The Bacchae: How do you imagine the dark?

Myth Matters

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"He is a young god.
Mythologically obscure,
always just arriving

at some new place
to disrupt the status quo,
wearing the start of a smile."

--from Ann Carson' translation "The Bakkhai"

In the northern hemisphere we began our collective descent into winter's darkness, with the fall equinox on Wednesday September 22nd.

This is a good time to meditate on the most famous myth of the god Dionysus, intoxicating god of the night. It's a play written by Euripides in the 5th century BCE called "The Bacchae."

Athenians found the cautionary message of this play subversive. It disturbed their image of Greek reason, democracy, social order, and power. The women don't stay in their place. It ends on a gruesome note.

A few years after the play was performed, Athens fell to Sparta and their empire building was over. Euripides was in self-imposed exile, and perhaps he saw something that his fellow citizens could not...

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