Ritual Drama: Between Mysticism and Magic

Abstract

One of the last Greek tragedies and, ironically, the only surviving one which has as its subject the purported ritual origin of Western dramathe cult of Dionysus-was Euripides' The Bacchae. Its religious message is, however, complicated by the fact that we do not have the ending. Moreover, any hoped for revelations about the protodramatic rite are frustrated by the fact that it is a late version of the myth which Euripides dramatizes, one which has already absorbed both the redefinition ofDionysus's mother as a mortal princess rather than an Earth Mother and confirmed his new Olympian ancestry as the double-born son of Zeus. One suspects that not only late Skeptical revisions but even later Christian editorial assumptions regarding the nature of gods have so contaminated our reading that we cannot and perhaps should not attempt to reconstruct the origins of theatre from the rituals described in this late play. The play is, however, of unique value in another respect. Even if its rituals may not tell us anything reliable about the origin of drama, its plot does, for it is very much a metadrama not only in the way Dionysus acts (impersonating a human) and then directs the play of his revenge but in the way that, through so doing, he defines for us the new creature without whom there is no theatre: the spectator. For it is with the spectator that any origin of theatre must begin, and Pentheus up in the tree was in many ways the first recorded Western spectator. We know what happened to him. In a brutal but greatly escalated-anticipation of the audience insults and audience attacks of our own disappointed neoritualists, he was pulled down and torn to pieces and his limbs were scattered over the fields.