From Mystery to Initiation: A Mytho–Ritual Poetics of Love and Sex in the Ancient Novel even in Apuleius’ Golden Ass?

I contend that both discourses – the religious modes of expression, and the novel, based on orally transmitted traditional wonder-tales – focus upon, rework, circulate around, retract and help to overcome the central crisis of marriage as well as of the discovery of sexuality. This is very often presented from the vantage point of the girl. Novels as well as popular Greek stories deal with these issues in a dream-like manner in positive and negative ways. Fears, nightmares of monsters, and scenarios of blood and sacrifice are mingled with euphoric phantasies. Love, thus, becomes decisive for the genre. Very young adolescents are the protagonists. The objective, or telos, of the fictions is marriage, but between the frame of a beginning and an ending, we find the young lovers during their phase of marginality in a loop of destabilizing thoughts and adventures in liminal spaces

Sappho as Aphrodite’s Singer, Poet, and Hero(ine): The Reconstruction of Context and Sense of the Kypris Song

This contribution argues that the Kypris Song somehow represents the quintessential poetics of love. Through its self-reflective and religiously charged message, it reflects Sappho’s anthropological, ritual, and proto-philosophical pronouncement of the leading principle which guides her entire performance production. Like a motto, it bestrides general law and a very personal story of affection, passion and rationality, tackling both overwhelming affliction from external forces and the inner strife to maintain control over her extreme physical symptoms through self-awareness and a pure mind. This paper provides a brief analysis of the structure, texture, and meaning of the Kypris Song. First, it presents some recent reconstructions and addresses their problematic hermeneutical presuppositions in a monodic performance setting. Second, it develops some hypotheses regarding the original choral performance occasion as well as secondary reperformance contexts, and third, it elaborates thoughts on the metapoetic relevance of this song. Sappho’s audience envisages her body pierced and transfixed, and associates her with a heroic existence in an antagonistic relation to Aphrodite. Thus Aphrodite somehow becomes a reflection of a heroic Sappho. The image of the hero(ine) and Sappho merges through the performance of kleos and love, the medium and essence of Sapphic song

Visualizing the Cologne Sappho: Mental Imagery Through Chorality, the Sun, and Orpheus

Sappho builds her poetic discourse in the New Cologne papyrus on very specific cultural and visual patterns that through mental imagery help to shape the cognitive reception, particularly in oral performance contexts. Sappho draws on images and concepts of chorality and mythic dancing in a solar context. As cultural symbols they are in service to highlight the unifying themes of beauty, poetic and musical self-referentiality, and rejuvenation. The mention of Orpheus in the new Hellenistic poem O lends additional confirmation to the metapoetic and self-referential reading of Sappho’s poem on Tithonus. Death, night, lament, love, song, music, and the cosmos—in short, all that Orphism represents—are the decisive themes that unite the fragments. The deferral of love becomes its own song in the interruption and continuation of a reperformance. The original pedagogical-didactic reception gives way to secondary receptions, determined by changing occasions of reperformance. In the 4th century BC the new performative practice even showcases a Hellenistic cult of poets and metapoetic self-consciousness. Cyclic rejuvenation and the erotic poetics of desire and absence are more constitutive than ever. Through its deep visualizing power Sappho’s songs have lived on indeed, even until they have reached us today

‘All you Need is Love’: Some Thoughts on the Structure, Texture, and Meaning of the Brothers Song as well as on Its Relation to the Kypris Song (P. Sapph. Obbink)

The new Brothers Song is not a personal, biographical, and intimate expression of family matters but functions rather with a public dimension. As an originally public and choral performance it communalizes erotic experiences and acts out discourses of power relations in the polis and the clan. As aesthetic production it is embedded in an over-arching song-and-performance culture. The Brothers Song is connected with the traditional idea of a myth-and-ritual scenario, creating new myths and narratives for ritual performance. Thus the original occasion for this song was most likely the choral performance during the public festival at Messon. The Brothers Song does not really offer an alternative but like the new Kypris Song and many other erotic poems, deals with the consequences of love. Sappho thus portrays erotic entanglement as a programmatic feature of her clan. She probably used the bio-mythic cycle with her brother as well as more direct exchanges about love for wider educational and political purposes. As seen, the erotic song becomes an aristocratic and female discourse; politics with other means of addressing the strife of the hetaireiai in Lesbos

Maenadism as Self–Referential Chorality in Euripides’ Bacchae

Focusing on choreia and performance, the author provides a detailed analysis of the parodos of Euripides’ Bacchae. The Bacchae as a whole is characterized by an opposition between inner and outer space, between the actual stage and what is left offstage. Only the chorus as a mediator and shifter can cross these boundaries. The ritual power of the Dionysian cult can be experienced in the performance of the devotees, and in the theater of Dionysos, all of this cultic activity is identical with choral dancing. The entrance song which makes the god manifest by means of choreia breaks the former resistance to the god. The retained energy is released in an all the more violent manner as a consequence. Dramatically, the initial parodos functions as an interface for the further course of the play where the arrival in the city of Thebes simultaneously represents the transition to the brutal events on mount Kithairon. Thus, the chorus of the Asian bacchants as a theatrically and aesthetically confusing ensemble becomes the message in the rhythmical and ritual performance. By means of this chorus, particularly through the initial procession, the arrival of the “coming god” can be experienced in various media. Most of all, through choral projection, the movement toward the inside simultaneously becomes one toward the outside. The dimensions of time and space, as well as other oppositions, blur in a ritual flux in the songs. Past, present, future and the actual time of performance are fused, and the time of myth is reenacted in the ritual of drama. Multiple loops create a sensation of unity and communitas in a scenario of ‘anti-structure’. In a paradoxical way the oppositions between barbarians and Greeks, Thebes and Athens, nature and culture, animal, man and god, outside and inside, country and city, myth and ritual, chaos and idyll, ecstasy and happiness, brutal rites of sacrifice and blessed mysteries collapse in the acting out of choreia. In the Bacchae chorality functions as a dynamic field of force between myth and ritual. On the basis of the tension between these forms of expression, the artful and sophisticated dramatist Euripides develops his self-referential and Dionysiac theater of coinciding oppositions that Dionysos encompasses