Bacchantic

The orchestra played bacchantic music, and in bacchantic madness the dancers rushed by each other.

There is a passage from chaos to cosmos marked by the "bacchantic" riots of Nature and even ourselves.

Yet nature is Spirit only in its otherness— self-alienated Spriit: "A bacchantic god innocent of restraint and reflection has merely been let loose into it " ( E §247z ) .

the reason for this was twofold: insufficient acquaintance with the metaphors applied to public life and, on the other hand, sublimation on principle of all erotic and bacchantic elements into mystic allegory.

Indeed the Tereus episode resembles the Hecuba even more closely because it combines the motif of a conspiracy of women (a motif also parodied in Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazusae, Lysistrata, and Ecclesiazusae) with the motif of bacchantic rage and collective violence . It is even possible that this bacchantic motif entered Ovid's tale via Sophocles' lost Tereus, though this is only conjecture.

His friend Ted dancing the can-can trouserless with his shirt-tails flying, is an absurd equivalent to the bacchantic worshippers, who were supposed to don female dress during the rite.

In this way the spectators were contextualized as participants in a rite (the chorus of bacchantic dancers and those assisting were originally not separated, either spatially or in their pragmatic roles), who had to perform rite (rightly) that which lay beyond them all.

As am ecstatic city text it exemplifies the tendency to community, to festival, to love; and its bacchantic allusions remind us that Greek ecstatic religions were in part a protest against the restrictions of the urban, an effort to return to a more intense mode of existence.