Table Of ContentMARCEL DETIENNE
DIONYSOS SLAIN
Translated by
Mireille Muellner and Leonard Muellner
THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS
Baltimore and London
This book has been brought to publication with the g~llll~the
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. -
Originally published in 1977 as Dionysos mis a mort. © Editions Gilllimard 1977.
English translation © 1979 by The Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights
reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or
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in writing from the publisher.
Manufactured in the United States of America
The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Maryland 21218
The Johns Hopkins Press Ltd., London
Library of Congress Catalog Number 78-20518
ISBN 0-8018-2210-6
Library of Congress Cil.taloging in Publication data will be found on the 1.ast
printed page of this book.
For Jean-Philippe, Isabelle, and Olivier
Contents
Preface ix
The Greeks Aren't Like the Others
The Perfumed Panther 20
The Misfortunes of the Hunt 20
Le Dit de la Pan there d' Amors 26
The Wind Rose 40
3 Gnawing His Parents' Heads 53
4 The Orphic Dionysos and Roasted Boiled Meat 68
Notes 95
General Index 119
Index Locorum 127
Preface
Rumor has it that we're not done with the Greeks. Anthropology,
if it includes history, is their haven. Why? Because for three centuries
they had shared, covertly or not, one kind of knowledge; then, sud
denly, up sprang the Greek, Hegelian hero of the phenomenological
odyssey, tracing the lofty path from natural to philosophical con
sciousness. True, this miracle has never been less credible. Yet the
subversion of Hellenism is in vain unless it proceeds from within.
[n this instance, the Dionysos invoked does not play the role of
stranger, still less the role of mute. The byways that link hunting and
sexuality, that lead from cannibals near and far to the blood sacrifice
cooked by the Titans, traverse a region that is his: one of limits as
well as transgressions. We have chosen to interrogate Greek culture
at the frontier of its norms and at a distance from the guarantees of
humanism that others continue to sign in our name. A systeffi--()('
thought as coherent as the political and religious order of the city
is founded on a series of acts of partition whose ambiguity, here as
elsewhere, is to open up the terrain of a possible transgression at the
very moment when they mark off a limit. To discover the complete
horizon of a society's symbolic values, it is also necessary to map out
its transgressions, interrogate its deviants, discern phenomena of
rejection and refusal, and circumscribe the silent mouths that unlock
upon underlying knowledge and the implicit.
Of the two routes to the frontiers-one in the tracks of hunters
of ambiguous gender who transgress against prescribed conjugal rela
tions, the other through the labyrinth of dietary customs amid canni
bals, vegetarians, and eaters of raw flesh-doubtless the second is
today the better marked. It opens upon the reorganized space of
mystic belief where the conspiring figures of Pythagoras and Orpheus,
ceasing to appear to us as lost outlines and exotic shapes, crystallize
into a configuration of the alternative to the city's political and reli
gious system and its worldly order. If the diverse modalities of pro
test can be apprehended without derision in terms of cuisine, it is
simply because the city as a whole identifies itself by the eating of
meat-the flesh of a domestic animal cooked on the fire-an act that
coincides with the blood sacrifice and founds the dominant values of
a world maintained midway between nature and the supernatural.
The confines of the sacrifice are a privileged domain in which to
follow the paths of Oionysos. First, in the discord he multiplies at
will between domestic and wild, men and beasts, gods and mortals,
ix
X PREFACE
discreet slaughter and violent chase, cooked and raw, and even,
according to the Orphic variant, in the culinary process itself, between
the spit and the cauldron. The attack on the sacrificial model by
Dionysos takes place from without and from within as well. Subse
quently, the Dionysiac religion, which even in its mysticism never
slips over the brink into absolute renunciation of the world, traces
in its travels within the city a route the Cynics took in the fourth
century when they set in motion the deconstruction of the dominant
anthropological model by aggressive praise of raw eating and familial
endocannibalism.
But Dionysos's subversive power is not limited to the frontiers of
Greek history. It likewise manifests itself in the he,ut of the theory
of sacrifice that was constituted for us at the end of the nineteenth
century amidst the questions produced by the totemic illusion and
the reflections of the first sociologists on the interrelation between
religion and society. One of the fundamental propo<;itions of The
Elementary Forms of the Religious Life is that society gains self
consciousness and establishes itself by means of an emblem chosen
from among the forms of the animal or vegetal world with which
men in a primitive state had the most immediate, even familial rap
port. The immolation of the totem animal and· the feasting upon it
that followed had to be the prototype of all sacrificial practice. A
god like Dionysos, who oscillates between beast, plant, and human
appearance, straightway found himself at the center of the problems
of partition between man and the animal or vegetal world.
Thirsting for the blood of human or animal victims, but in turn
himself slaughtered and handed up to be devoured, Dionysos seemed
to offer in his ambiguous role of victim and god of mysteries the
synthesis of a historii:al process that began with the savagery of the
"peoples of nature" and climaxed in the spiritual maturity of the
Christian religion, whose god is a personal one immolated because
he sacrifices himself. Such was the strange illusion of a theory that,
wanting to distance the menace of a confusion between animal, man,
and divinity, beguiled itself into seeking in Dionysos the disquieting
precursor of a religious doctrine founded on the concept of sacrifice
as limitation of material desire and renunciation willingly accepted
by the individual I.
Returning to the Dionysos of the Orphics, those marginal creatures
who placed the prestige of the slaughtered god in the service of a
radical critique of the city's dietary and sacrificial model, we discover
at once how Christianity, through its successive apologias, progres
sively imposed upon a doctrine that considered itself secular and
sociological the gist of its own sacrifice problem. The fascination
xi PREFACE
exercised by Dionysos on the ideologies of sacrifice has no other
secret than the ancient connivance of this god with the images of
man's delimitation from alternate worlds, gods on one side, brutes
on the other.
The route of the hunter, the other pathway to cultural limits, is a
detour no less familiar to the liminal god of this book. One of the
symptomatic gestures of Oionysos's madness, the oreibasia, is to
roust married women out of the house on a chase across forests and
mountains where every living thing, whether animal or human, is
hunted and captured by the savage horde. Likewise, in the order of
myth, one of the pertinent traits of Dionysiac transgression consists
in substituting the brutal pursuit of animal or human game, which
is then torn apart bare-handed, for the nonviolent slaying of a domes
tic animal, which is eaten cooked at the conclusion of the sacrifice.
The hunts preferred by Dionysos derange marital space as well as
the orderly sequence of the sacrificial ritual.
In this instance, the panther featured does not at first know
Dionysos as master. It belongs to a bestiary in which hunting, seduc
tion, and marriage play shadowlike across the intersecting myths of
Atalanta and Adonis. Both are devotees of the hunt. Atalanta flees
marriage, refuses the gifts of Aphrodite, and seeks, in a fundamentally
masculine and warlike activity, the refuge that will keep her at the
greatest distance from amorous desire and the conjugal state. A
woman-in-arms, swift of foot and limb, her hatred of marriage is
particularly plain in the trial of speed she imposes on her obstinate
wooers. Instead of males rivaling one another in ardor to reach at
the finish the woman they desire, as is the custom in certain marriage
contests, here instead men are forced to flee, naked and defenseless,
from the threatening woman they lust after. She chases them before
her like timid hares and frightened fawns-precisely the same quarry
the hunter Adonis chooses to pursue. In abandoning himself in the
woodlands to the excessive passion that binds him to his mistress,
Aphrodite's lover excludes himself from the virile world of face-to-face
encounters with ferocious beasts. The hunting behavior he chooses,
which is the inverse of Atalanta's, leads him to confound the art of
tracking game with the art of pleasing and seduction. Adonis's hunt
is the continuation of his seduction, using the same means and with
the same weapons; his complicity with the panther so testifies, since
it is the sole animal endowed with a pleasing natural odor that per
mits it at one and the same time to captivate and capture its victims.
In this territory, which is forbidden to women and which young
men may only pass through as initiates, the huntress who flees mar
riage meets the hunter who is an effeminate seducer. Their meeting
