sos,[1] whom the legends described as clothed in feminine attire, and leading a troop of frenzied women, inspired a temporary ecstasy, and those who resisted the inspiration, being supposed to disobey his will, were punished either by particular judgments or by mental terrors; while those who gave full loose to the feeling, in the appropriate season and with the received solemnities, satisfied his exigencies, and believed themselves to have procured immunity from such disquietudes for the future.[2] Crowds of women, clothed with fawn-skins and bearing the sanctified thyrsus, flocked to the solitudes of Parnassus, or Kithærôn, or Taygetus, during the consecrated triennial period, passed the night there with torches, and abandoned themselves to demonstrations of frantic excitement, with dancing and clamorous invocation of the god: they were said to tear animals limb from limb, to devour the raw
- ↑ The Lydian Hêraklês was conceived and worshipped as a man in female attire: this idea occurs often in the Asiatic religions. Mencke, Lydiaca, c. 8, p. 22. Διόνυσος ἄῤῥην καὶ θῆλυς. Aristid. Or. iv. p. 28; Æschyl. Fragm. Edoni, ap. Aristoph. Thesmoph. 135. Ποδαπὸς ὁ γύννις; τίς πάτρα; τίς ἡ στολή;
- ↑ Melampos cures the women (whom Dionysos has struck mad for their resistance to his rites), παραλαβὼν τοὺς δυνατωτάτους τῶν νεανίων μετ’ἀλαλαγμοῦ καὶ τινος ἐνθεου χορείας. Apollodôr. ii. 2, 7. Compare Eurip Bacch. 861.
Plato (Legg. vii. p. 790) gives a similar theory of the healing effect of the Korybantic rites, which cured vague and inexplicable terrors of the mind by means of dancing and music conjoined with religious ceremonies—αἱ τὰ τῶν Κορυβάντων ἰάματα τελοῦσαι (the practitioners were women), αἱ τῶν ἐκφρόνων Βακχείων ἰάσεις—ἡ τῶν ἔξωθεν κρατεῖ κίνησις προσφερομένη τὴν ἐντὸς φοβερὰν οὖσαν καὶ μανικὴν κίνησιν—ὀρχουμένους δὲ καὶ αὐλουμένους μετὰ θεῶν, οἶς ἂν καλλιερήσαντες ἕκαστοι θύωσιν, κατειργάσατο ἀντὶ μανικῶν ἡμὶν διαθέσεων ἕξεις ἔμφρονας ἔχειν.
measured effusions and demonstrations of sorrow for the departed, sometimes accompanied by cutting and mutilation self-inflicted by the mourner vras a distinguishing feature in Asiatics and Egyptians as compared with Greeks. Plutarch, Consolat. ad Apollon. c. 22, p. 123. Mournful feeling was, in fact, a sort of desecration of the genuine and primitive Grecian festival, which was a season of cheerful harmony and social enjoyment, where in the god was believed to sympathize (εὐφροσύνη). See Xenophanês ap. Aristot. Rhetor, ii. 25; Xenophan. Fragm. 1. ed. Schnεidewin; Theognis, 776; Plutarch, De Superstit, p. 169. The unfavorable comments of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, in so far as they refer to the festivals of Greece, apply to the foreign corruptions, not to the native character, of Grecian worship.
