The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [144]
Some held young gazelles or wild wolf cubs
and fed them on their own white milk, the ones
who’d left behind at home a new-born child
whose breasts were still swollen full of milk.
It is nice to see the wolf show up this way, as a nursling of the mature woman rather than as the monster stalking the girl and grandmother. The women acted like wolves, in that they tore at and ate live flesh, and they made wolves human in nursing them. The image will return in reverse in the history of Rome, founded by the twins Romulus and Remus, who nursed at the teats of a wolf. It is a gesture that makes and unmakes civilization. The play also describes the festival’s innocent euphoria:
Then the bacchanalian woman
is filled with total joy—
like a foal in pasture
right beside her mother—
her swift feet skip in playful dance.
Euripides wrote that “after the running dance” Dionysus and his followers hunted goat’s blood, “devouring its raw flesh with joy.” Between the running, the dancing, the sex, the drinking, the drums, and the violence, this is rowdy stuff. There is also much suggestion of the use of powerful drugs.10 At some festivals fermented grains were eaten to produce a hallucinogenic effect, we think due to a fungus that grew on the grain. Euripides tells us that for the worshippers of “the god of joy,” the experience is delicious. For them, “The land flows with milk, the land flows with wine, the land flows with honey from the bees.” Milk, wine, and honey abundance is here associated not with a future utopia, but as a real description of how things feel when you get high and dance on a hillside with your neighbors.
Euripides’ play about the festival has a shockingly gruesome ending: the mother of young king Pentheus is one of the leaders of the Dionysian revel, and when he sneaks into the worshippers’ midst to spy on them, his inebriated, indeed frenzied, mother tragically mistakes him for a lion and kills him. It is only a play, not journalism, but the violence is gruesome. In one of the real festival ceremonies, each adherent bathes in the sea with her own piglet, which she later sacrifices. These are almost all mothers, and they bring this little, pink, squirming beast into the warm bath of the sea, and bathe it, and later kill it. It reveals an incredible willingness to glimpse the dark emotions of nurturing love. Later, there was another scene of mockery and obscenity that was said to again be copying Iambe cheering up Demeter, as in the Thesmophoria. As the great twentieth-century scholar of Greek history Jane Ellen Harrison put it, “Dionysus is as it were the male correlative of Kore, but changed, transfigured by this new element of intoxication and orgy.”11 These festivals of grief and triumph seem to have been a profound relief in the short term and, in the long term, psychologically protective. At enactments of the double birth of Dionysus, or in the abduction and rape of Kore, mothers became embodiments of the sorrows of women and goddesses. It was their job to act out the roles with passion and to make the magic of rebirth come true.
How do we pray for fertility today? Consider another example: Beer bottles in America all proclaim that drinking alcohol during pregnancy can cause birth defects. That is true, and what it can cause is a sad, bad thing called fetal alcohol syndrome, where the child is born mentally disabled and facially recognizable as such. Of course we cannot do studies to find out exactly how much alcohol it takes and