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Myth Matters - The Bacchae: How do you imagine the dark?

The Bacchae: How do you imagine the dark?

Myth Matters

09/23/21 • 42 min

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"He is a young god.
Mythologically obscure,
always just arriving

at some new place
to disrupt the status quo,
wearing the start of a smile."

--from Ann Carson' translation "The Bakkhai"

In the northern hemisphere we began our collective descent into winter's darkness, with the fall equinox on Wednesday September 22nd.

This is a good time to meditate on the most famous myth of the god Dionysus, intoxicating god of the night. It's a play written by Euripides in the 5th century BCE called "The Bacchae."

Athenians found the cautionary message of this play subversive. It disturbed their image of Greek reason, democracy, social order, and power. The women don't stay in their place. It ends on a gruesome note.

A few years after the play was performed, Athens fell to Sparta and their empire building was over. Euripides was in self-imposed exile, and perhaps he saw something that his fellow citizens could not...

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09/23/21 • 42 min

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Myth Matters - The Bacchae: How do you imagine the dark?

Transcript

Hello, and welcome to Myth Matters, storytelling and conversation about mythology and why myth matters to your life today. I'm your host and personal mythologist Dr. Catherine Svehla. Wherever you may be in this wide, beautiful, crazy world of ours, you are part of this story circle.

The Fall Equinox took place yesterday, Wednesday September 22nd, in the northern hemisphere. On the Fall and Spring Equinoxs the daylight and night time hours are in balance, so these days are a threshold,

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