Shamanism and the Drug Propaganda: Drama

It was to this shamanic enthousiasmos that we owe the masterpieces of Classical Greece. When the shamanism died, so did the archetypal creativity. Theama means 'vision.' The theatron was 'the place of visions.' Drama arose from the Great Dionysia: "All we really know of this momentous step is that it was taken sometime in the sixth century BC and taken in connection with the worship of Dionysos. Surely it is at least possible that the real impulse to the drama lay not wholly in 'goat songs' and 'circular dancing places' but also in the cardinal, the essentially dramatic, conviction of the religion of Dionysos, that the worshipper can not only worship, but can become, can be, his god."

Jane Ellen Harrison: "The elements of the Eniautos myth are few and simple; its main characteristic is its inevitable, periodic monotony. This comes out clearly in the dromena of the Oschophoria. The principal factors are: (a) A contest (agon). In this case and also in the Karneia and in the Olympic Games the contest is a race to decide who shall carry the boughs and wear the crown. (b) A pathos, a death or defeat. In the Theseus myth this appears in the death of the old king. The pathos is formally announced by a messenger (aggelos) and it is followed or accompanied by a lamentation (threnos). (c) A triumphant Epiphany, an appearance or crowning of the victor or the new king, with an abrupt change (peripeteia) from lamentation to rejoicing....The dromenon may of course take a somewhat simplified form. Thus the Kathodos and Anodos of Kore omits the agon, but probably in all cases where a human representative had to be chosen, a leader or king, the contest element was present. It is surely a fact of the highest significance that the Greek word for actor is agonistes, contester. The shift from sorrow to joy was integral because it was the mimetic presentation of the death of the Old Year, the birth of the New."

"The mythos, the plot which is the life-history of an Eniautos-daimon, whether performed in winter, spring, summer or autumn, is thus doomed by its monotony to sterility. What is wanted is material cast in less rigid mould; in a word legomena not bound by dromena, plots that have cut themselves loose from rites. The dithyramb, which was the periodic festival of the spring renouveau, broke and blossomed so swiftly into the Attic drama because it found such plots to hand; in a word - the forms of Attic drama are the forms of the life-history of an Eniautos-daimon; the content is the infinite variety of free and individualized heroic saga - in the largest sense of the word 'Homer.'"

"Achilles and Alexandros are tribal heroes, that is collective conceptions of conflicting tribes in Thessaly [home of Olympos]. Hector before, not after, he went to Troy was a hero-daimon in Boeotian Thebes; his comrade Melanippos had a cult in Thebes, Patroklos whom he slew was his near neighbor, like him a local daimon. It is the life-stories of heroes such as these, cut loose by the Migrations from their local cults, freed from their monotonous periodicity, that are the material of Attic drama, that form its free and plastic plots." Above are Hektor, Andromache, Paris and Helen, from an Attic sacramental vase, c.550 BC. The names were written with magical intent, backwards, so as to come to life when viewed in a mirror. The image on Hektor's shield says something about the ritual contents of the vase, as do the wings on Paris' feet.

The song for the slaughter of the sacramental goat at the February Anthesteria [Spring comes earlier in Greece], which preceded the Great Dionysia, was the tragodia. "It is an odd fact that the ancients seem to have called certain wild forms of fruits and cereals by names connecting them with the goat. The reason for this is not clear, but the fact is well-established. The Latins called the wild fig caprificus ['goat-fig']; Pausanias expressly tells us that the Messenians gave to the wild fig tree the name tragos, goat. Vines, when they ran wild to foliage rather than fruit, were called tragan. I would conjecture that the inferior sort of spelt called tragos, goat, owes its name to this unexplained linguistic habit. It is even possible that the beard with which spelt is furnished may have helped out the confusion [the psychoactive Claviceps purpurea of the kykeon]. Tragedy I believe to be not the 'goat-sing,' but the 'harvest-song' of the cereal tragos....When the god of the cereal...became the god of the vine, the fusion and confusion of tragodia the spelt-song, with trugodia, the song of the winelees, was easy and indeed inevitable. The tragodoi, the 'beanfeast-singers,' became trugodoi or 'must-singers.'"

The confusion was, of course, intentional, like that between melon and melon, 'sacrificial goat' or 'apple.' An engraved gem from Crete, above, c.1600 BC, shows a winged goat handing a pitcher of liquid to a communicant, who is standing on sacral horns. Floating in the air next to him, indicating the state he is about to achieve on ingestion of the drink, is another winged horned goat. A gold ring from Mycenae, below, shows a worshipper adoring live sacramental plants growing out of an altar while the same plants grow out of the back of the large horned goat that stands behind him. The goat, and the communicant, are about to suffer their own drama.