Tothasmos
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Tomorrow is the feast of the Roman god Bacchus, known by the Greeks as the Greek god Dionysus. In my hometown Sint Niklaas, there used to be a bar called Bacchus. That was in the late seventies and early eighties.
I had to wait until the 1990s and the first issue of Wired Magazine to be properly introduced to Bacchus via Camille Paglia's interview on her recently published Sexual Personae in which Paglia introduced me to the Nietzschean dichotomy of Apollonian and Dionysian.
- Popular perceptions of Dionysus and Bacchus
Dionysus was seen as the god of everything uncivilized, of the innate wildness of humanity that the Athenians had tried to control. The Dionysia was probably a time to let out their inhibitions through highly emotional tragedies or irreverent comedies. During the pompe there was also an element of role-reversal - lower-class citizens could mock and jeer the upper classes, or women could insult their male relatives. This was known as aischrologia - αἰσχρολογία or tothasmos, a concept also found in the Eleusinian Mysteries.
Cecil Taylor @80
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cP5L8tjnB6w
Excerpt of Ron Mann's 1981 "Imagine the Sound" documentary.
See also: free jazz, atonality, avant-garde jazz