#85 Wed (9/14/22) - Dionysus and The Bacchae, Dionysian ecstatic frenzy

Dionysus and The Bacchae, Dionysian ecstatic frenzy

Dionysus: "It's a wise man's part to practise a smooth-tempered self-control."
 
The Dionysus in Euripides' tale is a young god, angry that his mortal family, the royal house of Cadmus, has denied him a place of honor as a deity. His mortal mother, Semele, was a mistress of Zeus; while pregnant she was killed by Hera, who was jealous of her husband's affair. When Semele died, her sisters said it was Zeus' will and accused her of lying; they also accused their father, Cadmus, of using Zeus as a coverup. Most of Semele's family refused to believe Dionysus was the son of Zeus, and the young god was spurned by his household. He traveled throughout Asia and other foreign lands, gathering a cult of female worshipers, the Maenads. At the play's start he has returned, disguised as a stranger, to take revenge on the house of Cadmus. He has also driven the women of Thebes, including his aunts, into an ecstatic frenzy, sending them dancing and hunting on Mount Cithaeron, much to the horror of the young Pentheus, king of Thebes who also is Dionysius' cousin. Pentheus while disguised as a Maenad, so he can spy on them, is captured, set upon and dismembered horribly by his own mother.
 
Consider also the Nietzschean sense of Apollonian and Dionysian:
 
The main theme in The Birth of Tragedy is that the fusion of Dionysian and Apollonian Kunsttriebe ("artistic impulses") forms dramatic arts or tragedies. He argued that this fusion has not been achieved since the ancient Greek tragedians. Apollo represents harmony, progress, clarity, logic and the principle of individuation, whereas Dionysus represents disorder, intoxication, emotion, ecstasy and unity (hence the omission of the principle of individuation). Nietzsche used these two forces because, for him, the world of mind and order on one side, and passion and chaos on the other, formed principles that were fundamental to the Greek culture:[3][4] the Apollonian a dreaming state, full of illusions; and Dionysian a state of intoxication, representing the liberations of instinct and dissolution of boundaries. 

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