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By Root 1263 0

collective frenzy, especially the frenzy of the women of a city as they break out at the festival of license.”1 Again, it is women who feature most prominently. Yet there were parties during which everyone in town, regardless of gender, got drunk—for instance, the Wine Jugs Day of Anthesteria. By custom you couldn’t break open the earthenware jugs of autumn wine until a particular date in the spring, and Anthesteria was the festival for it. All men and women, including slaves, were each given a jug of strong wine, and whoever finished first won. Children of three years and older joined the fun, with minijugs and real wine. The Greek saying was “Birth, wine jugs, college, and marriage.”2 When infants died they were buried with the minijug that would have been theirs at Wine Jugs Day, had they lived to see it. We have vase paintings of the whole population drunk and wavering down the roads. As one historian put it, “Participation in the time of license creates community and gives the children in particular a new status; the Athenian becomes conscious of his Athenian-ness by the fact that he participates in the Anthesteria celebrations.”3 Solidarity must be enacted.

We are going to follow a Greek woman to one of her annual celebrations—the Thesmophoria—and see what she does there. In order to do this, we have to know something of who she is, of what she’s walking away from when she heads to the festival. Women obeyed their fathers, and then their husbands. Young women were generally married off to older, established men. The girls kept house, served men, did the weaving, and had babies. Many were closer in age to their eldest children than to their husbands. Though their lives were all about bearing children, they did not have rights to the children. Children belonged to the husband and at a young age would likely be taken away for marriage or war. Of course, children taken away for marriage or war most often visit their mothers, so that the cruel loss also occasioned joyous reunions, and dreams of reunions. By the height of the Greek classical age, it was shameful for a woman’s name to be mentioned, even in praise of her obedience and modesty. Women were commonly understood as inferior beings; they were relatively ignored by art, which favored the male nude, and by politics, which categorically dismissed them. Even ideal love was understood as a romance between a grown man and a male youth. The Greek woman was not supposed to be seen outside the house. For rich women this meant life in a lavish courtyard and home, but for most it was sadder even than that. Aristotle complained of how the women of the poor were often in sight, because they had to go to market and do other outdoor chores. We need to know all this because the burdens of these women’s lives will dictate the way that they party. Festival is release, the same way you release a slingshot. We can expect an extreme reaction when a slingshot has been pulled far back. We could also say that the further into a particular cultural fetish you take people, the more the culture shows interest in acting out and discussing the other extreme. At Brazilian carnival and at American frat-house costume parties, tough guys dress up as buxom women. As girls, the boys overdo it. Festival brings out strong opposites and makes visible what was most hidden in daily life—here the girl in the man. At the Thesmophoria, women of ancient Greece were suddenly very visible—to each other—running around the woods loud and naked.

For many years I have thought about public ecstasy. I have wondered about what does this work for people today, or if this work simply didn’t get done for us. I began by looking at what it was that they had and was surprised to find that for over a millennium the same myth kept turning up behind every wild super–freak festival, the myth of Demeter. The fact that this one story keeps coming up at every hint of ecstatic festival, across over a thousand years, is the kind of surprise that demands investigation. As I tell the story, keep in mind that at many of these ecstatic