bacchantic

alternative Bacchantic

1. not comparableBacchanalian; drunken or frenzied and unrestrained; orgiastic.

   The orchestra played bacchantic music, and in bacchantic madness the dancers rushed by each other.

   1878, Friedrich Spielhagen, Through Night to Light, page 70

   4 more examples

   There is a passage from chaos to cosmos marked by the "bacchantic" riots of Nature and even ourselves.

   1916, Edward Douglas Fawcett, The World as Imagination, page 469

   Yet nature is Spirit only in its otherness— self-alienated Spriit: "A bacchantic god innocent of restraint and reflection has merely been let loose into it " ( E §247z ) .

   1992, David Kolb, New Perspectives on Hegel's Philosophy of Religion, page 87

   the reason for this was twofold: insufficient acquaintance with the metaphors applied to public life and, on the other hand, sublimation on principle of all erotic and bacchantic elements into mystic allegory.

   2014, Julie Scott Meisami, Medieval Persian Court Poetry, page 279

   Indeed the Tereus episode resembles the Hecuba even more closely because it combines the motif of a conspiracy of women (a motif also parodied in Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazusae, Lysistrata, and Ecclesiazusae) with the motif of bacchantic rage and collective violence . It is even possible that this bacchantic motif entered Ovid's tale via Sophocles' lost Tereus, though this is only conjecture.

   2018, J.P. Sullivan, Irene J.F. de Jong, Modern Critical Theory and Classical Literature, page 274

2. not comparablePertaining to the clergy or worship of Bacchus.

   His friend Ted dancing the can-can trouserless with his shirt-tails flying, is an absurd equivalent to the bacchantic worshippers, who were supposed to don female dress during the rite.

   1996, Contemporary Drama in English - Volumes 4-6, page 61

   2 more examples

   In this way the spectators were contextualized as participants in a rite (the chorus of bacchantic dancers and those assisting were originally not separated, either spatially or in their pragmatic roles), who had to perform rite (rightly) that which lay beyond them all.

   2011, Johannes Ehrat, Power of Scandal: Semiotic and Pragmatic in Mass Media, page 93

   As am ecstatic city text it exemplifies the tendency to community, to festival, to love; and its bacchantic allusions remind us that Greek ecstatic religions were in part a protest against the restrictions of the urban, an effort to return to a more intense mode of existence.

   2021, Edward Ahearn, Rimbaud: Visions and Habitations, page 294

comparative more Bacchantic · superlative most Bacchantic

1. alternativeAlternative form of bacchantic.

   Action in Dionysian theatre always took place in a sacred context, which applied a fortiori to the Dionysian and Bacchantic orgies.

   2011, Johannes Ehrat, Power of Scandal: Semiotic and Pragmatic in Mass Media, page 93

   4 more examples

   The Perchta legends are of a somewhat wild— occasionally Bacchantic and Korybantic — character, in which the gloomy element is, however, not wanting.

   1872 May, Karl Blind, “Freia-Holda, The Teutonic Goddess of Love”, in The Cornhill Magazine, volume 25, number 149, page 612

   Another beautiful fragment—noticed also by Mr. Koyl, who is making a releve/ of the villa—was part of a face, having the character of the Bacchantic masks of the Warwick vase.

   1913 November, W. C. Francis, “Rome Letter”, in Journal of the American Institute of Architects, volume 1, number 10, page 507

   Here in our newly-won knowledge where, as Hegel puts it in the Phenomenology, "the true becomes a Bacchantic orgy in which no one escapes being drunk", reason seems to have lifted the veil concealing the sacred mystery at Saïs and discovers, as in the parable of Novalis, that it is itself the solution to the riddle.

   1972, Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, page 145

   All four plays interrogate the liberating potential of the Bacchantic ritual and the Dionysian spirit, which, especially in Wertenbaker's The Love of the NIghtingale, entails a self-conscious analysis of gender roles, patriarchy, and historical agency.

   1996, Contemporary Drama in English - Volumes 4-6, page 15