#and/or once had an obsession with maenads

[knowlesian]

misty turning her head perfectly on beat with the start of mother, mother is one of those tv music moments that is just part of me now, it’s in my very dna

[kieransyphe]

there  was  a  certain  uneasiness  eating  away  at  his  viscera  ,  unbearable  and  oppressive ; would like to believe that it was just the consequence of burning his last cigarette yesterday but even he , in all his neuroses and ineffable emotions , wasn't that delusional. he had always carried loneliness for as long he could remember , always in a state of being apart , for fear of being misunderstood. for fear of being getting close and being left behind. for fear of being not who people wanted him to be. and now , for fear of causing harm just from contact. fear ... fear ... fear ... there was nothing more that he wanted than a way out of fear. then maybe , he'd know where he began and where his father ended. then maybe , he'd know how to control this gift that felt more like a curse sometimes. he wished there was a self - book for being an offspring of thanatos , but desperation had led him somewhere else — rituals and rites , cults and bacchantes , madness as liberation. the maenads once subjected themselves to willful repression , an obsession with order and symmetry , until dionysus liberated and allowed them to sing , scream , dance barefoot in the woods and release everything they had been keeping inside. it was an alluring image on his mind , to be absolutely free and not care about anything in the world. even just for a moment. maybe it was what he needed ; to face himself in his most naked state , to free the most primitive part of himself rather than attempting to murder it. but obviously , he couldn't just summon dionysus and ask the god for enlightenment. but maybe , the next best thing could help. knock after knock after knock , heavy fists banging against the door of the god of wines' cabin until there was an answer , until the door was opened ajar. " i need your help. " simple. explicable. desperate.. the other demigod's presence was intimidating , but it wasn't the kind that made him want to turn away and leave — it pulled at him , making him push past the door and enter the cabin before being invited in. " there's something in my head that i can't just──── " a pause , uncertain how to even explain it all without already sounding like a madman. he took a deep breath , attempted to will some calmness. " i need to feel free in my own skin. "

[an0det0l0ve]

My love,

here are for you 20 quotes from the book which is closest to my heart, The Secret History. May they touch your soul the way they did mine.

Love,

Casper

⟴ ⟴ ⟴

1. Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.

2. It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves? Euripides speaks of the Maenads: head thrown I back, throat to the stars, "more like deer than human being." To be absolutely free! One is quite capable, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways. But how glorious to release them in a single burst! To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal! These are powerful mysteries. The bellowing of bulls. Springs of honey bubbling from the ground. If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn.

3. For if the modern mind is whimsical and discursive, the classical mind is narrow, unhesitating, relentless. It is not a quality of intelligence that one encounters frequently these days. But though I can digress with the best of them, I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive.

4. Some things are too terrible to grasp at once. Other things - naked, sputtering, indelible in their horror - are too terrible to really grasp ever at all. It is only later, in solitude, in memory that the realization dawns: when the ashes are cold; when the mourners have departed; when one looks around and finds oneself - quite to one's surprise - in an entirely different world.

5. One likes to think there’s something in it, that old platitude amor vincit omnia. But if I've learned one thing in my short sad life, it is that that particular platitude is a lie. Love doesn't conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.

6. Why does that obstinate little voice in our heads torment us so? Could it be because it reminds us that we are alive, of our mortality, of our individual souls – which, after all, we are too afraid to surrender but yet make us feel more miserable than any other thing? It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one’s burned tongues and skinned knees, that one’s aches and pains are all one’s own. Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us. Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that’s why we’re so anxious to lose them, don’t you think?

7. “Cubitum eamus?"

"What?"

"Nothing.

8. There was a horrible, erratic thumping in my chest, as if a large bird was trapped inside my ribcage and beating itself to death.

9. They understand not only evil, it seemed, but the extravagance of tricks with which evil presents itself as good.

10. Because it is dangerous to ignore the existence of the irrational. The more cultivated a person is, the more intelligent, the more repressed, then the more he needs some method of channeling the primitive impulses he's worked so hard to subdue. Otherwise those powerful old forces will mass and strengthen until they are violent enough to break free, more violent for the delay, often strong enough to sweep the will away entirely.

11. They all shared a certain coolness, a cruel, mannered charm which was not modern in the least but had the strange cold breath of the ancient world : they were magnificent creatures, such eyes, such hands, such looks - sic oculos, sic ille manus, sic ora ferebat.

12. She was a living reverie for me: the mere sight of her sparked an almost infinite range of fantasy, from Greek to Gothic, from vulgar to divine.

13. That night I wrote in my journal: "Trees are schizophrenic now and beginning to lose control, enraged with the shock of their fiery new colors. Someone - was it van Gogh? - said that orange is the color of insanity. Beauty is terror. We want to be devoured by it, to hide ourselves in that fire which refines us.

14. Mais, vrai, J'ai trop pleure! Les aubes sont navrantes. What a sad and beautiful line that is. I'd always hoped that someday I'd be able to use it.

15. I had said goodbye to her once before, but it took everything I had to say goodbye to her then, again, for the last time, like poor Orpheus turning for a last backward glance at the ghost of his only love and in the same heartbeat losing her forever: hinc illae lacrimae, hence those tears.

16. “Aristotle says in the Poetics,” said Henry, “that objects such as corpses, painful to view in themselves, can become delightful to contemplate in a work of art.”

“And I believe Aristotle is correct. After all, what are the scenes in poetry graven on our memories, the ones that we love the most? Precisely these. The murder of Agamemnon and the wrath of Achilles. Dido on the funeral pyre. The daggers of the traitors and Caesar’s blood—remember how Suetonius describes his body being borne away on the litter, with one arm hanging down?”

“Death is the mother of beauty,” said Henry.

“And what is beauty?”

“Terror.”

“Well said,” said Julian. “Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.” I looked at Camilla, her face bright in the sun, and thought of that line from the Iliad I love so much, about Pallas Athene and the terrible eyes shining. “And if beauty is terror,” said Julian, “then what is desire? We think we have many desires, but in fact we have only one. What is it?”

“To live,” said Camilla.

“To live forever,” said Bunny, chin cupped in palm.

The teakettle began to whistle.

17. White Sky. Trees fading at the skyline, the mountains gone. My hands dangled from the cuffs of my jacket as if they weren’t my own. I never got used to the way the horizon there could just erase itself and leave you marooned, adrift, in an incomplete dreamscape that was like a sketch for the world you knew -the outline of a single tree standing in for a grove, lamp-posts and chimneys floating up out of context before the surrounding canvas was filled in-an amnesia-land, a kind of skewed Heaven where the old landmarks were recognizable but spaced too far apart, and disarranged, and made terrible by the emptiness around them.

18. She looked up at me, her eyes large with compassion, with understanding of the solitude and incivility of grief.

19. Tulips, I thought, staring at the jumble of letters before me. Had the ancient Greeks known them under a different name, if they’d had tulips at all? The letter psi, in Greek, is shaped like a tulip. All of a sudden, in the dense alphabet forest of the page, little black tulips began to pop up in a quick, random pattern like falling raindrops.

20. And how did they drive people mad? They turned up the volume of the inner monologue, magnified qualities already present to great excess, made people so much themselves that they couldn’t stand it.

[shatteredionysus]

Lived long enough to become the villain - ofstarrycrowns

Leave ‘Lived long enough to become the villain’ to get a glimpse of my muse being a villain.

Dionysus smiled, he was only half dressed, in tight fitting pants, and a long feminine trenchcoat he’d picked up for someone, and he had his arms stretched out wide, fingers dripping with blood.

Behind him the city burned. Sirens and screams screeched. Every building but those she’d built was fair game, or the places she liked. People were rioting, drinking, tearing each other apart, and through it all his maenads were leading them in his hymns. Power surged through his veins as it had’t in millennia, and his eyes flickered between colors and shapes. Sometimes looking like a bull’s, or a serpent’s, sometimes grey, or black, or every color.

He would make her safe again. He would not go quietly into the night, he would not fade again. He felt his mind touching on the city’s, felt his power sliding into the souls of everyone drinking and reveling, and he didn’t hold himself back from claiming. From searching out those who would love his wife, and whispering quiet epiphanies, prayers of hers, old puzzle charms to keep them hidden from the madness, to keep them safe. 

They would love her.

It’d started last night, started with idiot humans mugging them. It would have been nothing, absolutely nothing, if he hadn’t been being foolish himself. And it’s not like they could cause either of them permanent harm. They’d only scratched his wife, before they knocked them out.

It had healed within moments. She was a goddess. But still. Still that tiny wound had filled the Olympian with dread. They were not as powerful as they once were. They’d all known some of their greater miracles were gone, without regular worship. But if she could be touched…

Terror had filled him, infected him. He’d obsessed over it for a day, then, once she was home safe and occupied with work. He’d gone out. And he’d decided…no more. He’d violated the pact he and the other Olympians had had. They’d all agreed to step away, the greater gods of the old pantheon. They wouldn’t fight, wouldn’t reveal themselves again. This would be war. But he was sure he could convince Ares at least to delight in it. It was worth it.

He strode up to their house, the door opening with a touch. “Darling. Darling you won’t believe the night I’ve had,” he called out, sing song and wild.

@ofstarrycrowns

[nikator]

As something of a belated postscript, here's an interesting and relevant passage from Nietzsche, in the context of a discussion about the Dionysiac being essentially an urge towards unity and against all individuation:

[T]he dithyramb [an ecstatic choral hymn in praise of Dionysus] is essentially different from any other kind of choral song. The virgins who walk solemnly to the temple of Apollo, bearing laurel branches in their hands and singing a processional hymn as they go, remain who they are and retain their civic names; the dithyrambic chorus is a chorus of transformed beings who have completely forgotten their civic past and their social position; they have become timeless servants of their god, living outside every social sphere.

(The Birth of Tragedy § 9, tr. Speirs)

Assuming Nietzsche is grasping at a real cultural element of archaic into antique Greek society (and I think he is), this unity/individuation antagonism---Althusser might call it (confusingly) a "unity" (e.g. "the unity unity/individuation")---highlights many of the motives and much of the subconscious background of the maenad that I mention above. In particular, we see that in the city, this relatively young, Apolline social formation, characterised as it is by classes and its status as a state society, the woman is individuated: no longer merely human, she is now a member of a certain tribe, of a certain class, of a certain gender. Individuation has brought her to ruin: the "world-historic defeat of the female sex", as Engels famously put it (and he specifically mentions classical Greece as paradigmatic here). So the yearning for the end of individuation---for unity, conceived as harmony with (a terrible, awful) nature, and for supplication before a god that so clearly subverted the gender distinctions of the city---is an eminently understandable one.

So, once again, we can say that the maenad is grasping at the (live, active, far from impotent if nonetheless moribund) ideology of which Dionysus is the symbolic head, an ideology older than the Apolline-headed one which is dominant in her society. She is doing so because she sees in it, not unreasonably, the hope of greater freedom and an escape from the oppressive structures that determine her existence in the city. Symbolically, the cruel and vicious passing around of Ariadne and her love between powerful men, both mortal and divine, aptly captures what such a supposed liberation would likely actually mean for the maenad: freedom, yes, but a relative, stained freedom, and only insofar as she is trapped in a marriage with madness. Perhaps the passage from Minos and the love of the father-ruler (Apolline par excellence) to Theseus and the love of the conqueror, and, finally to Dionysus and the love of the obsessive (Dionysiac par excellence), really did liberate Ariadne in some sense---certainly, it took her out of her society and the role she had within it---but if it did, it did so only to deposit her in some new subservience, and such close proximity to a god is never good for one's health, or freedom. Just as Nietzsche said: no longer a citizen and a social being, but a timeless servant of a god. Likewise, the fate of the runaway, of the self-imposed exile fled to the rural cult, is unlikely to be a kind one. But it is a gamble that many presumably felt was worth taking, which in itself says a lot about the kind of society they were running from.

Some thoughts on the figure of the maenad in Greek culture.

The maenad’s fate is to be forever estranged from her city. She has chosen a new loyalty (the god) and a new community (the cult) over her old loyalty and old community (be it demos, slave, whatever); in giving herself over to Dionysus, she has forsaken her place in the established political and religious communities. In Althusserian language, we can say that she has evacuated the terrain of the city's religious ideological state apparatus. Of course, she is still in a religious ideological apparatus, but my suspicion is that it is not an apparatus of the state ideology---it is not an ideological state apparatus---; rather, it is a kind of dissident, nonconformist ideology, fundamentally poisonous to the city. Worship of Dionysus occurs in the city, even very prominently such as with the Dionysia in Athens, but it is a distinctly different kind of worship to that seen in a Bacchic cult. The Dionysia worshipped Dionysus through theatre (initially only dramatic, later also comic)---that is, through a cultural mechanism very much incorporated into the state ideology and its reigning ideological apparatus, and which was, importantly, solely a male art---and this is very different to the frenzied, drug-fueled female worship found in the cults. The city sees this fate of the maenad---exclusion; rejection---as a curse: that is what the city must see it as, for it is the ultimate breach and rejection of the social order. For the maenad, for exactly the same reason, it is the promise of escape; of liberation.

Dionysus himself is interesting here. Though a male figure, he is consistently portrayed as effeminate. He's also often portrayed as young (especially in the classical period; earlier portrayals favour an older figure), implying that in his sexual relationships with men he occupies the subservient role (eromenos); the Souda goes so far as to call him hermaphroditic and androgynous for playing both active (masculine) and passive (feminine) roles during sex. This already sets him apart from the other male Olympians. It doesn't, however, set him that much apart from plenty of non-Olympian deities, Hermaphroditus included, which is in itself very indicative of Dionysus' rural, archaic origins, origins which are never fully eradicated and pacified during the construction of the urban, state-society which practised the Dionysia. This, I think, is the historical reason why Dionysus was the ideological element through which this social phenomenon of the maenad occurred. Dionysus is far from a safe character for a woman to associate with---like all Greek gods, he is guilty of the serial manipulation, abuse, and assault of women---so it would be very difficult to argue that these people were specifically drawn to the character of Dionysus. Figures like Athena and Hera, who in their character are maybe preferable (though dangerous and cruel in their own ways, of course), very noticeably have their temples inside the city (not merely geographically; politically, culturally); to turn to them is only to reaffirm your place within the oppressive social formation. The Dionysiac cult, in contrast, is fundamentally rural, a madness of a very different kind to that which possesses urban societies; a rabid, animal madness, quite unlike the democratic or tyrannical brutality (necessarily highly ordered) which is the sickness of the city, and there's a twisted kind of freedom in that.

The maenad has left society; she is exiled from it, by her own choosing (albeit under duress). For her, freedom can only be found in non-participation: assimilation and submission will never set her free; she will never become a man. This is a theme not unknown to Greek cultural criticism: Euripides' Medea expresses it well. The tragic and powerful speech to the Corinthian women that Euripides puts in her mouth is particularly pertinent: Medea is a foreigner, bereft of all kin in a land that will never truly accept her; she must flee. All women, her implicit argument goes, are like this; women will always be a subjugated other to men, and must escape from this oppression. Medea can leave the city for Athens, or Iran; the Corinthians cannot. The Bacchic mysteries offer just such an escape: physically, out of the city and into the countryside; mentally, into ecstasy and sex; politically, out of the dominant ideological apparatus.

The maenad, then, is a perennial threat to the dominant social formation in classical Greece, because she is the promise that the oppressed and maligned elements within it might one day refuse to accept its rules, and substitute them for their own. She represents an urge with its origins in a moribund and decayed social formation, running up to the pre-class formations. Despite the city's fears, then, her urge is, ultimately, futile; the maenad poses a threat to the city, but a far from existential one. Nevertheless, Dionysus is an anarchic power; utterly lawless and unrestrainable. This is the fundamental conflict Nietzsche understands the Dionysiac to be engaged in against the Apollonian; the Dionysiac is the older cultural instinct, which then becomes vestigial and gradually eclipsed by the younger, lawlike cultural instinct that arises from the cities, personified most of all in Apollo but also in all the gods with temples in the city. The city can accommodate many cults, and in the Hellenistic regimes outside of Greece even syncretic cults of native deities, but it cannot accommodate bacchanals.

So the maenad, on a personal level, is driven by her oppression in the city and her desire to escape this. The promise of a rustic cult of women existing outside the political, legal, and religious ideological state apparatus is obviously attractive to a certain kind of person in this situation, including, likely, to those who have nothing left to lose--- it seems probable to me that smaller Bacchic cults attracted criminals, dissidents and exiles. On a historical and ideological level, she is driven by the remnants of an obsolete mode of production, once dominant, now dominated; the lingering ideological products of the religion of this mode of production offers the (partial, imperfect, violent) route to escape from the oppression of the new one. The result is a religious phenomenon that acts as a pressure valve where the conflicting elements in the ideological apparatus grind against one another, releasing a manageable amount of madness and deviance from established norms and communities. The Bacchae's warning: do not close off this pressure valve, or the city will explode.