Carson Anne - Euripides Bakkhai

Greenish-bluish-purple dewy and cool almost transparent, as a ripe grape. Tone of alterity, things just about to change, already looking different. Energy headlong and heedless and shot like a beam. Ethics fantastically selfish. 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.

The Greeks called him foreign and staged his incursion into polis after polis in stories like the one in Euripides Bakkhai. A shocking play. Lecturing in Japan Stephen Hawking was asked not to mention that the universe had a beginning (and so likely an end) because it would affect the stockmarket. Speculation aside, we all need a prehistory. According to Freud, we do nothing but repeat it. Beginnings are special because most of them are fake.

The new person you become with that first sip of wine was already there. Look at Pentheus twirling around in a dress, so pleased with his girl-guise hes almost in tears. Are we to believe this desire is new? Why was he keeping that dress in the back of his closet anyhow? Costume is flesh. Look at Dionysos, plucked prematurely from his doomed mothers womb and sewn up in the thigh of Zeus to be born again later. Life is a rehearsal for life. Heres a well-known secret about Dionysos: despite all those legends of him as new god imported to Greece from the east, his name is already on Linear B tablets that date to 12th-century BC.

Previousness is something a god can manage fairly well (time a fiction for him) but mortals less so. Look at those poor passionate women who worship this god, the Bakkhai, destroyers of livestock and local people and Pentheus the king. They had a prior existence once. The herdsman describes them lying at peace in the mountains calm as buttons on a shirt. This is the world before men. Then the posse arrives and violence begins.

What does this tell us? The shock of the new will prepare its own unveiling in old and brutal ways. Dionysos does not explain or regret anything. He is pleased if he can cause you to perform, despite your plan, despite your politics, despite your neuroses, despite even your Dionysian theories of self, something quite previous, the desire before the desire, the lick of beginning to know you dont know. If life is a stage, that is the show. Exit Dionysos. Dionysos. Dionysos.

I am son of Zeus, born by a lightning bolt out of Semele you know this story the night Zeus split her open with fire. In order to come here I changed my form, put on this suit of human presence. I want to visit the springs of Dirke, the river Ismenos. Look there I see the tomb of my mother, thunderstruck Semele, and her ruined house still smoking with the live flame of Zeus. Im glad my grandfather Kadmos named this place sacred, Im glad he keeps it clean. I myself planted it all round with vines in the clear key of green.

The story so far: I crossed Lydia, Phrygia, Baktria, Media, Arabia and the whole coastland of Asia to come here to this Greek city to make myself known: my rituals, my dances, my religion, my livewire self! I am something supernatural not exactly god, ghost, spirit, angel, principle or element There is no term for it in English. In Greek they say daimo can we just use that? So, I set all Asia dancing and then I came here first of all the cities of Greece: I came to thrill you, Thebes. Dont doubt I will. Heres what youll need: fawnskin, thyrsos, absolute submission. My mothers sisters failed to understand this theyve been going around saying Dionysos wasnt born of Zeus, Kadmos just made that up after Semele slept with a perfectly ordinary person. It was wrong of them to say such things.

I have stung them from their homes, they are gone mad upon the mountains. The whole bursting female seed-pod of Thebes is gone mad. Ive put them in Dionysian uniform and they sit beneath pine trees staring at their own green hands. So they will learn, so Thebes must learn, to call me son of Zeus and call me daimon. Now Thebes has a new leader. Kadmos appointed him.

Hes Kadmos grandson. Name is Pentheus. This man is against me. He does not acknowledge me in libation or prayer. But I am a god. Ill show him.

Him and all his Thebans. Then Ill be on my way to another land in visible triumph. But if Thebes comes forth in anger to drive my Bakkhic women from the mountains I shall lead them as an army into battle. Thats why Ive changed to mortal form how do I look? Convincingly human? O dear women! My cadre, my sisterhood, my fellow travellers you who left your distant lives to wander all the way from Lydia with me lift up your tambourines! bang loud your drums! Surround Pentheus house with noise and let the city see you! Ill go to Mt Kithairon and get them dancing there. [enter Bakkhai]