From Demeter to Dionysos: laughter as a vehicle for transformation in archaic cult ritual and Attic Old Comedy

The purpose of this project is to explore the links between laughter and transformation in Archaic and Classical Greek culture and cult practice, the use of cult paradigms and the role of laughter in Old Comedy. And how these themes reverberate in Platonic philosophy because Plato’s guarded response to laughter helps to confirm and clarify the pivotal role of laughter in Athenian transformative consciousness. He writes in Book III of The Republic, “ἀλλὰ μὴν οὐδὲ φιλογέλωτάς γε δεῖ εἶναι. σχεδὸν γὰρ ὅταν τις ἐφιῇ ἰσχυρῷ γέλωτι, ἰσχυρὰν καὶ μεταβολὴν ζητεῖ τὸ τοιοῦτον. But, they [the guardians of the city, i.e. the men of Athens] must not be laughter loving. For usually when a person abandons himself into violent laughter he is seeking such a violent change.” This very clearly shows the potential power that laughter had for an Athenian audience. And in his very criticism, Plato is giving us a glimpse of how most people saw laughter and its function in eliciting change—since he is using general opinion about laughter to prove his point concerning its danger for the men who are in charge of the polis. ❧ Laughter is, of course, an elusive subject. There is no universal agreement about what is funny, what provokes laughter, or even if human beings are the only life-form to laugh. In addition to the cerebral elements of laughter, I explore the work that has been done on cognitive and evolutionary psychology and neuroscience to see if there are valuable insights for the transformative power of laughter and how it effects and engages the brain and consciousness. This work helps to bring together the language and intellectual elements of laughter and the physical components, because laughter does not simply engage the intellect, but is also deeply bodily and sensual experience employing the muscles, lungs, neurons and voice of the person laughing. ❧ The scholarly exploration of Laughter and Old Comedy has largely ignored the role of ritual laughter in comedy or how evoking rituals tied with laughter in comedic plots might cue the Greek audience that a specific type of laughter is either occurring on stage or required of the audience. It seems very significant to me that the action of a third of Aristophanes’ extant plays either take place during a festival or have festival episodes, while, of course, being part of a festival themselves. Clearly ritual and laughter are a major theme in his poetic work. Many of the ritual scenes in Aristophanic comedy (though not all) involve the sexual exploitation of women (the marketplace scene in Acharnians, even the scene between Dionysus the Eleusinian initiates in Hades in The Frogs), and it is striking that while ritual laughter is a potent tool that women use in religious festivals, in Aristophanes’ rituals scenes often the laughter is at women’s expense or in response to planned exploitation. The institutionalization of comedy allows the state to use laughter as its own tool, reclaim its political power, and defray some of the power that was granted to women in fertility festivals. ❧ This paradigm of laugher before a transformation was not simply a literary ploy; but deeply embedded in the Athenian consciousness concerning metamorphosis and ritual. Initiation into one of the most important Athenian cults, the worship of Demeter at Eleusis, hinged on ritual laughter. And many of the Athenian cults concerning fertility (more often than not to Demeter) had elements of sacred laughter that helped to mark the space or time of the ritual as something apart from everyday life, and to facilitate the shift of consciousness or identity involved in the transition from one sphere of life to another. The other Attic festivals to Demeter, the Proerosia, Stenia, Thesmophoria, Haloa, Lesser Mysteries, and Skira all had elements of ritual laughter and ritualized interactions with lewd or obscene words and objects—often the objects were cakes or figures in the shape of male or female genitalia. The link between ritual laughter and the obscene is a very important one. It is mirrored in Aristophanes’ use of laughter and transformation and I think it informs some of Plato’s caution about laughter as well. Not because Plato is concerned with obscene or lewd speech or objects in and of themselves, but because this laughter takes place outside of the realm of ordinary rational life and is very powerful. ❧ The ritual worship of Demeter in Athens and Attica often included instances of ritualized abuse speech and laughter. The sources for these rituals are diverse; Aristophanes’ plays, Demosthenes’ speeches, the Homeric Hymns, accounts written several centuries after these authors, archeological remains, representations on pots and vases, even rather hostile Christian authors—and each comes with its own set of methodological problems and potential for insight. There has been a great deal of work done on Athenian religion and cult practices and I have found methodological inspiration in the work of Simon, Hamilton, and Halliwell. All three scholars have used a large variety of sources in their work creating a full and multifaceted view of the many Athenian festivals, while also carefully weighing the various data against each other and freely admitting when the lack of clear evidence does not allow them to make secure conclusions. ❧ I believe that my approach to this problem, which embraces not only literary sources but also material culture and embodied practices, allows us to see the true power and function of laughter in ancient Attic culture. Laughter was not a mere by product of humor but a phenomenon all on its own. This potent tool was, in ritual contexts, primarily in the hands of women during the archaic period. It was only with the onset of the democracy that we start to see laughter associated with Dionysus (instead of Demeter) and attempts by the state to control laughter and undermine the power that women had been able to wield in the archaic period. ❧ The importance of ritual in the everyday lives of the ancient Greeks became increasingly clear to me while in Greece during the summers of 2007 and 2008. Ruins of ritual spaces pepper the landscape of Greece—small rural temples in the highest mountains of Arcadia, and grander centralized places of worship near cities. This means that laughter and initiation rituals were a uniting experience for ancient people across geographical and economic strata. And this pairing of laughter and transformation is an essential seed of western thought—laughter continues to be closely tied with the consciousness, transformation and death throughout western literature and psychology.