Dining On Dionysus

Those who have read the classics know what is coming in August. Now that the Stadium of Men has burned down, there is no stopping them, the Raving Ones. I posted on the Maenads August 26 2013, seven months before Belle and the Valkyrie came raging into my life. Then, Krysta and her women helpers, appear. They are getting ready, for their festival when they will dine on my flesh once more. It has been too long. What an honor for a poet and artist to go out like this, I enduring a thousand cuts from their crescent moon knives, down by the river, under the moonlight, the statue of Eugene Skinner covering his ears so he will not hear their bloodcurdling shrieks. She will be there, Krysta’s little sister ‘The Beautiful One’. She has been told, I am ‘The One’. She will be driving up from Orange County with a serious stereo system installed in her Love Mobile. She’s a chorographer, and she wants to dance the Godzilla Run with me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dTTlOke0d4

Maenads have been depicted in art as erratic and frenzied women enveloped in a drunken rapture, the most obvious example being that of Euripides’ play The Bacchae. His play, however, is not a study of the cult of Dionysus or the effects of this religious hysteria of these women. The maenads have often been interpreted in art in this way. To understand the play of Euripides though one must only know about the religious ecstasy called Dionysiac, the most common moment maenads are displayed in art. In Euripides’ play and other art forms and works the Dionysiac only needs to be understood as the frenzied dances of the god which are direct manifestations of euphoric possession and that these worshippers, sometimes by eating the flesh of a man or animal who has temporarily incarnated the god, come to partake of his divinity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maenad