. Across centuries upon centuries, there was one particular story that kept appearing at the heart of the Greek public ecstasies. This story is worth a close look, not just because it is a lush tale of sex, betrayal, violence, and unfathomably unlikely reunions. It will keep reappearing throughout our history and will shed light on the topsy-turvy of medieval carnival and on every aspect of our own times.
Walter Burkert, a scholar of Greek history, wrote of Greek religion being experienced as “frenzy” and ecstasy: “ritual and institutionalized,