Eat, Drink and Be Mad
Since Dionysos brings intensity, life without him is a bore and psychosomatic research has confirmed what the Maenads knew a long time ago: boredom and repression can kill you! Dionysos won’t stand for us being governed only by the light of reason and everyday awareness: then he becomes the vengeful “bringer of madness.”
In Greece the Dionysian festivals were associated with primitive feasts. The legend of the frenzied women in Dionysos’s cortege has them tumbling down mountains, catching animals and devouring them raw.
“Oh how tremendous it is, when someone is in the hills and getting dizzy from all the fun and he falls on the ground and the fawnskin falls over him while he was chasing the goat for its blood, and because he likes raw meat, all the way to the hills of Phrygia, or Lydia, ani Bromius is leading you, Evoi”! - Euripides, The Bacchae
The thiasos was a country fair, combining feast and religious ritual, where each person brought a contribution in kind. Gastronomical rituals that require sophisticated service, formal dress, white linen and fragile china are just the opposite of the noisy, rustic and bucolic Dionysian feast. No one felt obligated to anyone else, because the thiases didn't depend on the generosity of a powerful or rich host. The fact that they took place in the countryside allowed for even more freedom and underscored the communal aspect of the feast.
All feasts and banquets, however, are not thiases: there has to be a group emotion, a group enthusiasm for Dionysos. One must not confuse Dionysian appetite with bulimia or chronic overeating; eating without appetite is anti-Dionysiac. That is why the thiasos was preceded by a fast. The God and his followers recovered their appetites by fasting, just as Aphrodite renewed her virginity by bathing in the sea. The image of a fat Bacchus stuffing himself passively is a decadent version of Dionysian pleasure that Christianity has given us, as if this pleasure were vulgar or sinful because the body is involved. Yet, a certain piggishness and gluttony—even greed—are part of Dionysian appetite, whether it be hunger for food or sexual hunger. For example, Gargantua and his wife Gargamelle, the characters described by Rabelais at the time of the Renaissance, are capable of every excess and yet are models of exuberance and mental health. In that they are Dionysian.
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