Category: Inspiration/Musings

On Centaurs and Satyrs:

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From Masks of Dionysus in “The Wildness of Satyrs”:

“Centaurs, on the other hand, make up a real society of their own, attached to neither god nor a master, situated outside the human world and civilization. Heracles cannot pass among them without violence. Nessos tries to rape Deianira. The opening of the wine jar entrusted to Pholus by Dionysus drives the centaurs into a frenzy, and the same kind of rioting at the wedding of Pirithous, where Theseus has to restrain the centaurs’ outbursts as they turn into drunken rapists. Inversely, some centaurs, such as Pholus and Chiron, hold secret powers, medical or magical ones. Chiron is also an educator, a famous paidotrophos. These hybrid beings are more truly on the borderline between extremes of wildness and culture, animality and humanity.

In the case of satyrs, the situation is not quite the same. Satyrs do not form an isolated society, far from the civilized world of humans. They accompany Dionysus, who is present among humans with wine, dance, and music, surrounded by maenads. They have a subordinate status, like that of slaves; servants of Dionysus, they also work as artisans at the forge of Hephaestus; sometimes they are sculptors, sometimes cooks. They can be servants of Heracles, who captures them but does not defeat them, unlike the centaurs who he massacres. By the logic of their servile status, satyrs are depicted as both thieves and gluttons, incorrigible and unrepentant drunkards.”

Quotes from “Destroyer of the Household” in _Masks of Dionysus_

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“Normally, in ritual, Dionysus as a god of communality draws women out of the household, inspiring them with a temporary, controlled resistance to public gender division. In this way he counters the two antithetical threats to the polis — offsetting excessive adherence to the household by bringing the women out from the their homes, and gender confusion by bringing them out for only a temporary, controlled period. Because he is honored by the while polis, Dionysus both presents a latent threat to the household and, if deprived of that honor, will destroy the gender division which the polis is based. Indeed, fi Dionysus is resisted, both threats are activated. Female adherence to the household is violently revised by a frenzy in which women leave their homes and even destroy their families. And this frenzy also endangers male control of the public sphere….”

Quotes from “Sacrifice and Cultural Formation” in _Masks of Dionysus_

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“I will not, however, want to claim that maenadic omophagy is even a mythic of imaginative example of Dionsysiac sacramentalism, for the very reason that it is not sacrifice at all. Instead,  it constitutes the inversion of normal sacrificial procedure, in which a domesticated (and not wild) animal is ritually selected (and not merely chanced  upon), killed, systematically cut up (and not dismembered by force), and eaten cooked (and not raw). Maenadic sparagamos followed by omophagy thus stands in complete contradistinction to ordinary sacrifice and can thus be viewed as a kind of inverted character myth, setting for the way in which sacrifice should not take place, much as the account of the dismemberment of the young Dionysus by the Titans invert the original, paradigmatic division of the sacrificial victim by (another Titan) Prometheus.

…

Raw meat in these instances is to be associated with highly marginal, unusual, and infrequent situations of ritual exception and solution. One may compare the Hephaestia on Lemnos, a time of dissolution and exception, in which all fire is extinguished for nine days until new fire is brought from Delos.* During the exceptional period sacrifices continue to be performed without fire; there is thus no normal food (consumption of raw meat is actually not attested). So also in the case of maenadic sacrifice there is an infrequent (“trietetric,” i.e., every other year), periodic (though short-lived) ritual and commemorative regression to an aboriginal period in cultural history, with the mythical worshipers of Dionysus “regressively transformed into bestial predators.”

…

I suspect that if you asked a Theban of Delphic maenad if they performed sparagmos during their oreibasiai, the answer would have been, ‘No, but we used to do so. It’s just we don’t do that anymore. Other people, those people,” they might have said, “up there [Thracians, perhaps], still do it.” (The same is often said by one culture of another culture about cannibalism[…].)

*Philostratus Heroicus 67.7 (de Lannoy 1977): during the exceptional nine-day period ‘fid the ship brining new fire from Delos arrives before the funerary sacrifice are over, it may not be brought to anchor on Lemnos.’ Cf. Burkert 1983, 190-96, especially on the Dionysiac elements with further bibliography: ‘Sacrifice was clearly a part of the exceptional period at Lemnos, sacrifice without fire; so that one could eat at most only raw pieces of meat, burying the rest or throwing it intot he sea’ (193).

GABBLER RECOMMENDS: Promising Young Woman – better than the reviewers are giving it credit for

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Promising Young Woman is the first film we watched in 2021. It was a great kickoff to what we hope are many more great films, but we have notes for reviewers. Spoilers ahead.

I start first with this excerpt from Vulture’s review of it:

“But Cassie’s romance also sets Promising Young Woman up for a big finish that has to contend with the complicated question it’s been skirting all along — one of reconciliation versus retribution, and whether there’s any benefit to holding fast to rage forever, no matter how warranted. It’s a question that’s impossible to answer broadly, but the specific conclusion for which the movie opts is both profoundly upsetting and apparently intended to provoke applause. Fennell’s film is a vibrant, stylistically precise piece of work, but the sentiments it conveys don’t feel examined. It’s an acceleration off a cliff when what you’d really like to see is some kind of road forward, no matter how rough.”

I will admit that Cassie’s death turned the “dark comedy” into an unexpected, horrific allegory of some sort. But it was not undermined by this. In fact, I argue it was what had been promised throughout the whole film. I did see a “road forward,” actually, by Cassie’s forgiveness of Alfred Molina’s lawyer character. She granted him a way to set his wrongs right and he immediately asked for her forgiveness. You don’t see that a lot in stories like these. It was the kind of forgiveness I had hoped BoJack would be allowed in the Netflix series BoJack Horseman, but that show’s end left me a bit unsatisfied in terms of seeing justice or forgiveness for him. Not that Promising Young Woman is at all comforting, but it offers something a bit stronger.

Notes/Observations: 

– It is of course true that some do not heal from trauma. And do recognize the kind of trauma I mean–the trauma of losing a best friend. This film is not just about Cassie seeking revenge. It is about her dealing with her grief.

– Cassie is missing her other half, represented by half the friendship locket. She will never be whole again until her own body, wearing Nina’s half, is found.

– Cassie is sometimes framed as a saint-like figure in the film, righteous in her crusade. We see her as if she has a halo here, for example:

But these are red herrings. They distract from the Christ-like poses elsewhere that were at first lost on me:

And again:

– All of the sugar-coated colors and the amusing soundtrack are distractions from the ultimate sacrifice she is willing to make.

– Her love for her friend perhaps turns her into her friend, thus why she wears Nina’s half of the locket when she is murdered. Perhaps similar to a theme in Alias Grace, the dead possesses her to enact revenge. Cassie is a willing vessel for that revenge because she misses her friend so much and it is all she has left of her.

– Allison Willmore’s Vulture review says Cassie’s death/willingness to die is like “an acceleration off a cliff when what you’d really like to see is some kind of road forward, no matter how rough.” This made me wonder if Thelma & Louise had similar critiques back in the day when they drove off a literal cliff instead of continuing to live in the male dominated world that would never be home to them. What Thelma & Louise did to the buddy road film, Promising Young Woman might do to the dark comedy–or whatever genre it is that I haven’t pinned down yet. Throughout the whole film I thought there was going to be more gore and horror. Like this video essay breaks down, I also see Cassie as a single combination of the Whore and Madonna:

UPDATED AFTER PUBLICATION——————————————————

Also recommended:

 

“one divinity may be taken for the manifestation of another.”

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‘In ancient Egypt, the principle of “identity” had far wider application than in our culture, resulting in what Henri Frankfort called a “multiplicity of approaches.” Facts do not exclude one another, but are added in layers, doing justice to the multiple facets of reality. This art of combining rests on the capacity of an entity to manifest itself in different forms: one divinity may be taken for the manifestation of another.’

 

The ancient gods speak : a guide to Egyptian religion