Bakkhai Variations:
Villanova Theatre
Dionysian Ritual & Sex
In looking at the Dionysian ritual patterns themselves, overt sex or sexuality rarely constitutes a prominent part of the practices. For more information on what we know of these sacred spaces and their components, check out the Dionysian Ritual research page. However, there are some notable side effects and associations of these gatherings in Dionysos’ name that leads to a sexualized connotation.
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First, the relationship between ecstasy and sex. One of our productions, exxx...stasis, exxx...hale… pretty comfortable taps into this connection and it is well-founded. Marvin Mayer discusses Dionysos in The Ancient Mysteries: A Sourcebook and writes how one “might feel his [Dionysos’] power variously… in inebriation, in sexuality, in spiritual bliss” (63). In other words, the means to reach ecstasy would be the ritual described on the research page — dance, chanting, a rejection of individualism — and sometimes sexual or sensual union would represent the ends. When one ascends to a state of understanding all people as deeply connected, sexual pleasure seems like a perfectly reasonable outcome.
Part of this historical association, however, stems from a time centuries after Euripides and the height of Attic Greece altogether. The word most often associated with worship to Bacchus, who never reached mainstream religious acceptance in the Roman world like Dionysus did in Greece, is impudicus. The word can translate to ‘shameless’ or ‘immodest,’ but also to ‘lewd’ and ‘perverted.’ Whether this was a xenophobic ascription by Roman orthodoxy or an accuarate translation, both linguistically and culturally, is up for debate. All that said, ritual spaces dedicated to Bacchus were undeniably fringe and subversive and likely could have been a safer space for more feminine sexualities to be experienced.
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Finally, the dramaturg will provide some of their own theorizing based on their study of the ancient Mediterranean world.
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Dionysian sojourns, especially in Ancient Turkey and Greece, were largely dominated by women, as Euripides suggests. They posit that much of the writing on these matters, almost entirely by men, stems from a sexual insecurity about women gathering and understanding their sexual power a la Lysistrata (Aristophanes, 411 BCE). Pilgrimages to places outside of urban ritual spaces, such as the one depicted in Bakkhai to Mt. Kithairon, represented one of the few places women went without explicit male supervision. This anxiety expresses itself by over-sexualizing these women to frame these rituals in their own terms, sexual objectification. In this way, the
dramaturg connects maenads to the women of the isle Lesbos, who symbolized an inverted world that was designed to freak men out. On the inverse of this, in Egypt these mysteries were more often conducted by men and one of the recovered totems to Dionysos from there was just a large erect phallus.
That said, the dramaturg’s theory does not invalidate the themes explored in exxx...stasis, exxx...hale… On the contrary, claiming one’s sexuality on one’s own terms directly flies into the face of this patriarchal ownership of sexuality, empowering the very people Ancient Greece’s patriarchy marginalized.
