252
LESLIE EPSTEIN
the talent for sublimation is exhausted. We should be grateful, perhaps,
for the generation's respite between what the madman felt and what
we acknowledge to be true.
The cult and ceremonies of Dionysus, in which the drama was
conceived, and whose paternity may be perceived in the burnt swallow–
tail, the founding father in a puff of smoke, were not ludicrous, nor
did they suffer any lethargy. Here is Erwin Rohde's description of such
a rite:
The festival was held on the mountain tops in the darkness of night
amid the flickering and uncertain light of torches. The loud and
troubled sound of music was heard; the clash of bronze cymbals;
the dull thunderous roar of kettledrums; and through them
all
penetrated the "maddening unison" of the deep-toned flute. • ..
Excited by this wild music, the chorus of worshippers dance with
shrill crying and jubilation. . . . These dances were something very
different from the measured movement of the dance-step in which
Homer's Greeks advanced and turned about in the
Paian.
It
was in
frantic, whirling, headlong eddies and dance-circles that these in–
spired companies danced over the mountain slopes. They were
mostly women who whirled round in these circular dances
till
the
point of exhaustion was reached; they were strangely dressed; they
wore
bassarai,
long flowing garments, as it seems, stitched together
of foxskins; over these were doeskins, and they even had horns
fixed to their heads. Their hair was allowed to float in the wind;
they carried snakes sacred to Sabazios
in
their hands and brandished
daggers or else thyrsos-wands, the spear-points of which were con–
cealed in ivy-leaves. In this fashion they raged wildly until every
sense was wrought
to
the highest pitch of excitement, and in the
"sacred frenzy" they fell upon the beast selected as their victim
and tore their captured prey limb from limb. Then with their teeth
they seized the bleeding flesh and devoured it raw.
Psychology, the working of the mind, exists here only to be uprooted.
This magical action is designed not to make the unknown known but
to render whatever is apprehended by the intellect a mystery.
We have been congratulating ourselves ever since on going beyond
all that - beyond not in the sense of abandonment but of attenuation,
toning down, vicariousness. The Victorian argument that the drama
was born from such festivities and has preserved more or less (more
catchup that is, and less blood) intact their ritual form and content has
so pervaded our scholarship that generations of school children, not to
mention Francis Fergusson, have thought that tragedy has something
to do with growing vegetables. That goat song evolved from goat feast,
that scapegoat superceded sparagmos, and that ecstasy and act gave way
to analysis, word, is no more in question than the fact that the small,
