#Elvis/Dionysus
When Elvis Presley swivelled his hips and a generation of females screamed in ecstasy it was as if Dionysus had been reborn and the Maenads liberated from their long imprisonment under the tyranny of the One God.
I was13 and still remember the impact of Elvis’s “All Shook Up” the first time I heard it blasting out of the radio. Wow![i]
The timing was inevitable. Two world wars had finally stripped naked the hypocrisy of monotheism — a god of ‘peace and love’ in whose name so much bigotry, misogyny, violence and pain has been inflicted on the world over the centuries! Robert Browning’s assertion in his poem Pippa’s Song that “…God’s in His heaven, All’s right with the world!” (1841) now rings with a very hollow sound; so, in spite of millennia of suppression, it was as if the old gods and goddesses were stirring deep in our souls.
And how our souls responded! We danced to the music, hugged trees, made love, and called forth the Great Goddess from Her millennial exile, For those of us who heard the pipes of Pan calling, the natural world, animal, vegetable and mineral regained its ancient sacredness. As William James noted in1902 the popular religion of the so-called ‘common people’ has always been ‘a polytheism.’
I’m 77 now and I still dance to the music when my arthritis lets me! I treat my garden as a slug sanctuary because all wild life has as much right to live as we do.
Of course the old guard is fighting back; in their death throes, fundamentalism and neo-liberalism have joined forces to subdue the hard fought for liberties we enjoyed so briefly between the end of WWll and the rise of Thatcher and Reagan. The disaster that started with the Industrial Revolution is reaching its apex in this millennium in the garb of technology. But, know thine enemy. I’m writing this on a lap top because sometimes the instruments of evil can be used for the good. So mote it be.
[i] ! Maenad, was the Greek name for a female follower of Dionysus. The word comes from the Greek maenades, meaning “mad” or “demented.” Just by the name you can imagine the orgiastic nature of their worship. .When the Romans assimilated the Greek pantheon, Dionysus became Bacchus and the Maenads became the Bacchae or Bacchantes; the name changed but the festivities carried on. It was, indeed, the worship of Dionysus that led to the foundation of theatre as we know it today.
