254
LESLIE EPSTEIN
them, being ravished and ravishing, that the participants seek to fix
and confirm by devouring, all alive, bleating, the divinity. The last
boundary to fall is that between sacred and profane, man and god.
It ought to be clear that the feeling of connectedness which under·
lays the Dionysian rites (and, for Freud, the activity of those other
mystics: infants, madmen, people in love) - its assumption that
man's way is nature's way, that body and mind, deserts and destiny,
are in a final harmony - is antithetical to the spirit of tragedy. The
world of the Maenads, like all primitives, is coherent and integral;
nothing can crack it but the wedge of consciousness, which is why the
rhythms of the dance are meant to blunt the waking mind. The world
of tragedy is disjunctive and schismatic; its chief fear is of being swept
by the oceanic tide, swamped by the unconscious, which is why it
strives, as Artaud said, to make the unknown known. Where the dancers
feel joy and exhaltation at the engagement of their passions, the memo
bers of an audience, confronted by their fantasies, experience only terror
and apprehension. To shift the emphasis of Miss Harrison's formula
slightly, the mimetic, as opposed to the methectic, seeks, if anything, to
prove that the characteristics being imitated - killing a King at a dis–
tant crossroads, bedding a familiar Queen -
are
.
alien; just so the
cathartic rite struggles to make what is for the communal ritual a
dimly perceived distinction between man and nature, self and other,
intellect and instinct, a chasm. In religious terms, the forces which the
drama seeks to purge its audience of are no less sacred than those which
the Dionysian rite wishes to incorporate into its participants. Equally
holy, they are treated with equal awe. What distinguishes them is the
dancers' faith that they are beneficent and propitious and the actors'
belief that they are a defilement and a profanation.
It
is this division
of essentially the same forces into pure and impure sacred, a distinction
known to every religion, that has made the one ceremony a rite of con·
secration, the other a ritual of desacralization.
How this transformation of belief occurred is important to us here
only insofar as it was a function of the contemporaneous shift in Greek
society from matriarchy to patriarchy, group membership to individual
citizenship, shame culture to guilt culture, totemism to Olympianism–
in short, as it was a necessary consequence of civilized life. The degree
to which a people have been socialized may be measured by the amount
of
miasma
-
guilt, anxiety, contamination - they feel. It is the index
of the gap between wish and fulfillment, a kind of waste product of
an
efficient culture. On one level these impurities are deposited by the
constant mental rehearsal of just those desires, incest, parricide,
by
whose interdiction society is maintained. Culture is based, then, primari.
