Friday October 5 to Monday October 8
The Anthesteria: Questions and Answers
Required Reading for Retreat Registration
A. In our time and place, a "Dionysian" experience is usually expected to look like something out of the classic 70s film "Animal House." However, getting blind drunk wasn't the goal of the ancient Greek festival of the Anthesteria (and probably wasn't the goal of Dionysian worship in general). The ancient Greeks watered their wine in ritual, and the rite we will enact on the first night of our gathering commemorates Dionysos teaching the Greeks to do so, in order to enjoy the benefits of wine while avoiding the dangers. Wine was believed to be healthful (as today), bring pleasure to life (as today), and impart the inspiration of the divine. The danger was the divine madness of the god -- his tragic flipside. With this in mind, we will be drinking under controlled circumstances (within the bounds of ritual) and moderately during the course of this weekend.
Q. But seriously, we're going to drink a lot, right? Woohoo!
A. We ask that people who see this ritual weekend as an opportunity to drink excessively do not apply, for we won't support you in your efforts. Anyone who abuses alcohol at the gathering will be asked to leave without refund.
Q. So there will be no drinking?
A. Yes, there will be some. The Rites celebrate the gift of wine, an everyday part of the ancient world, so potential participants should feel comfortable with others’ moderate consumption within sacred context.
Q. How authentic are these rituals?
A. We are not conducting the Anthesteria on its traditional dates. The original dates, in late February or early March, made sense in a Mediterranean climate, but the elements of the Anthesteria do not correspond to anything that is happening in New England at that season. We have chosen to hold these rites in the fall to correspond more closely with the northern season of opening the new wine, and with our own Samhain traditions, which are echoed in parts of the Anthesteria rites.
Our "reconstructionist" Rites of the Anthesteria are based on available scholarly literature about the festival of the Anthesteria. No complete rituals have been handed down, so we are following the spirit of the festival in creating appropriately-themed rites for the appropriate times of the three-day festival, including as many authentic details as practical, while attending equally to the meaningfulness of the rituals for the modern people that we are. We're using the following sources for the Anthesteria and for Dionysos:
The Homeric Hymns
The Bacchae, by Euripides
Greek Religion, by Walter Burkert
Festivals of the Athenians, by H.W. Parke
Dionysus: Myth and Cult, by Walter F. Otto
Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, by Carl Kerenyi
Masks of Dionysus, edited by Thomas H. Carpenter & Christopher A. Faraone
If any of the titles above are familiar to you, if you are interested in the ancient Greek gods, and you have some ritual experience, this gathering might be appropriate for you.
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