Fragment on Maenads
Some thoughts on the figure of the maenad in Greek culture.
The maenad’s fate is to be forever estranged from her city. She has chosen a new loyalty (the god) and a new community (the cult) over her old loyalty and old community (be it demos, slave, whatever); in giving herself over to Dionysus, she has forsaken her place in the established political and religious communities. In Althusserian language, we can say that she has evacuated the terrain of the city’s religious ideological state apparatus. Of course, she is still in a religious ideological apparatus, but it is my suspicion that it is not an apparatus of the state ideology — it is not an ideological state apparatus — ; rather, it is a kind of dissident, nonconformist ideology, fundamentally poisonous to the city. Worship of Dionysus occurs in the city, even very prominently such as with the Dionysia in Athens, but it is a distinctly different kind of worship to that seen in a Bacchic cult. The Dionysia worshipped Dionysus through theatre (initially only dramatic, later also comic) — that is, through a cultural mechanism very much incorporated into the state ideology and its reigning ideological apparatus, and which was, importantly, a solely male art — and this is very different to the frenzied, drug-fueled female worship found in the cults. The city sees this fate of the maenad — exclusion; rejection — as a curse: that is what the city must see it as, for it is the ultimate breach and rejection of the social order. For the maenad, for exactly the same reason, it is the promise of escape; of liberation.
Dionysus himself is interesting here. Though a male figure, he is consistently portrayed as effeminate. He’s also often portrayed as young (especially in the classical period; earlier portrayals favour an older figure), implying that in his sexual relationships with men he occupies the subservient role (eromenos); the Souda goes so far as to call him hermaphroditic and androgynous for playing both active (masculine) and passive (feminine) roles during sex. This already sets him apart from the other male Olympians. It doesn’t, however, set him that much apart from plenty of non-Olympian deities, Hermaphroditus included, which is in itself very indicative of Dionysus’ rural, archaic origins, origins which are never fully eradicated and pacified during the construction of the urban, state-society which practised the Dionysia. This, I think, is the historical reason why Dionysus was the ideological element through which this social phenomenon of the maenad occurred. Dionysus is far from a safe character for a woman to associate with — like all Greek gods, he is guilty of the serial manipulation, abuse, and assault of women — so it would be very difficult to argue that these people were specifically drawn to the character of Dionysus. Figures like Athena and Hera, who in their character are maybe preferable (though dangerous and cruel in their own ways, of course), very noticeably have their temples inside the city (not merely geographically; politically, culturally); to turn to them is only to reaffirm your place within the oppressive social formation. The Dionysiac cult, in contrast, is fundamentally rural, a madness of a very different kind to that which possesses urban societies; a rabid, animal madness, quite unlike the democratic or tyrannical brutality (necessarily highly ordered) which is the sickness of the city, and there’s a twisted kind of freedom in that.
The maenad has left society; she is exiled from it, by her own choosing (albeit under duress). For her, freedom can only be found in non-participation: assimilation and submission will never set her free; she will never become a man. This is a theme not unknown to Greek cultural criticism: Euripides’ Medea expresses it well. The tragic and powerful speech to the Corinthian women that Euripides puts in her mouth is particularly pertinent: Medea is a foreigner, bereft of all kin in a land that will never truly accept her; she must flee. All women, her implicit argument goes, are like this; women will always be a subjugated other to men, and must escape from this oppression. Medea can leave the city for Athens, or Iran; the Corinthians cannot. The Bacchic mysteries offer just such an escape: physically, out of the city and into the countryside; mentally, into ecstasy and sex; politically, out of the dominant ideological apparatus.
The maenad, then, is a perennial threat to the dominant social formation in classical Greece, because she is the promise that the oppressed and maligned elements within it might one day refuse to accept its rules, and substitute them for their own. She represents an urge with its origins in a moribund and decayed social formation, running up to the pre-class formations. Despite the city’s fears, then, her urge is, ultimately, futile; the maenad poses a threat to the city, but a far from existential one. Nevertheless, Dionysus is an anarchic power; utterly lawless and unrestrainable. This is the fundamental conflict Nietzsche understands the Dionysiac to be engaged in against the Apollonian; the Dionysiac is the older cultural instinct, which then becomes vestigial and gradually eclipsed by the younger, law-like cultural instinct that arises from the cities, personified most of all in Apollo but also in all the gods with temples in the city. The city can accommodate many cults, and in the Hellenistic regimes outside of Greece even syncretic cults of native deities, but it cannot accommodate bacchanals.
So the maenad, on a personal level, is driven by her oppression in the city and her desire to escape this. The promise of a rustic cult of women existing outside the political, legal, and religious ideological state apparatus is obviously attractive to a certain kind of person in this situation, including, likely, to those who have nothing left to lose — it seems probable to me that smaller Bacchic cults attracted criminals, dissidents and exiles. On a historical and ideological level, she is driven by the remnants of an obsolete mode of production, once dominant, now dominated; the lingering ideological products of the religion of this mode of production offers the (partial, imperfect, violent) route to escape from the oppression of the new one. The result is a religious phenomenon that acts as a pressure valve where the conflicting elements in the ideological apparatus grind against one another, releasing a manageable amount of madness and deviance from established norms and communities. The Bacchae’s warning: do not close off this pressure valve, or the city will explode.
An interesting and relevant passage from Nietzsche, in the context of a discussion about the Dionysiac being essentially an urge towards unity and against all individuation:
[T]he dithyramb [an ecstatic choral hymn in praise of Dionysus] is essentially different from any other kind of choral song. The virgins who walk solemnly to the temple of Apollo, bearing laurel branches in their hands and singing a processional hymn as they go, remain who they are and retain their civic names; the dithyrambic chorus is a chorus of transformed beings who have completely forgotten their civic past and their social position; they have become timeless servants of their god, living outside every social sphere.
(The Birth of Tragedy § 9, tr. Speirs)
Assuming Nietzsche is grasping at a real cultural element of archaic into antique Greek society (and I think he is), this unity/individuation antagonism — Althusser might call it (confusingly) a “unity” (e.g. “the unity unity/individuation”) — highlights many of the motives and much of the subconscious background of the maenad that I mention above. In particular, we see that in the city, this relatively young, Apolline social formation, characterised as it is by classes and its status as a state society, the woman is individuated: no longer merely human, she is now a member of a certain tribe, of a certain class, of a certain gender. Individuation has brought her to ruin: the “world-historic defeat of the female sex”, as Engels famously put it (and he specifically mentions classical Greece as paradigmatic here). So the yearning for the end of individuation — for unity, conceived as harmony with (a terrible, awful) nature, and for supplication before a god that so clearly subverted the gender distinctions of the city — is an eminently understandable one.
So, once again, we can say that the maenad is grasping at the (live, active, far from impotent if nonetheless moribund) ideology of which Dionysus is the symbolic head, an ideology older than the Apolline-headed one which is dominant in her society. She is doing so because she sees in it, not unreasonably, the hope of greater freedom and an escape from the oppressive structures that determine her existence in the city. Symbolically, the cruel and vicious passing around of Ariadne and her love between powerful men, both mortal and divine, aptly captures what such a supposed liberation would likely actually mean for the maenad: freedom, yes, but a relative, stained freedom, and only insofar as she is trapped in a marriage with madness. Perhaps the passage from Minos and the love of the father-ruler (Apolline par excellence) to Theseus and the love of the conqueror, and, finally to Dionysus and the love of the obsessive (Dionysiac par excellence), really did liberate Ariadne in some sense — certainly, it took her out of her society and the role she had within it — but if it did, it did so only to deposit her in some new subservience, and such close proximity to a god is never good for one’s health, or freedom. Just as Nietzsche said: no longer a citizen and a social being, but a timeless servant of a god. Likewise, the fate of the runaway, of the self-imposed exile fled to the rural cult, is unlikely to be a kind one. But it is a gamble that many presumably felt was worth taking, which in itself says a lot about the kind of society they were running from.
