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Meditations on Modern Bacchanalia

26 July 2022

As part of our commitment to Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, we have appointed three student journalists to create compelling content which links Art History and EDI. In this article, student Joseph Knoeppel suggests how we might frame a queer rereading of Modern Bacchanalia.

HoA student journalists

There has been power in partying for over two millennia. In Ancient Greek and Roman civilisations, festivals often were demonstrations of piety and power. In the contemporary and modern West, festivals have increasingly been deployed by marginalised groups to celebrate differences in identity. I am thinking specifically of queer parties, or larger-scaled Pride celebrations which now receive mainstream media attention.

Bacchus is one ancient god whose character and rites seem to embody queerness. These ancient festivities may not translate perfectly into the contemporary, but certain acts and characteristics associated with the bacchic myth might map onto individuals and groups society now deems queer. In conjunction with my master’s dissertation, which seeks comparisons between the ancient god Bacchus and modern queer readings of art, I began to think of examples of modern bacchanalia. Though unintentional, contemporary queer parties operate similarly. Let me explain.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Greek myth of Dionysus I will begin with a short introduction to the god. (Bacchus is the name given to the god by the Romans. While myths do not always translate directly, it would seem their shared myths are almost identical.) Semele, a princess of Thebes in Greek mythology, claimed the father of her unborn child to be Zeus. Upon hearing this news, a jealous Hera, the wife of Zeus, persuaded the pregnant Semele to request Zeus come to her in his true form. Zeus’ power was too great for the mortal, she was struck by thunderbolts, and while Semele lay dying, Zeus saved Dionysus, sewing him up in his thigh.

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Detail of ‘The Birth of Dionysus’, c.405-385 BC in National Archaeological Museum of Taranto

Pictured here is an early 4th century BC vase that depicts the birth of Dionysus from the thigh of Zeus. Dionysus might be thought of as having two mothers: Semele, who conceives and carries the foetus in her womb, and Zeus, who, after killing his mother, carries Dionysus in his thigh to the end of gestation. In this regard, the birth story of Dionysus disrupts notions of the nuclear family and raises questions of kinship.

Two further bacchic myths weigh into queer readings of the god that I will briefly expand on. The first is the Euripidean play, The Bacchae, in which the women are driven mad by Dionysus, run away from their homes, and escape to the mountains to engage in ecstatic religious orgies. The women find themselves outside the traditional spatial organisation of kinship, the home. In the same play, Dionysus is described as “soft, even effeminate, [in] appearance,” and without facial hair. Indeed, the god is often depicted as androgynous, as being boyish and youthful. The play The Bacchae upsets gender roles, it features men dressed as women and vice versa. It is a play where the women become the plunderers who fight and steal. 

In addition to this, Bacchus is blamed in Aesop’s fables for causing the creation of ‘depraved lust’, specifically the creation of male and female homosexuals. Prometheus, who returns home from a drunken dinner with the god of wine, affixes female genitalia onto male bodies and vice versa as he moulds humankind out of clay. We can begin to see in Bacchic myths that notions of kinship, gender, and sexuality, are upset and thrown into a state of confusion.

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‘Bacchanal with a Wine Vat’ by Andrea Mantegna (before 1475) from the Metropolitan Museum of Art collection. 

Bacchic rites are often represented as carefree and uninhibited. “Debauched and debauchers, frenzied devotees, bereft of their senses by lack of sleep, by drink, by the hubbub and the shouting that goes on through the night.” Livy recorded that the bacchanal was outlawed in Rome in 186 BC for being immoral and subversive; any Bacchic meetings would be considered a “conspiracy” against the Senate. Thus, exercising the ecstatic rites of Bacchus became a subversive and transgressive celebration. They were said to inspire ecstasy where one could find “males, scarcely distinguishable from females.” Here, again, do we find suggestions of the genderqueer nature of the bacchic. I have included an etching by Mantegna to demonstrate an early modern conception of the bacchanal in which the statuesque flesh of the naked body indulges and seduces and perhaps represents the antithesis of Catholicism as it was imagined in 15th century Europe.

In Greek and Roman rituals, Dionysus and Bacchus functioned as a social equaliser. The worshipers, whether male or female, young or old, a freeman or slave, entered a state of natural equality and cultural indistinguishability in their rituals. The bacchanal is imagined as existing out with the parameters of day-to-day life. It can exist only within strict temporal and spatial parameters. It is a stepping out of societal expectations, a ritual of release. Might this not be how the contemporary queer party operates?

By rereading the myths surrounding Bacchus, expanding a queer archive becomes possible. The bacchanal is an equalising celebration that, in its excess, disorder, and madness, became immoral and illegal. The modern queer party, subversive in nature, creates an inclusive environment in which LGBTQ people can socialise and celebrate their differences free from stigma. They are defined by their opposition to the status quo, as the bacchanal and its later conceptions in European culture were. My research suggests that bacchic iconography has, across time, been deployed to represent the queer, and that queerness has been disguised by alternative names in history. So, the next time you find yourself dancing at Adonis, remember to thank the Ancient Greeks.

Written by Joseph Knoeppel