Anthesteria's Second Day: Khoes, The Day Of Pitchers, Feast Of Swinging

Anthesteria's second day: Khoes, the Day of Pitchers, Feast of Swinging

First she offered him her cup, and he filled it with his divine wine. Then He returned to Her the crown of His love, and the two ascended together into the heavens where Her crown is still seen among the stars...

Anthesteria started yesterday with a festival of flowers, a procession from the waters to the city, a Masked Man adored by wild women and satyrs and other, stranger folk.  But today... today it starts to get weird.

It could be the drinking, yes.  The pithoi jars have been opened, the wine has been mixed and blessed, there is no shortage.  Rampant and massive public drunkenness rules the streets, wine flows like water.  Drinking contests are set up, men and women celebrate the swinging rites of Aiôra and set up swings to play upon like children, hanging dolls and masks also to swing from the trees like Erigone of old.  

But what really makes the day of Khoes weird... are the ghosts.

Not the beloved personal dead whose faces we know and love or fear, but the public dead are these ghosts, our Keres.  The spirits of those nameless crowds of people whose lives moved here before ours, whose stories played out and ended, whose pasts fill our community with untold tales and unwhispered names.  They move through us every day, but on this day, maybe with the help of the wine, we FEEL them.  We hear the soundless echoes of their footfalls, their shouting, their laughter, their quiet murmuring talk.  We feel full to bursting with all those who lived in our home, our neighborhood, those who walked our streets, those who gathered in the parks we go to.

And to make it just that little bit weirder, along with the ghosts and the dry dusty whispers of death and time, we feel the stirrings of a powerful sexual tide moving through us, individually and communally.  It binds us generally if not specifically -- each of us has lusted, hungered, longed for touch and heat and passion and release.  Even the ghosts, now cold and untouchable.  The serpent stirs in us, the hot fluids rise, the erotic awareness of bud and flower and stem and root fill every glance at the sacred flowerbeds.  We have drunk the wine, we have felt the wildness rise in us.  We want to dance, and laugh, and kiss, and caress, and fuck, and explode.

Like a fever, it spreads, then reaches a peak as the evening slides languorously into night.  In the most sacred places, the most innermost of temples, the greatest rite is performed, the sacred marriage between the God and the Basalinna, the Sacred Queen.  A man and a woman writhe together and become one -- a priest and priestess -- a maenad and a satyr -- Dionysus and Ariadne.  And the city shudders in the night with prismatic visions of wine-saturated paradise and release.

Liberation.

Eleleu!  Eleleu!  Iou!  Iou!  Hail and welcome the Reveller.

Satyrs And The Oreads

by William Adolphe Bouguereau

...um, why would Dionysos have a soldier's haircut?  And a soldier's helmet?  Everything else is fine, not especially Dionysian, but not unfitting.  But part of the root of the Dionysian archetype is a strong element of femininity, androgyny, and the one thing every description of his human appearance agrees on is: long hair.

And the martial overtones, the implications of aggression and war and combat and soldierliness, they are completely oppositional to everything Dionysos represents.  It's like saying that a picture of a femmy guy in a pink ruffled dress represents Ares.

"To each their own" only goes so far...

"I wear my hair long,  for the god." -- from "The Bacchae", by Euripides

A visual representation of Lord Dionysos in all of his power and glory. I am unworthy of being his maenad, yet he still collects me into madness.

I want to hear raucous music, to see faces, to brush against bodies. Beautiful women and handsome men arouse fierce desires in me. I want to dance, I want drugs, I want to know perverse people, to be intimate with them. I never look at naive faces. I want to bite into life, to be torn by it - I’m going to hell, to hell, to hell - wild, wild, wild.

Anaïs Nin  (via considerthishippie)

Hey! You seem to be pretty well versed in the Greek concepts of the afterlife, so I was wondering; what were there thoughts on reincarnation? I've heard it mentioned before, but never with details.

The main sources on reincarnation in ancient Greek culture come fairly late in the picture, relatively speaking — Pythagoras and Herodotus, mainly.  Herodotus got most of his reincarnation talk from his study of Egyptian culture, and it was fairly minimal as I recall, didn’t go very far, he was just fascinated with the Egyptians in general.  The main lineage then would be Pythagoras, who learned of reincarnation from a mentor in the Orphic traditions (relating to Orpheus), a sort of New Religion from Thrace that was probably influenced by the Hindus from India and surrounding areas.  It’s no coincidence that Dionysos was known for A) being a New God bringing new mysteries, and B) having come from India (where he was hidden from Hera).  The Propompoi is largely a symbol of the foreign monsters and creatures who formed the Indian court of Dionysos.

Orpheus, who went to Hades seeking his wife Eurydice, taught that the immortal soul is caught or imprisoned in the mortal body, but can fly free with the grace of the gods (especially Dionysos), moving between freedom and captivity in a cycle related to the Fates. and through self-purification (the mystery rites of Eleusis) and the favor of Dionysos, Persephone and Demeter — Liber, Libera, and Ceres, as they are called at the upcoming Liberalia — the soul can achieve immortality and eternal bliss.  Perhaps this means Elysium, perhaps something else, much has been lost.

Orphism organized into mystery schools at Eleusis around the time of Pythagoras.  Some suggest that Socrates was involved, and that this related to his forced suicide, these new ideas of his that threatened the system of life and afterlife that had been established before the coming of Dionysos.  There are bits of it in the Phaedrus, the Republic.  The soul drifting in a sort of limbo, Pindar’s “realm of Persephone” before taking another body, and eventually dying permanently into the afterlife of heroes.

It is likely that much of the reincarnation mythology from India passed through Greece and into the Celtic cultures as well; many feel that the eastern lands from which the Tuatha De Danann sailed to Ireland must have been Greece, and maybe India as well, and the Danann ancestors (the Nemedians, the Fir Bolg) were said to have been scattered to Greece before returning to Ireland as the Tuatha De Danann.

mythology series → the minotaur’s sister ariadne [Ἀριάδνη]

out of the maze revealing secrets we kept on the way who knows who’s right breaking the chains i’m gonna give up my future to fate now i’m alright eventually i saw what was not clear to my eyes for all my life thought i had friends i could confess my fears and my hopes no more tears, no more fights  each one is free to take his own way out you take yours, i’ll take mine out of the maze