![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Abstract
The ancient mystery cults practiced by the Greeks and their neighbors were derived from the prehistoric use of caves as places to induce altered states of consciousness. The visions obtained in these rituals were expressed in both cave paintings and in the stories of the ancient playwrights. Ancient thought was shaped profoundly by the ecstatic experiences of Euripides and others, whose own experiences in visionary states were externalized in the form of their poetry and plays. Plato’s allegory of the cave represents a rejection of the “irrational” Dionysian way of knowing, and thus a denial of a long-enduring source of human knowledge, and a preference for a “rational” Apollonian way of knowing. Our modern attitudes continue to reflect this Platonic prejudice.
Notes
1. See also the documentary film Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010) about Chauvet Cave, southern France, directed by Werner Herzog.
2. Plato, Republic, VII, 514a ff.
3. Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae, 15.20.5: Philochorus refert in insula Salamine speluncam esse taetram et horridam, quam nos vidimus, in qua Euripides tragoedias scriptitarit. The verb scriptitare is the frequentative of scribere, meaning it was a repeated and customary action.
4. Philochorus FGrH 328 F 219 (Jacoby).
5. Oxyrhynchi Papyri ix 1176 fr. 39 col. X., A.S. Hunt, Oxyrhynchi Papyri, vol. 9 (1912), no. 1176, pp. 124-182.
6. Aristophanes, Frogs, 943, 1407.
7. Plato, Symposium, 210a–212b. The chauvinistic bias of male scholarship has attempted to deny the existence of Diotima or to identify her with Aspasia, the female sexual companion of Pericles. But Plato did not invent characters, and Aspasia appears in her own right in his Menexenus dialogue.
8. So depicted in Arthur Rackham’s illustration for the 1920 edition of Washington Irving’s Sketch Book.
9. Diogenes Laërtes, 1.112: ekpatésai ascholoúmenon perí rhizotomian. Ascholéomai means “occupy oneself with a profession or study”.
10. Diogenianus Grammaticus 8.28; Strabo 10.4.14; Diogenes Laërtes 8.3; Plutarch, Solon, 12.8; Suda, s.v. Epimenídes.
11. Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae, 1.22ab, citing the third-century BC Chaemaeleon.
12. Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae “Aeschylus used to make his tragedies in an intoxicated state of mind (muthúon), as Chamaeleon says. Sophocles used to reproach him in that even though he did it correctly, he didn’t do it consciously (eidós).”
13. Theophrastus, History of Plants, 9.16.2: see Ruck Citation1978.
14. Nicander, Alexipharmaca, verses 186–194.
15. Apicius, De re coquinaria.
16. Ezekiel, 3.1–3. See Ruck and Hoffman Citation2012.
17. Scholia to Aristophanes, Acharnians, 395ff; so also Scholia to Aristophanes, Frogs, 944.
18. “Bee” is onomatopoetic in English for the buzzing of the bee.
19. Plato, Ion, 533d ff.
20. Aristophanes, Frogs, 944, 1407–1409, 1451–1453.
21. Aristophanes, frag. 596: “O Cephisophon, you best and blackest guy, since you share everything with Euripides, and even collaborate on his melodies”: cited and explained in the anonymous Life of Euripides. The same adultery is related in Satyros.
22. Plutarch, De mulierum virtutibus, 249 EF.
23. Plutarch, Nicias, 29.2–3.
24. Cited in Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae, 13.557e.
25. Hermesianax 7.63–64 Powell (=Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta, 5.1, T 106a)
26. Thucydides, 2; Plutarch, Life of Pisistratus.
27. Euboulos, Semele or Dionysus, frag. 93, preserved in Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae, 2.37c.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Carl A. P. Ruck
Carl A. P. Ruck is Professor of Classics at Boston University, an authority on the ecstatic rituals of the god Dionysus. With the ethno-mycologist R. Gordon Wasson and Albert Hofmann, he provided the currently best evidence for the nature of the secret psychoactive ingredient in the visionary potion that was drunk by the initiates at the Eleusinian Mystery. In Persephone’s Quest: Entheogens and the Origins of Religion (Yale University Press, 1986), he posited the centrality of psychoactive sacraments at the very beginnings of religion, employing the neologism “entheogen” to free the topic from the pejorative connotations for words like “drug” or “hallucinogen”.