Once again, the satirical “wit” at the Daily Show with Jon Stewart shows a familiarity with the history of religions in the reference to Michael Jackson’s victory celebration as the Boy-cchanalia. I will not engage the Michael Jackson issue, but thought I’d say a few words about the Bacchanalia incident that ultimately provided us with our word for wild drunken orgies (Bacchanalia is now in most English dictionaries with a definition along those lines, though you will rarely hear it used these days).

Back in the time of Augustus (c. 20 BCE), the Roman historian Livy recounted the story of a controversy from two centuries earlier (186 BCE) involving the worshippers of Bacchus (Dionysos) in Rome and the surrounding area in Italy. In the process of explaining why the Roman leaders (consuls) had suppressed the worship of that imported, foreign deity, Livy goes into great detail concerning the incidents that supposedly led up to the suppression. In the process he draws on a common stock-pile of charges (including human sacrifice and wild orgies) attributed to foreign or “barbarian” peoples, charges which are echoed in the accusations against the early Christians in later times as well (see earlier post). Livy has the character Hispala describe these Dionysiac mysteries or secretive rituals as follows:

From the time when the rites were held promiscuously, with men and women mixed together, and when the license offered by darkness had been added, no sort of crime, no kind of immorality, was left unattempted. There were more obscenities practiced between men than between men and women. Anyone refusing to submit to outrage or reluctant to commit crimes was slaughtered as a sacrificial victim. To regard nothing as forbidden was among these people the summit of religious achievement
(Livy, History of Rome 39.13; trans. by H. Bettenson, Livy: Rome and the Mediterranean [Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976]).

To read more about Dionysos’ mysteries, go here. For some photos of Dionysos or Bacchus, go here or here.