The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [147]
How good was it? It reads as very satisfying to me. The event’s great classic scholar, Walter Burkert, and the historian Jane Ellen Harrison both stated with confidence that the Eleusinian mysteries were occasions for cutting loose one’s inhibitions to a profound degree. Burkert described the coldness of the sophisticated, individualist, rationalist life that was increasingly idealized in the classical age and explains that the Eleusinian mysteries were a response to constraining social mores. With the Eleusinian mysteries, “[a]n atavistic spring of vital energy breaks through the crust of refined urban culture. Man, humbled and intimidated by normal everyday life, can free himself in the orgies from all that is oppressive and develop his true self. Raving becomes divine revelation, a centre of meaning in the midst of a world that is increasingly profane and rational.”13 Jane Ellen Harrison wrote of an insider report on the Eleusinian experience: “The whole ecstatic mystic account beginning with the sensation of a blow on the head and the sense of the soul escaping, reads like a trance-experience or like the revelation experienced under an anesthetic.”14 Remember, it wasn’t just a small sect of backwoods weirdos doing this; it was a large sect of hip, sophisticated weirdos. Refined, educated, financially comfortable couples dominated. The festivals went on for hundreds and hundreds of years, for thousands upon thousands of people. As Burkert wrote, the festival was an opportunity to break out of their rational, nonmagical world and go temporarily crazy—to visit the mad side of one’s mind. The mystery religions flourished throughout the Roman Empire, and wild dancing to Demeter had started even earlier there. That’s because in 496 B.C.E. there was a devastating famine and the Romans decided to adopt the Greek goddess Demeter as their own, calling her Ceres, the name of a minor goddess of their pantheon. Ceres was the goddess of grain and of motherhood. Hence the word cereal. At the festival of Ambarvalia at the end of May, women celebrated Ceres, dressed as her, and carried out secret rituals in her name. The Eleusinian mysteries ended in 396 C.E. when Goths and other Christians destroyed the site and claimed the territory for Arian Christianity.
Gatherings are a necessary condition for the survival of the group, both really and magically. In ancient Greece, people believed that participation in the rituals described here kept the community going, magically. For us, if we join our communities’ rituals, then our community rituals continue to exist, with people like us in them. Community spirit and team spirit are both called spirit for a reason. Community and team are where we got the idea of spirit, and they are what still delivers. These reenactment festivals—the Thesmophoria, the Dionysian bacchanal, and the Eleusinian mysteries—are the events most often called ecstatic in the whole history of the world. They helped cope with grief and worry, and they were explicitly imagined as keeping the world going, and keeping it fertile. Also, they provided the occasional euphoria that people need to be happy.
18
Medieval Carnival
The medieval world and the ancient Greek world were both almost unfathomably foreign to our own and to each other. Yet both were our culture’s ancestors. There are a few ways in which we are very much like the Middle Ages, and not at all like the ancient world, and these are manifest in their wild parties. What fueled the Greek women’s rapturous ecstatic festivals were family terror stories, and true political powerlessness. Medieval festivals were, like ours, for both sexes, and for the general population (not just initiates), which makes a very big difference. Maybe you need a decisively limited group if you want to eat hallucinogenic fungi, engage in blood rites, and generally freak out all night. Still, if the medieval carnival was less