Women’s Dionysian Initiation: The Villa of Mysteries in Pompeii

By Linda Fierz-David

Newsletter, Vol. 14, No 5, February 1989

Women’s Dionysian Initiation: The Villa of Mysteries in Pompeii. By Linda Fierz-David. (Dallas, Tex.: Spring Publications, 1988, 149 pages.)

Linda Fierz-David’s last lectures at the Zurich Institute have been in private circulation for over thirty years. First, in 1957, two years after her death, among members and friends of the Psychological Club in Zurich, and later, in 1967, among supporters of the newly formed C. G. Jung Foundation for Analytical Psychology of New York, which commissioned their English translation. It is the Foundation’s translation with its introduction by M. Esther Harding which Spring Publications has made available to a wider readership.

Writing as she does in the context of the mid-sixties, Dr. Harding seeks to clarify the differences between the renewal-seeking descent of the woman initiate into her instinctual depths, portrayed in the fresco series at Pompeii, and the autoerotic orgies of contemporary youth. Where the distinction lies, she believes, is in the attitude of the initiate. An approach which is less than conscious and deeply religious leads not to transformation, but to “the dissipation of life energy and a decadent and destructive primitivity.”

What Linda Fierz-David has given us in her psychological study of the Orphic or Dionysian ritual of initiation into the Mysteries experienced by Roman women of the first century B.C., continues Dr. Harding, is an understanding of some of the problems of modern women and the means to their transformation. For contemporary women, no less than their classical antecedents, are in need of initiation. When the sterility of a merely adapted life overtakes her, “the modern woman must walk a solitary path unless she can get help from psychological understanding.”

“The analytical psychology of C. G. Jung, however,” Dr. Harding concludes, “has made the secret transformations that can and do take place during an analytical experience available not only to those who undergo an analysis but also to the knowledge and understanding of all who study the wealth of material he has accumulated—provided they read with the heart as well as with the head.”

The Villa of Mysteries was situated on the outskirts of Pompeii where it housed a private esoteric cult between 31 B.C. and 14 A.D., which offered an initiation to aristocratic Roman women. In 79 A.D., it suffered the fate of Pompeii, inundation caused by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, which left it undisturbed until its excavation in 1910. Its discovery, in particular that of the striking, largely undamaged frescoes of the Initiation Chamber, created an enormous stir among European scholars, leading to an abundance of theories as to its origins and intention.

Linda Fierz-David has based many of her conclusions on the standard work on the villa, Amadeo Maiuri’s La Villa dei Misteri. Maiuri concluded that the cult was Orphic in origin, and that the female figure with Dionysus in the central panel was Ariadne.

Accepting these findings and dismissing as “naive” German research worker Margaret Bieber’s suggestion that the frescoes depict the initiation rites of a bride before her wedding, Mrs. Fierz-David has concluded that the union of Dionysus and Ariadne portrays no earthly marriage, but a transformation mystery in the deepest sense.

Expressed psychologically, Dionysus-Ariadne represents a symbol of the Self. The central positioning of their panel, and the fact that none of the figures of the other panels face them, rendering them invisible, lends credence to a psychological interpretation which suggests that the panel series as a whole forms a great mandala, with the individual scenes serving as small mandalas. As one performs a circumambulatio around the chamber, each scene reveals a different aspect of the central truth, depicted in the central panel. Each points to and is governed by Dionysus-Ariadne.

In other words, it is Mrs. Fierz-David’s belief that the Initiation Chamber of The Villa of Mysteries portrays individuation symbolism in a form which carries numinosity and meaning for contemporary women. On this basis she continues her exploration and ours of the psychological significance of the fresco series.

In common with followers of other redeemer gods, initiates to the Orphic mystery cult sought to atone for their guilt by reliving the fate of Dionysus, of death, dismemberment and rebirth. Each scene of the fresco series reveals different aspects of first Dionysus and then Ariadne, personifying as they do the Self becoming a Self.

Before considering each scene with meticulous attention to its mythological and psychological possibilities, Mrs. Fierz-David explores the background of both these figures. Perhaps the single most important factor for our purposes is their chthonic origins. Dionysus was the son of Zeus in the form of a snake, and Persephone. Ariadne was the daughter of King Minos, himself the son of Zeus in the form of a bull, and Pasiphae. She was the half-sister of the Minotaur, who was the product of Pasiphae’s earlier union with a sun-bull.

Dionysus then is not representative of a higher order, but in Mrs. Fierz-David’s words, “Dionysus always shines forth from the depths.” Moreover Ariadne is deserted by Theseus, the heroic slayer of the Minotaur, because that aspect of the feminine principle, represented in the myth by Artemis, cannot tolerate one-sided consciousness.

The amplification and interpretation of the fourth scene, the “so-called terrified woman,” shows how important from mythological and psychological perspectives, the development of a compensatory movement and its integration into the situation or conscious position is.

In the temple at Delphi both Apollo, the summer sun and god of light and life, and Dionysus, the winter sun and god of darkness and death, were venerated. Every second year, the latter’s return was celebrated in a nocturnal festival which began with the god’s epiphany as the roar of a bull, arousing the faithful, the Athenian matrons assembled in the temple, to awaken the awakener. The Thyiades or violent ones, as they were known, rushed from the temple in a Dionysian frenzy, later to return with the god as a small child in a winnowing basket to the Korykian Cave, high on Mount Parnassus, Apollo’s mountain. The men, in contrast, remained behind to worship in the quiet of the temple to be joined later by the women.

Mrs. Fierz-David sees in the woman of the fourth scene not only terror, but frenzied movement, as if she is stepping out of the frieze in response to the invocation of the god. In other words, she identifies her with the Thyiades of the Dionysian cult, an interpretation which later scenes appear to justify.

Should the call be refused and the woman remain passive and uncommitted, death ensues, both mythologically and psychologically. The woman initiate must propitiate the ruler of souls by rushing to “his ghostly breath” if she is to experience his powers of transformation and rebirth.

What is the initiate, the Roman matron and her modern counterpart dying to with her leap forward and downward?

To her overburdened life is Linda Fierz-David’s answer. Women are governed by the principle of relatedness, not because they want to be, but because it is their natural capacity to become enmeshed in people and things and experiences. Their tendency to build walls of animus opinions is an attempt to separate themselves from their over intrusive world. Yet opinions alone are insufficient; at best relatedness becomes negative. The alternative is indicated in the Villa of Mysteries:

The bellowing of the ghostly bull-god heralds the frightful necessity of rending all ties in themselves and giving up all relatedness in the world, in order to find relationship to the spirit and therewith also to themselves. Women must do this with the greatest vehemence ... This vehemence is necessary because subduing the worldly Eros surely means the heaviest sacrifice for every naturally womanly woman. She loses so much that she seems to herself like a ghost among ghosts. At this moment of development, a great deal hangs in the balance for every woman with an inner life, and it is a test, for no woman can know in advance whether she will lose forever the life which flows from relatedness or whether she will remain ghost-like. Only the god-spirit knows.

Just as the womanly woman needs to experience her separateness, the manly man, guided as he is by the Logos principle, needs to be initiated into relatedness. Within our Orphic cult, the god-spirit is manifested in the wine, contained in a silver receptacle, which is contemplated rather than drunk, suggesting that real relatedness is religious in origin.

The epiphany of Dionysus, or anima, is no less terrifying for the man than it was for the woman. In giving up his separateness, he is sacrificing his freedom. Whether entrapment in “the spectral vision of the receptacle ... will lead to real life or whether life will now become ghostly, (o)nly the god-soul knows.”

A detail which Mrs. Fierz-David believes merits further mention is the departure of the women from the temple before the men begin their divine service in the Orphic rite. Even today, just as in classical times, emancipated women arrive at a point in their lives when outer striving with men loses all its meaning. It is they who turn naturally and appropriately from worldly relatedness to psychological work. With their withdrawal, some of the confusion and entanglement of the outer world are lessened, freeing men of the compulsion to pour their energies into excessive activity, and enabling them instead to meditate in quiet upon the life-giving properties of the soul.

The operative word in Linda Fierz-David’s exploration of the paths to initiation for contemporary women and men is “groundedness”. In contrast to the subjects of Laurie Layton Schapira’s book, The Cassandra Complex, the candidates for a descent to the Dionysian depths must be women grounded in their femininity, just as their masculine counterparts, the contemplators of the wine, must be grounded in their masculinity. Anything less than this may require years of preparatory work, for what in essence is a natural step, hearing and responding to a call from our innermost nature.

—Alice Johnston