Sebastian Hayes

When candidates for initiation during the VIth century B.C. left Athens for Eleusis, the procession was headed by a group bearing the statue of Iacchos. Now Iacchos was a mystic name for Dionysus who originally had not been associated with the goddess of fertility,  Demeter, (Ceres for the Romans) at all. Dionysus was not strictly speaking a god : he was a dæmon, or hybrid, the offspring of Zeus and a mortal woman, Semele. This hybrid nature is crucial, for the essential tenet of the religion that developed around Dionysus was that mankind as a whole was a hybrid, in the main evil but containing a hidden divine nature.

In a hunting/food-gathering or agricultural society there are no clear demarcation lines between plant and animal, human and supra-human. “All things are full of gods”, as Thales of Miletus put it. But already by the VIth century B.C. Greeks living in enclosed city states felt themselves to be cut off from the source of life — and during the later Hellenistic and Roman periods this sense of alienation rose to fever pitch. The gods had become remote, and because remote irrelevant — like the Olympians — and for many educated citizens they were little more than personifications of abstract principles (which is at best how they are conceived today). The numerous mystery religions that arose during the latter period of Ancient Greece were an extreme reaction against his development : their aim was to reconnect the two realms, the human and the divine. By far the most popular of these mystery religions was that of  Dionysus, though it was subsequently displaced by the worship of Isis, Mithras and finally Christ.

Though Dionysus developed from a minor deity who is credited with the introduction of the vine, it would be quite wrong to associate Dionysus with drunkenness and jollity as such. For most of his life Dionysus suffered persecution : he was rendered insane by Hera and spent years wandering across the Middle East. Cured by Rhea, he went as far as India and introduced certain strange new doctrines into the West. Dionysus, in the words of Plutarch, was “the god who is destroyed, who disappears, who relinquishes life and then is born again”. There was a Passion of Dionysus as there was of Christ.

Dionysus can, however, be considered the god of altered states of consciousness. Since the ordinary person was almost completely unaware of his or her divine nature, very radical means to awaken the divine essence were required. Intoxication with wine or drugs, erotic mania, solitary confinement, flagellation, near death experiences, dancing to exhaustion, all such means were employed with the aim of bringing about a shift of consciousness from the personal to the transpersonal. Only a profound internal revolution could release the god within. The followers of Dionysus rapidly acquired an unenviable reputation and his worship was banned in certain Greek states. The sort of people who are today classed as ‘New Age travellers’ were at the time considered to be ‘Dionysians’. The most notorious devotees of the god were the Maenads, bands of young women who roamed the hillsides, dancing themselves into a frenzy until they were able to tear wild animals to pieces with their bare hands.

The Maenads and similar devotees of Dionysus understandably alarmed  the civic authorities of many Greek cities but Athens succeeded in diverting these wild energies into less dangerous and (arguably) more constructive channels. Dionysus enters Eleusis which came under Athenian control, and, in true Greek fashion, even though his mother was Semele, he was made the offspring of Demeter. The union of Zeus and Demeter, enacted by the Hierophant and the High Priestess in the inner sanctuary at Eleusis, replaces the original communal orgy. And in general the controlled symbolisation of experience replaces direct participation. One of the most important results of this Athenian synthesis was the Greek theatre itself. The physical theatre was a sacred space and the plays put on were part of the annual Festival of Dionysus to which all adult (free) Athenians contributed in one way or another either as sponsors and organisers or as actual members of the Chorus. As Brenda Laurel writes, “Early Greek drama sprang from the intersection  of  philosophy, religion and art… At least some of the actors felt themselves to be ‘in possession of the god’ as they performed in the festival that honoured him.” The aim was exactly the same as that of the original anarchic orgies : ‘katharsis’, the Aristotelian term which we can translate as ‘purging’, ‘liberation’, ‘deliverance’.

Whether this evolution was a good or bad thing can be argued interminably. Having myself participated in some of the Dionysian excesses of the hippie era, I can with hindsight see the problems such movements inevitably pose for the civil authorities, whether those of twentieth century California and Amsterdam or ancient Greek city-states. The most satisfying experiences psychologically tend to be the most dangerous either to oneself or to others. The wanton destruction of property is extremely liberating so long as one does not bother twopence about the people who happen to own it. So is dying a very rewarding experience to judge by the reports of those who have undergone NDEs (Near death Experiences). Even apart from moral and social considerations, ‘pure’ experience tends to be self-defeating if it is not accompanied by some reflection on  what it ism one is experiencing and some means of incorporating the experience into a permanent mode of life. Having said this, it is also true that there is ultimately no substitute for direct experience : I remember someone saying to me years ago, “Other people’s experiences are perfectly valid, but they don’t  teach you anything”. Today, the ‘arts’, completely divorced as they are from their origin in religious ritual have become utterly trivial : the principal task facing the revived paganism of today is to find suitable ways of reintroducing the dimension of the sacred into everyday life.

The seasonal rites at Eleusis were performed over a surprisingly long period of time (nearly 2000 years) and almost certainly underwent some changes. I would imagine that they evolved from being mainly commemorative rites to being mainly transformative. Commemorative rites are outer-directed, they are reminders to the deities in  charge of seasonal changes and themselves a form of human assistance to these deities. There may well have been a certain element of solemnity and awe, but the idea of the transmission of ‘secret knowledge’ is entirely foreign to such rites and customs. Transformative rites are, however, inner-directed : all the emphasis is on the participant and at the limit the candidate need not necessarily believe in the ‘reality’ of the divinity at all as an independent entity. What mattered was the effect the experience had on the person’s subsequent life and after life. The Rites of Eleusis never completely lost their original meaning as fertility rituals but there is no doubt that during the Hellenistic and Roman period initiation ceased to have much to do with the seasons, but concerned the destiny of the soul. And precisely this was the principal concern of the Dionysian movement.

According to Levy, “the name Eleusis was believed by the Ancients to mean a Way or Passage, and was connected with Elysium”. The Rites, during this latter period, were a ‘passage to Elysium’ : the candidate was made to undergo, in symbolic form, the experiences of birth, growth to maturity, old age, death, and rebirth to the life beyond. Eleusis and other sites where mysteries were celebrated constituted a ‘Dionysian cyberspace’ as Harold Rheingold puts it. The inner sanctuary at Eleusis was a ‘virtual reality chamber’, the last in a long line of such underground sites amongst which Rheingold places the Lascaux caves where the world’s earliest paintings were painted. This claim is  by no means as absurd as it may at first sight seem and, surprisingly, has some authority amongst classical authors.

In a famous passage in The Republic, Plato compares the human condition to “the condition  of chained men living all their lives in a sort of cavernous chamber, with the entrance to the light very far off, and a long passage down to the cave” (The Republic vii). The complete image is not easy to visualize but it seems that Plato had in mind a sort of shadow-puppet show, perhaps like those still performed today with hand-puppets in Java. There is, we are told, a “parapet, like the screen at a puppet show, which hides the performers”. Various objects are held up above the parapet by invisible persons, but the men in the cave, who have their back to the light, can only see the shadows cast by the objects on the walls of the cave, and these shadows they mistake for reality. Later on, one of the prisoners is dragged up the pathway into the light of day, but is at first sight blinded and sees nothing. Cornford, the translator, writes that “the image was probably taken from mysteries held in caves or dark chambers representing the underworld, through which the candidates for initiation were led to the revelations of sacred objects in a blaze of light.” Plato, of course, would have known of the Mysteries at Eleusis and conceivably had been a candidate himself as a young man.

We know that at least two sacred dramas were performed at Eleusis, one representing the abduction  of Koré (Persephone), the other the union of Zeus and Demeter. We are also told that the candidates, on their way to Eleusis, were “mocked by masked figures”. To what extent then organisers employed more sophisticated techniques than theatre is a matter of conjecture, though the Greeks were much more technically minded than is usually thought and had remote controlled temple doors and moving statues activated by compressed air at Alexandria. In any case, careful psychological preparation and (possibly) the use of drugs more than made up for the lack of electronics.

Joseph Campbell claims that at one stage during the Mysteries of Eleusis, the candidate is made to look into a specially designed metal bowl. “The concavity of the bowl was such that a young man looking in expecting to see his own face, would see instead the face of an old man, or the mask of an old man held up.” And Plutarch, who may have been an initiate himself, speaks of even more dramatic experiences :

“At first there are wanderings and laborious circuits and journeyings through the dark, full of misgivings, where there is no end to anything; then come terrors of every kind, shivering and trembling and sweating and amazement. After this a wonderful light meets the wanderer; he is admitted to pure meadowlands, there are voices and dances and the majesty of holy sounds and sacred visions.”

The effects of all this after several days of preparation and fasting must have been considerable even if no drugs were employed: it is probably not going too far to suppose that some at least of the candidates experienced what we now call OBEs (Out of the Body Experiences) or even NDEs (Near Death Experiences).

What was the point of all this? Not just entertainment and money-making certainly, as seem so far to be the only aims of electronic Virtual Reality — although it may well be that in its latter days Eleusis did become too sensationalist and that this contributed to its decline. I would assume that the original aim of such controlled psycho-dramas was to bring the candidate to the realisation of his or her divine origin and nature, exactly the same aim that mystic cults and esoteric schools have today. Once the candidate had passed through life and death, if not quite in fact at least subjectively, the ‘higher self’, the ‘god within’, ‘immortal soul’ or whatever else one decides to call it, is awakened and from then on is present even within ordinary states of consciousness. The ‘secret’ is incommunicable because it is a lived transformation and not a magical or scientific formula.

It should be noted that the aim of such controlled experiences is not at all the same as that of the earlier fertility rites which were intended to reawaken the dormant energies of nature, not the dormant energies hidden within the individual. Although for a while Demeter and Dionysus both presided at Eleusis, there was to be no lasting synthesis of these two conflicting tendencies, nor has there been any such synthesis to this day in the West. The religion of Dionysus was at first fiercely resisted in Greece and, from a certain point of view, with good reason, for it eventually displaced the worship of all the other gods and prepared the way for the coming of Christianity. The obsessive concern with personal salvation which came to be such a prominent feature of the later ancient world ran counter to the older religions which were concerned to establish deep rapports between the social group and the divine forces at work in nature. Later movements, such as the Manichaean and Gnostic sects, came to the conclusion that the ‘hidden self’, the ‘god within’, had nothing in common with the forces of nature — it was ‘acosmic’, not part of the physical world at all. The link between the natural and the divine was snapped and man now sought to extricate himself from the grip of nature (‘him’ rather than ‘her’ though there were prominent female Manichaeans and Gnostics). In North Africa the Gnostic Christians carried on the Dionysian tradition with all its wild excesses within the new religious framework to the horror of civic authorities and  bishops alike.

Sebastian Hayes

References :

G.R. Levy, The Gate of Horn (Faber). Easily the best book I have read on pre-Christian Western religious belief from the Stone Age to Greece and Rome.

Harold Rheingold, Virtual Reality (Secker and Warburg 1991, pbk. Mandarin 1992). Contains a useful section on “Dionysian Cyberspaces and the Birth of Theatre” (pp. 299-305) and on the Lascaux caves.

Brenda Laurel, Computers as Theatre (Addison Wesley 1991).

Plato, The Republic (section vii pp. 222-230), Cornford’s translation.

Acknowledgement : This article first appeared in the magazine Wood and Water Vol.  2 No. 52  1995.