Entertainment / Literature / Maenad: Also known as bacchae or thyiads, maenads were female worshippers of Dionysus or Bacchus. In the mystery cult of Dionysus, worshippers would get drunk on wine and then undergo an all-night process of stylized frenzied dancing in order to achieve the divine state of ekstasos. At the height of the frenzy, they believed that they would become one with Dionysus/Bacchus (thus the common Latin name 'bacchae,' a feminine plural form of the god Bacchus' name. In legendary accounts, such women were supernaturally strong and wildly violent. They would run through the forest naked after the ceremonies and would catch small animals (or in some myths men and children!), rip them apart bare-handed, and then eat the flesh raw. In literature, Euripides' tragedy The Bacchae is a dramatic retelling of the arrival of the Dionysiac rites in Greece.
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Entertainment / Literature / Ekstasos: (Greek, 'ecstasy') In Greek thinking, ekstasos is a non-rational state of mind that people achieve by 'losing themselves' in an experience--becoming so engrossed in a sensation or a moment that one fo MORE
Entertainment / Literature / Mystery Cult: Unlike the official 'public cults' dedicated to the Olympian gods in ancient Greece and Rome, a number of religious practices involved chthonic deities (like Demeter) and imported foreign gods (Ishtar MORE