Anthesterias Second Day: Khoes, The Feast Of Pitchers, Day Of Swinging

Anthesteria’s second day: Khoes, the Feast of Pitchers, Day 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.

ramblingtaz:

A bacchante by the Italian comic book writer and artist Milo Manara

DARK DRUNKENNESS: THE TALE OF ERIGONE

The reason Khoes is sometimes referred to as the Day of Swings is a story that goes as follows:

When Dionysos first came to Athens to give wine to the people, He was taken in by a kind farmed called Ikarios. In some versions of the tale, Dionysos also fell in love with Ikarios’s daughter Erigone, and many parallels have been drawn between Erigone and Ariadne. In return for their hospitality, Dionysos taught Ikarios to make wine.

Ikarios held a big party, inviting all his friends and neighbors. He bought out the wine which Dionysos had taught him to make, and at first everyone loved the new drink. But when they began to get drunk and started to fall down, they became fearful and suspicious, and thought that Ikarios had poisoned them — so they killed him and stuffed his body in a well. When Erigone found her father’s body, she was so grief-stricken that she hanged herself on a nearby tree.

As punishment, Dionysos cursed Athens and the surrounding land of Attica with barrenness, and struck down the daughters of the people with a madness that caused the young women to hang themselves — just like Erigone, whose death their fathers had caused.

The Athenians sent word to the Temple of Delphi, asking the Oracle for help, to know which God they had wronged. The Pythia told the people of Attica that they needed to make amends for the death of Erigone and her father. Ikarios and Erigone were finally given a proper burial, and a festival, the Aiora, was instituted. The madness was lifted, and the land became fruitful again.

During the Aiora, the young girls of the city would hang ribbons, cups and dolls from trees and let the boys push them on a swing. It can be celebrated on either Khoes or Khutroi, either day works.

——- —- — - The external tragedy of drunkenness.  This is a deep and subtle and complex tale, with many layers and moving parts.  It is the story of paranoia, fear and suspicion.  Of drunken rage and confused impulsive violence.  It tells of those who unfairly fear alcohol and inebriation, as well as those who fall under the darker influences of the same.  It is a story of a death, and of a suicide, and of the ripple effects that suicides can have in a community, like a curse.  And finally, it is the story of how proper reverence, the right attitudes of respect and release, can lift even the heaviest burdens, how merriment and light-heartedness and reverent inebriation can restore the balance and keep dark cycles at bay.

I think of this tale every time someone rails primly against drinking, calls it an evil, blames it for horrible evil things.  For it is not the drinking that creates or causes violence and brutality and dark behavior, any more than an unlocked door causes burglary, or a short skirt causes rape.  All drinking does is to open the doors to rooms in the self that have long been locked — it brings to the surface and the light that which has lain sunken in the dark watery depths for so long.  In one who has no hidden unresolved monsters, drinking brigs out laughter, and love, and daring, and silliness, and relaxation.  The only ones who need fear the liberation of Dionysus are those who have chained their monsters without mastering them.

I think of Erigone’s tragedy when a death or a suicide rends the peace of a community, its savage echoes tearing and ripping the fabric of so many lives outward in extending circles.  When people seem unable to escape the despair and confusion and pain caused by the tragedy and its echoes, and go on dully repeating them ritually, as if condemned.  Holding on.  Locked in to the dull pain of their loss, their fracture, their downward spiral.  No hope of redemption.

But Dionysos is the Liberator.  The savior.  The redeeming one.  He saved the helmsman from the pirates’ fate, raised the shade of his manipulated mother out of Hades and made her a goddess in Olympia, rescued Ariadne from her isolation and misery on Naxos after Theseus had abandoned her.  Dionysos and all He represents, all He brings, can help and heal.  Passion, finding something to care about again.  Ecstasy, getting outside of the self, shedding the layers of self-perception that imprison you.  Devotion, believing in something, valuing something that is greater than your self.  Intoxication, relaxation, sensation, pleasure, opening up, taking chances, feeling alive, again.  Light-hearted playing like a child with others who are doing the same.  Sitting on a swing and swinging, hanging ribbons in the trees, as the scents of spring thaw in the fading shadow of winter.

He is life’s liberating force. He is release of limbs and communion through dance. He is laughter, and music in flutes. He is repose from all cares — he is sleep! When his blood bursts from the grape and flows across tables laid in his honor to fuse with our blood, he gently, gradually, wraps us in shadows of ivy-cool sleep.

— Euripedes, “The Bacchae”