The Bacchae by Euripides - Note on the Bacchae

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Notes on the Bacchuyde by Gilbert Murray. This LibriVox recording
is in the public domain recording by Tony Addison notes
on the baccuide an introductory note. The Baccyde being, from

(00:22):
one point of view, a religious drama, a kind of mystery. Plague,
is full of allusions both to the myth and to
the religion of Dionysus. One the myth, as implied by Euripides, Semele,

(00:43):
daughter of Cadmus, being loved by Zeus, asked her divine
lover to appear to her once in his full glory.
He came a blaze of lightning, in the ecstasy of
which semeleay died, giving premature birth to a son. Zeus,

(01:04):
to save this child's life and make him truly God
as well as man, tore open his own flesh, and
therein fostered the child till in due time, by a
miraculous and mysterious second birth, the child of Semele came
to full life as God. Two. The religion of Dionysus

(01:31):
is hard to formulate or even describe, both because of
its composite origins and because of its condition of constant vitality, fluctuation,
and development a. The first Dartun, apparently, is the introduction
from Thrace of the characteristic god of the wild northern mountains,

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a god of intoxication, of in inspiration, a giver of
superhuman or immortal life. His worship is superposed upon that
of diverse, old, tree or vegetation gods already worshiped in Greece.

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He becomes especially the god of the vine. Originally a
god of the common folk, despised and unauthorized, he is
eventually so strong as to be adopted into the Olympian
hierarchy as the youngest of the gods, son of Zeus.

(02:43):
His Olympian name, so to speak, is Dionysus. But in
his worship he is addressed by numbers of names, more
or less mystic and secret Bromios, Bacchios or Bacchaeus, Yakos, Eleuthercus, Zagreus, Zabarzios,

(03:12):
et cetera. Some of these may be the names of
old spirits whom he has displaced. Some are his own
Thracian names. Bromos and Sabajah, for instance, seem to have
been Thracian names for two kinds of intoxicating drink. A

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baccos means a wand together with his many names, he
has many shapes, especially appearing as a bull and a
serpent b This religion, very primitive and barbarous, but possessing

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a strong whold over the emotions of the common people,
was seized upon and transfigured by the great wave of
religious reform known under the name of Orphism, which swept
over Greece and South Italy in the sixth century b c.

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And influenced the teachings of such philosophers as a. Pythagoras, Aristaeus, Empedocles,
and the many writers on purification and the world after death.
Orphism may very possibly represent an ancient Cretan religion in

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clash or fusion with one from Thrace. At any rate,
it was grafted straight upon the Dionysus worship, and without rationalizing,
spiritualized and reformed it ascetic, mystical, ritualistic, and emotional. Orphism

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easily excited both enthusiasm and ridicule. It lent itself both
to inspired santhness and to imposture. In doctrine, it laid
a special stress upon sin and the saccadotal purification of sin.

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On the eternal reward due beyond the grave to the
pure and the impure. The pure living in an eternal ecstasy,
perpetual intoxication, as Plato satirically calls it, the impure toiling
through long ages to wash out their stains. It recast

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in various ways the myth of Dionysus, and especially the
story of his second birth. All true worshippers become, in
a mystical sense, one with the God. They are born again,
and Arbakoy Dionysus, being the God within the perfectly pure soul,

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is possessed by the God Holy and becomes nothing but
the God. Based on very primitive rights and feelings, on
the religion of men who made their gods in the
images of snakes and bulls and fawns because they hardly
felt any difference of kind between themselves and the animals.

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The worship of Dionysus kept always this feeling of kinship
with wild things. The beautiful side of this feeling is
vividly conspicuous in the back eye, and the whable side
is not in the least concealed. A curious relic of
primitive superstition and cruelty remained firmly embedded in orphism, a

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doctrine irrational and unintelligible, and for that very reason wrapped
in the deepest and most sacred mystery, a belief in
the sacrifice of Dionysus himself and the purification of man
by his blood. It seems possible that the savage Thracians,

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in the fury of their worship on the mountains, when
they were possessed by the God and became wild beasts,
actually tore with their teeth and hands any hares, goats, fawns,
or the like that they came across. There survives a
constant tradition of inspired bacchanals, in their miraculous strength, tearing

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even bulls asunder a feet, happily beyond the bounds of
human possibility. The wild beast that tore was, of course
the savage God himself, and by one of those curious
confusions of thought which seemed so inconceivable to us and

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so absolutely natural and obvious to primitive men, the beast
torn was also the God. The awful congregations of later times,
in their most holy gatherings, solemnly partook of the blood
of a bull, which was, by a mystery the blood

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of Dionysus Zagarius himself the bull of God slain in
sacrifice for the purification of man, and the minads of
poetry and myth, among more beautiful proofs of their superhuman
or infre human character, have always to tear bulls in

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pieces and taste of the blood. It is noteworthy and
throws much light on the spirit of orphism, that, apart
from this sacramental tasting of the blood, the orphic worshiper
held it an abomination to eat the flesh of animals
at all. The same religious fervor and zeal for purity

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which made him reject the pollution of animal food made
him at the same time cling to a ceremonial which
would utterly discuss the ordinary hardened flesh eater. It fascinated
him just because it was so incredibly primitive and uncanny,

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because it was a mystery which transcended reason. It will
be observed that Euripides, though certainly familiar with orphism, which
he mentions in the Hippolytus and treated at length in
the Treatons see Appendix, has in the Back Eye, gone

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back behind orphism to the more primitive stuff from which
it was made. He has little reference to any specially
Orphic doctrine, not a word, for instance, about the immortality
of the soul, and his idealization or spiritualization of Dionysus.

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Worship proceeds along the lines of his own thought, not
on those already fixed by the Orphic teachers, and of
Notes on the Back Eye by Gilbert Murray,