Chapter five focuses upon scenes of revels in which Dionysos is surrounded by the musical and danced performances of satyrs and maenads, the mythical beings who accompany him. Dionysos exhibits a distinct kind of musicality: unlike the other gods, Dionysos rarely plays an instrument himself. Rather, he acts as the source of inspiration for satyrs and maenads, prompting them to play their instruments, dance to the wild music they produce, and lose themselves, collectively, to the ecstatic sounds that envelop them. The movements of the satyrs and maenads also communicate to the external viewers how they might experience Dionysos’ presence. Within the symposium, ancient viewers created the opportunity for Dionysos to manifest when they consumed wine from the vases, looked at the representations of mythical revels, listened to music performed on similar instruments, and moved their bodies in response to the music they both saw and heard. Such immersive and imaginative seeing and hearing thus allowed the symposiasts to join in the divine revel, where, under the influence of Dionysos, they played instruments and danced with satyrs and maenads.

Tantalizing similarities between Euripides’ Bacchae and the historical ritual of the oreibasia— – a mountainside dance performed for Dionysus – have fascinated and polarized scholars for over a century. The wild women of myth are depicted as ecstatic devotees of the Dionysian cult, or as raging, murderous avatars of the god’s vengeance. But in the tightly regulated civic cult, ritual practitioners were respectable women who honoured Dionysus by imitating his mythological entourage.<break/>The question of whether ritual participants could have experienced ecstasy and epiphanic visions has stimulated a long-running debate encompassing hysteria, belief, and the interplay between cult and myth. Lacking first-hand accounts, historians have struggled with reconciling the ecstatic ‘madwomen’ of myth with the prestige of the civic cult performance, but the apparent gap between ritual performers and mythical exemplars may not be so wide. Inspired by Jan Bremmer’s 1984 paper on the physiological effects of the oreibasia, I revisit the ancient evidence with a cognitive interpretative framework, looking at ritual experience in the embodied mind. Incorporating theories of agency detection and predictive processing, I explore how an interdisciplinary approach can integrate artistic and historical narratives, and better understand the lived experience and religious identity of historical maenads.