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By Root 1192 0

them. We all know about the infanticide of the ancient world. Sometimes families decided not to raise a child and instead put it out on a public hillside. But this was often not infanticide as much as putting the child up for adoption: many of these babies were taken home by someone else, often to be raised as a servant. In Greek literature, when people change their mind about a baby, they tend to go looking for her or him with the expectation of finding the baby somewhere among the population, and the babies tend to be found. The women’s world was very marked by their babies, and very haunted with loss. But also haunted by recovery, in all senses of the word.

I am going to give you some details about two more festivals, and I want you to note whether any of the details, of the story or the ritual or the party, seem particularly attractive to you; whether you wish you could have taken part. Like the Thesmophoria, the festival of Dionysus was very ancient, and in its origins it was also for women only. Not one of the original Olympian gods, Dionysus, god of the bacchanal, was also called “Dionysus the twice-born.” His worship came from outside Greece and caught on like crazy. One popular version of his origins says that when Zeus and Semele were expecting the baby Dionysus, Zeus killed Semele with a lightning bolt. Zeus found the boy’s fetal heart and tucked it into his own thigh, where the baby healed and gestated, and whence he was born. In some versions, Dionysus’s mother is Persephone (yes, Zeus’s daughter), and after the child is born, Zeus’s jealous wife, Hera, lures the boy away with toys and has him torn to shreds. His grieving grandmother, Demeter, finds the heart and nurtures Dionysus to rebirth. Lions and polar bears kill their cubs sometimes. Male mammals worry about how their stature will change as a result of a new generation. We are sophisticated animals, but we still sense the threat that we pose to each other, and we have the brains to worry it into the ground. For women this means a hostile world, but the myth also speaks to the women’s own murderous frustration. Families draw on each other in complex, subterranean ways that no one ever fully fathoms. The Dionysus myth suggested them in vivid, violent terms.

The cult of Dionysus is about wine, sex, dancing, and madness. There was violence, too. Part of the festival was the sparagmos, which means “tearing apart,” and the omophagia, which means “consuming raw”: the women killed goats, fawns, and other animals, then tore them to pieces and ate the flesh raw. The women hunted for some of these animals themselves during the festival. Unlike the Thesmophoria, the Dionysian festival took place not inside the city walls, but outside them, in the wilderness. The women dressed in fawn pelts. At night they drank wine, sang, and chanted. We have vase paintings showing them dancing with their heads thrown back, throats exposed, eyes rolled back, and we have descriptions of them cawing, bleating, and roaring like wild animals. They feasted, and again they had bread and cake shaped like phalluses and pudenda. This time pomegranate seeds are forbidden. This is no fertility ritual: the women are in no mood to take in seed. In a rage, the father has killed us, and our baby. Then we are Demeter, the grandmother, finding our grandson’s heart and healing him. The women acted out Dionysus’s birth, death, and second birth. Dionysus is almost always surrounded by maenads—the word means “mad women”—frenzied female worshippers, and the celebrants took on that role, too. Later on in Greek history, Dionysus was surrounded by frenzied male worshippers as well. Greek theater originated in the performances that took place at the festival of Dionysus. The festival would also be a common setting for plays.

Euripides’ Bacchae, the latest of the classical Greek tragedies, and one of the most psychologically interesting, is all about the Dionysian festival. A brash young king, Pentheus, looks forward to spying on the dancing women with the expectation of finding them “in the woods, going