by E R Dodds
If I understand early Dionysiac ritual aright, its social function was essentially cathartic,78 in the psychological sense: it purged the individual of those infectious irrational impulses which, when dammed up, had given rise, as they have done in other cultures, to outbreaks of dancing mania and similar manifestations of collective hysteria; it relieved them by providing them with a ritual outlet. If that is so, Dionysus was in the Archaic Age as much a social necessity as Apollo; each ministered in his own way to the anxieties characteristic of a guilt-culture. Apollo promised security: "Understand your station as man; do as the Father tells you; and you will be safe to-morrow." Dionysus offered freedom: "Forget the difference, and you will find the identity; join the and you will be happy tot-day." He was essentially a god of joy, as Hesiod calls him; as Homer says.79 And his joys were accessible to all, including even slaves, as well as those freemen who were shut out from the old gentile cults.80 Apollo moved only in the best society, from the days when he was Hector's patron to the days when he canonised aristocratic athletes; but Dionysus was at all periods a god of the people.
The joys of Dionysus had an extremely wide range, from the simple pleasures of the country bumpkin, dancing a jig on greased wineskins, to the of the ecstatic bacchanal. At both levels, and at all the levels between, he is Lusios, "the Liberator"—the god who by very simple means, or by other means not so simple, enables you for a short time to stop being yourself , and thereby sets you free. That was, I think, the main secret of his appeal to the Archaic Age: not only because life in that age was often a thing to escape from, but more specifically because the individual, as the modern world knows him, began in that age to emerge for the first time from the old solidarity of the family,81 and found the unfamiliar burden of individual responsibility hard to bear. Dionysus could lift it from him. For Dionysus was the Master of Magical Illusions, who could make a vine grow out of a ship's plank, and in general enable his votaries to see the world as the world's not.82 As the Scythians in Herodotus put it, "Dionysus leads people on to behave madly"—which could mean anything from "letting yourself go" to becoming "possessed."83 The aim of his cult was ecstasis—which again could mean anything from "taking you out of yourself" to a profound alteration of personality.84 And its psychological function was to satisfy and relieve the impulse to reject responsibility, an impulse which exists in all of us and can become under certain social conditions an irresistible craving. We may see the mythical prototype of this homoeopathic cure in the story of Melampus, who healed the Dionysiac madness of the Argive women "with the help of ritual cries and a sort of possessed dancing."85
With the incorporation of the Dionysiac cult in the civic religion, this function was gradually overlaid by others.86 The cathartic tradition seems to have been carried on to some extent by private Dionysiac associations.87 But in the main the cure of the afflicted had in the Classical Age passed into the hands of other cults. We have two lists of the Powers whom popular thought in the later fifth century associated with mental or psycho-physical disturbances, and it is significant that Dionysus does not figure in either. One occurs in the Hippolytus, the other in the de morbo sacro.88 Both lists include Hecate and the "Mother of the Gods" or "Mountain Mother" (Cybele); Euripides adds Pan89 and the Corybantes; Hippocrates adds Poseidon, Apollo Nomios, and Ares, as well as the "heroes," who are here simply the unquiet dead associated with Hecate. All these are mentioned as deities who cause mental trouble. Presumably all could cure what they had caused, if their anger were suitably appeased. But by the fifth century the Corybantes at any rate had developed a special ritual for the treatment of madness. The Mother, it would appear, had done likewise (if indeed her cult was at that time distinct from that of the Corybantes);90 and possibly Hecate also.91 But about these we have no detailed information. About the Corybantic treatment we do know something, and Linforth's patient examination has dissipated much of the fog that surrounded the subject. I shall content myself with stressing a few points which are relevant to the particular questions I have in mind.
1) We may note first the essential similarity of the Corybantic to the old Dionysiac cure: both claimed to operate a catharsis by means of an infectious "orgiastic" dance accompanied by the same kind of "orgiastic" music—tunes in the Phrygian mode played on the flute and the kettledrum.92 It seems safe to infer that the two cults appealed to similar psychological types and produced similar psychological reactions. Of these reactions we have, unhappily, no precise description, but they were evidently striking. On Plato's testimony, the physical symptoms of included fits of weeping and violent beating of the heart,93 and these were accompanied by mental disturbance; the dancers were "out of their minds," like the dancers of Dionysus, and apparently fell into a kind of trance.94 In that connection we should remember Theophrastus' remark that hearing is the most emotive of all the senses, as well as the singular moral effects which Plato attributes to music.95
2) The malady which the Corybantes professed to cure is said by Plato to consist in "phobies or anxiety-feelings arising from some morbid mental condition."96 The description is fairly vague, and Linforth is doubtless right in saying that antiquity knew no specific disease of "Corybantism."97 If we can trust Aristides Quintilianus, or his Peripatetic source, the symptoms which found relief in Dionysiac ritual were of much the same nature.98 It is true that certain people did try to distinguish different types of "possession" by their outward manifestations, as appears from the passage in de morbo sacro.99 But the real test seems to have been the patient's response to a particular ritual: if the rites of a god X stimulated him and produced a catharsis, that showed that his trouble was due to X;100 if he failed to react, the cause must lie elsewhere. Like the old gentleman in Aristophanes' parody, if he did not respond to the Corybantes, he might then perhaps try Hecate, or fall back on the general practitioner Asclepius.101 Plato tells us in the Ion that oi "have a sharp ear for one tune only, the one which belongs to the god by whom they are possessed, and to that tune they respond freely with gesture and speech, while they ignore all others." I am not sure whether is here used loosely as a general term for "people in an anxiety-state," who try one ritual after another, or whether it means "those who take part in the Corybantic ritual"; on the second view, the Corybantic performance must have included different types of religious music, introduced for a diagnostic purpose.102 But in any case the passage shows that the diagnosis was based on the patient's response to music. And diagnosis was the essential problem, as it was in all cases of "possession": once the patient knew what god was causing his trouble, he could appease him by the appropriate sacrifices.103
3) The whole proceeding, and the presuppositions on which it rested, are highly primitive. But we cannot dismiss it—and this is the final point I want to stress—either as a piece of back-street atavism or as the morbid vagary of a few neurotics. A casual phrase of Plato's104 appears to imply that Socrates had personally taken part in the Corybantic rites; it certainly shows, as Linforth has pointed out, that intelligent young men of good family might take part in them. Whether Plato himself accepted all the religious implications of such ritual is an open question, to be considered later;105 but both he and Aristotle evidently regard it as at least a useful organ of social hygiene—they believe that it works, and works for the good of the participants.106 And in fact analogous methods appear to have been used by laymen in Hellenistic and Roman times for the treatment of certain mental disorders. Some form of musical catharsis had been practised by Pythagoreans in the fourth century, and perhaps earlier;107 but the Peripatetic school seems to have been the first who studied it in the light of physiology and the psychology of the emotions.108 Theophrastus, like Plato, believed that music was good for anxiety-states.109 In the first century b.c. we find Asclepiades, a fashionable physician at Rome, treating mental patients by means of "symphonia"; and in the Antonine Age Soranus mentions flute music among the methods used in his day for the treatment either of depression or of what we should call hysteri
a.110 Thus the old magico-religious catharsis was eventually detached from its religious context and applied in the field of lay psychiatry, to supplement the purely physical treatment which the Hippocratic doctors had used.
There remains Plato's third type of "divine" madness, the type which he defines as "possession by the Muses" and declares to be indispensable to the production of the best poetry. How old is this notion, and what was the original connection between poets and Muses?
A connection of some sort goes back, as we all know, to epic tradition. It was a Muse who took from Demodocus his bodily vision, and gave him something better, the gift of song, because she loved him.111 By grace of the Muses, says Hesiod, some men are poets, as others are kings by grace of Zeus.112 We may safely assume that this is not yet the empty language of formal compliment which it was later to become; it has religious meaning. And up to a point the meaning is plain enough: like all achievements which are not wholly dependent on the human will, poetic creation contains an element which is not "chosen," but "given";113 and to old Greek piety "given" signifies "divinely given."114 It is not quite so clear in what this "given" element consists; but if we consider the occasions on which the Iliad-poet himself appeals to the Muses for help, we shall see that it falls on the side of content and not of form. Always he asks the Muses what he is to say, never how he is to say it; and the matter he asks for is always factual. Several times he requests information about important battles;115 once, in his most elaborate invocation, he begs to be inspired with an Army List—"for you are goddesses, watching all things, knowing all things; but we have only hearsay and not knowledge."116 These wistful words have the ring of sincerity; the man who first used them knew the fallibility of tradition and was troubled by it; he wanted first-hand evidence. But in an age which possessed no written documents, where should first-hand evidence be found? Just as the truth about the future would be attained only if man were in touch with a knowledge wider than his own, so the truth about the past could be preserved only on a like condition. Its human repositories, the poets, had (like the seers) their technical resources, their professional training; but vision of the past, like insight into the future, remained a mysterious faculty, only partially under its owner's control, and dependent in the last resort on divine grace. By that grace poet and seer alike enjoyed a knowledge117 denied to other men. In Homer the two professions are quite distinct; but we have good reason to believe that they had once been united,118 and the analogy between them was still felt.
The gift, then, of the Muses, or one of their gifts, is the power of true speech. And that is just what they told Hesiod when he heard their voice on Helicon, though they confessed that they could also on occasion tell a pack of lies that counterfeited truth.119 What particular lies they had in mind we do not know; possibly they meant to hint that the true inspiration of saga was petering out in mere invention, the sort of invention we can observe in the more recent portions of the Odyssey. Be that as it may, it was detailed factual truth that Hesiod sought from them, but facts of a new kind, which would enable him to piece together the traditions about the gods and fill the story out with all the necessary names and relationships. Hesiod had a passion for names, and when he thought of a new one, he did not regard it as something he had just invented; he heard it, I think, as something the Muse had given him, and he knew or hoped that it was "true." He in fact interpreted in terms of a traditional belief-pattern a feeling which has been shared by many later writers120—the feeling that creative thinking is not the work of the ego.
It was truth, again, that Pindar asked of the Muse. "Give me an oracle," he says, "and I will be your spokesman The words he uses are the technical terms of Delphi; implicit in them is the old analogy between poetry and divination. But observe that it is the Muse, and not the poet, who plays the part of the Pythia; the poet does not ask to be himself "possessed," but only to act as interpreter for the entranced Muse.122 And that seems to be the original relationship. Epic tradition represented the poet as deriving supernormal knowledge from the Muses, but not as falling into ecstasy or being possessed by them.
The notion of the "frenzied" poet composing in a state of ecstasy appears not to be traceable further back than the fifth century. It may of course be older than that; Plato calls it an old story, I should myself guess it to be a by-product of the Dionysiac movement with its emphasis on the value of abnormal mental states, not merely as avenues to knowledge, but for their own sake.124 But the first writer whom we know to have talked about poetic ecstasy is Democritus, who held that the finest poems were those composed "with inspiration and a holy breath," and denied that anyone could be a great poet sine furore.125 As recent scholars have emphasised,126 it is to Democritus, rather than to Plato, that we must assign the doubtful credit of having introduced into literary theory this conception of the poet as a man set apart from common humanity127 by an abnormal inner experience, and of poetry as a revelation apart from reason and above reason. Plato's attitude to these claims was in fact a decidedly critical one—but that is matter for a later chapter.
NOTES TO CHAPTER III
IV
Dream-Pattern and Culture-Pattern
S'il était donné à nos yeux de chair de voir dans la conscience d'autrui, on jugerait bien plus sûrement un homme d'après ce qu'il rêve que d'après ce qu'il pense.
Victor Hugo
Man shares with a few others of the higher mammals the curious privilege of citizenship in two worlds. He enjoys in daily alternation two distinct kinds of experience— and as the Greeks called them—each of which has its own logic and its own limitations; and he has no obvious reason for thinking one of them more significant than the other. If the waking world has certain advantages of solidity and continuity, its social opportunities are terribly restricted. In it we meet, as a rule, only the neighbours, whereas the dream world offers the chance of intercourse, however fugitive, with our distant friends, our dead, and our gods. For normal men it is the sole experience in which they escape the offensive and incomprehensible bondage of time and space. Hence it is not surprising that man was slow to confine the attribute of reality to one of his two worlds, and dismiss the other as pure illusion. This stage was reached in antiquity only by a small number of intellectuals; and there are still to-day many primitive peoples who attribute to certain types of dream experience a validity equal to that of waking life, though different in kind.1 Such simplicity drew pitying smiles from nineteenth-century missionaries; but our own age has discovered that the primitives were in principle nearer the truth than the missionaries. Dreams, as it now appears, are highly significant after all; the ancient art of oneirocritice once more provides clever men with a lucrative livelihood, and the most highly educated of our contemporaries hasten to report their dreams to the specialist with as grave an anxiety as the Superstitious Man of Theophrastus.2
1 For notes to chapter iv see pages 121-134.
Against this historical background it seems worth while to look afresh at the attitude of the Greeks towards their dream-experience, and to this subject I propose to devote the present chapter. There are two ways of looking at the recorded dream-experience of a past culture: we may try to see it through the eyes of the dreamers themselves, and thus reconstruct as far as may be what it meant to their waking consciousness; or we may attempt, by applying principles derived from modern dream-analysis, to penetrate from its manifest to its latent content. The latter procedure is plainly hazardous: it rests on an unproved assumption about the universality of dream-symbols which we cannot control by obtaining the dreamer's associations. That in skilled and cautious hands it might nevertheless yield interesting results, I am willing to believe; but I must not be beguiled into essaying it. My main concern is not with the dream-experience of the Greeks, but with the Greek attitude to dream-experience. In so defining our subject we must, however, bear in mind the possibility that differences between the Greek and the modern attitude to dreams may reflect not only different ways of interpret
ing the same type of experience, but also variations in the character of the experience itself. For recent enquiries into the dreams of contemporary primitives suggest that, side by side with the familiar anxiety-dreams and wish-fulfilment dreams that are common to humanity, there are others whose manifest content, at any rate, is determined by a local culture-pattern.3 And I do not mean merely that where, for example, a modern American might dream of travelling by 'plane, a primitive will dream that he is carried to Heaven by an eagle; I mean that in many primitive societies there are types of dream-structure which depend on a socially4 transmitted pattern of belief, and cease to occur when that belief ceases to be entertained. Not only the choice of this or that symbol, but the nature of the dream itself, seems to conform to a rigid traditional pattern. It is evident that such dreams are closely related to myth, of which it has been well said that it is the dream-thinking of the people, as the dream is the myth of the individual.5
Keeping this observation in mind, let us consider what sort of dreams are described in Homer, and how the poet presents them. Professor H. J. Rose, in his excellent little book Primitive Culture in Greece, distinguishes three prescientific ways of regarding the dream, viz., (1) "to take the dream-vision as objective fact"; (2) "to suppose it . . . something seen by the soul, or one of the souls, while temporarily out of the body, a happening whose scene is in the spirit world, or the like"; (3) "to interpret it by a more or less complicated symbolism."6 Professor Rose considers these to be three successive "stages of progress," and logically no doubt they are. But in such matters the actual development of our notions seldom follows the logical course. If we look at Homer, we shall see that the first and third of Rose's "stages" coexist in both poems, with no apparent consciousness of incongruity, while Rose's second "stage" is entirely missing (and continues to be missing from extant Greek literature down to the fifth century, when it makes a sensational first appearance in a well-known fragment of Pindar).7
