United States or Niger ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
+1099+. It was different with the Dionysiac cult, whose wildness made it popular; of foreign origin, it was in time partly Hellenized and in Athens took its place in the regular national worship; some of its foreign features were taken up in the mysteries. These latter, with their enthusiasm and their half-barbaric ceremonies, excited the contempt of most of the educated class.
She knows nothing of the Dionysiac rapture and the sensuous side of mysticism. She can give nothing to the young soul that thirsts and hungers for these things. It is not surprising, therefore, that the world should be callous to Emily Brontë. What you are not prepared for is the appearance of indifference in her editors. They are pledged by their office to a peculiar devotion.
In the Doni Madonna in the Tribune of the Uffizii, Michelangelo actually brings the pagan religion, and with it the unveiled human form, the sleepy-looking fauns of a Dionysiac revel, into the presence of the Madonna, as simpler painters had introduced there other products of the earth, birds or flowers; and he has given to that Madonna herself much of the uncouth energy of the older and more primitive "Mighty Mother."
'And in certain Dionysiac sports and processions which shall be nameless, in order to awaken a proper devotion for the gods in those who might not be able to appreciate Aeschylus and Sophocles. 'You would not reintroduce them? 'Pallas forbid! but give as fair a substitute for them as we can. 'And are we to degrade ourselves because the masses are degraded? 'Not in the least.
He, if any one, was in the habit of being moderate in all things, if only as a good example to his sons; and he had proved in many a Dionysiac feast that the god could not easily overpower him. The amount of wine he had drunk to-day would generally have had no more effect upon him than water, and yet he had felt now and then as if he were drunken, and the whole festal hall turned round with him.
A portion of these ceremonial usages and of this discipline he would naturally be inclined to introduce among the workmen at Jerusalem. He therefore united them in a society, similar in many respects to that of the Dionysiac artificers.
I have said that in the mysteries of Dionysus the legend recounted the death of that hero-god, and the subsequent discovery of his body. Some further details of the nature of the Dionysiac ritual are, therefore, necessary for a thorough appreciation of the points to which I propose directly to invite attention.
Myth., vol. iii. p. 174. The Orphic Argonautics allude to the oath: μετὰ δ' ὁρϗια Μύσῖαις, ϗ. τ. λ., "after the oath was administered to the mystes," &c. Orph. Argon., v. 11. The satirical pen of Aristophanes has not spared the Dionysiac festivals. But the raillery and sarcasm of a comic writer must always be received with many grains of allowance.
+934+. The development of the rôle of women as representatives of deities is illustrated by the character of the priestesses of oracular shrines. These, like the Dionysiac devotees, are seized and possessed by the god, and speak in a state of frenzy. But their frenzy is controlled by civilized conditions.
The history of the Dionysiac dance has a fairly exact parallel in that of the 'Morisco. Each dance has travelled far, and survives, shorn of its explicitly religious character, and in many other ways 'diablement change' en route. The 'Morisco, of course, has changed the less of the two.
Word Of The Day