The gate of the year

Interior of an Attic red-figure cup (about 480 B.C.), representing Dionysus with a group of Sileni, now in the Cabinet des Médailles of the Bibliothèque Nationale (National Library), Paris. The god is portrayed in an ecstatic trance posture, while playing the lyre and showing himself as the pattern with which his own worshipers identified themselves, reaching through music and dance a condition of ecstatic “folly”. At Delphi, in fact, Dionysus was called Sphaleotas, “Who makes one stumble”, since he induced an elation and possession by the divine power. The Greek term ekpedan, “leaping out”, was a technical term to indicate the Dionysian trance: a drive to throw oneself which invades the entire body, subtracts it to itself and drags it in an irresistible way (Detienne, 1986, English transl. p. 58).

[Source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dionysos_satyrs_Cdm_ Paris_575_n2.jpg]




Ritual Folly

Back

Interior of an Attic red-figure cup (about 480 B.C.), representing Dionysus with a group of Sileni, now in the Cabinet des Médailles of the Bibliothèque Nationale (National Library), Paris. The god is portrayed in an ecstatic trance posture, while playing the lyre and showing himself as the pattern with which his own worshipers identified themselves, reaching through music and dance a condition of ecstatic “folly”. At Delphi, in fact, Dionysus was called Sphaleotas, “Who makes one stumble”, since he induced an elation and possession by the divine power. The Greek term ekpedan, “leaping out”, was a technical term to indicate the Dionysian trance: a drive to throw oneself which invades the entire body, subtracts it to itself and drags it in an irresistible way (Detienne, 1986, English transl. p. 58). [Source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dionysos_satyrs_Cdm_ Paris_575_n2.jpg]