MODERN THEATER
265
lyon the feeling men have of being accomplices in a crime and secon–
darily on the "creative sense of guilt" (Freud) that the wish
to
return
to
its scene engenders. On another, more metaphysical level, anxiety is
manufactured not by one's desire to recapitulate the deeds of the
ancient dead but simply by virtue of being a part of what Jaspers
ca11s
the conspiracy of the living. Because a man, no matter what he does,
does not
do more
to end whatever evil exists in the world: he is re–
sponsible for it. The better the citizen, the worse the criminal. Since
the Greeks were good citizens indeed, one should not wonder that they
came to be haunted by what E. R. Dodds describes as a "universal fear
of pollution (miasma), and its correlate, the universal craving for ritual
purification (catharsis)." Obsessed by a sense of perilousness and di–
vision, profoundly distrustful, fifth-century Athens evolved a ceremonial
life designed not to unite or reconcile its citizens with the antagonistic
sacred forces in their midst, but to allow them to walk gingerly between
the rock of the Acropolis and the fickle Furies, their goal reality, that
mediocrity.
All of which is to say that the ritual purpose of tragedy is closer
to
Leviticus than Dionysus, to Aaron's goat, not the one representing the
Thracian god:
And Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat,
and confess over him all the iniquities of the children of Israel,
and
all
their transgressions in all their sins, putting them upon the
head of the goat, and shall send him away by the hand of a fit man
into the wilderness.
Tahnudic commentary has always assumed that the sins passed on to
the 8capegoat are those of Azazel, the demon of seduction, and the
chapters of Leviticus that surround the description of purification deal
with sexual pollution, specifically incest, homosexuality, bestiality and
even the "seed of copulation" itself, which makes the garment it falls
upon unclean until the evening on which it is washed. These iniquities
were for the most part not acts of commission but belong to the cate–
gory of what the Talmud calls sinning of the heart, dream transgres–
sions. Indeed, by confessing these deeds, by uttering the forbidden
words, the children of Israel put themselves in greater danger than
when they restricted them to the pleasure ground of the imagination.
But this is precisely how the homeopathic remedy of catharsis works. As
Aristotle remarked, the tragedian arouses emotions only to purge them,
creates a frenzy to effect a calm, weighs down the soul in order to
lighten
it.
To Plato and to Heraclitus (who said that catharsis was like
taking a bath by washing in mud), such a procedure was as absurd
lUI
