Thought Bubble, Take the stage. This ceremony occurs at sunset in a temple. Some priests attend to a statue of Ares, but most of the people involved are doing something
very different: "The majority of them hold clubs made of wood and stand at the temple's entrance while others make vows, more than a thousand men, all holding clubs… And those few left behind with the statue pull a four-wheeled wagon
carrying the shrine and the statue which is in the shrine, and the others standing at the front gates do not let them enter." If things seem tense to you… very perceptive! Probably the clubs that tipped you off, right?
Herodotus says "Those who vowed to defend the god strike those resisting. As I understand, many even die from their wounds…" The ritual continues all through the night. And, as you might if you were Herodotus, he asks some locals why the poundings?
They tell him: "There lived in this temple Ares' mother, and Ares who was raised elsewhere came-after having become a man, wishing to lay with his mother, and the servants of his mother, for not having seen him before, did not look the other way when he entered,
rather they fended him off, and he fetching men from another city handled the servants roughly and went inside to his mother. For this reason this fight in behalf of Ares at the festival has become a tradition, they say." Thanks Thoughtbubble.
So - the Ritualists look to stories like this to illustrate their idea that worship becomes ritual. Ritual becomes myth. Myth becomes performance.
Someone writes a few songs to go along with the skull-splitting, someone else turns the battle into a dance, let it all simmer for a millennia or two, and voila "West Side Story"! This ritualism theory is useful in some ways and as we'll see in the next episode, it fits very nicely
with Greek drama, mostly because the whole theory was pretty much based on Greek drama. That's a welcome fix to how previous generations of scholars viewed Greek drama-as something very pure and stately,
not as something that might have evolved from passion and magic–but this theory causes problems when you try to apply the history of Greek Drama to OTHER dramatic traditions.
