The Bacchae: How Ignoring Your Dark Side Can Destroy You

What this Ancient Greek Tragedy Teaches About Curiosity, Madness, and the Human Psyche

Euripides’ The Bacchae has haunted the western imagination for millennia. It’s a brutal story that warns against impiety and the dangers of repressing the dark side of your psyche.

The play tracks King Pentheus, who’s tasked to defend his city from a strange religious cult that’s corrupting the city’s populace. His noble intentions backfire, and lead to one of the most catastrophic downfalls in all of literary history.

Beneath the chaos and bloodshed of his collapse is a stark warning of how unexpressed desires can wreck your soul if you don’t bring them to light.

Here’s the tale of The Bacchae, Pentheus’ fatal mistake, and how discovering your dark side can help you escape the great snare that leads mankind to ruin.

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A Strange Cult

The Bacchae’s plot follows Dionysus — a Greek God born to a mortal woman in Thebes. He’s a recognized deity in Asia, and his goal is to bring his new religion to Greece.

The problem, however, is that his hometown of Thebes rejects him. King Pentheus claims he’s no god, but a mortal, and seeks to destroy the religion.

What’s wrong with Dionysus’ religion?

Well, his cult is a little… strange.

Dionysus is followed by strange foreign women. They engage in erotic dances and grotesque practices in public. Worse yet, they engage in strange rituals deep in the wilderness — which involve slaughtering cattle and kidnapping children.

King Pentheus, a man of reason, rejects the cult for tarnishing Thebes’ morals. He plots to destroy the cult and banish it from the city altogether.

Dionysus, however, has other plans for him…

Welcoming Chaos In

Pentheus suits up in armor to slaughter the Dionysian women, but Dionysus himself approaches the king in his court, disguised as a mortal.

He stops Pentheus with a stern warning:

“I warn thee, Lift thou not up thy spear

Against a God, but hold thy peace, and fear…

Better to yield him prayer and sacrifice

Than kick against the pricks, since Dionyse

Is God, and thou but mortal”

Though its wise counsel to respect the Gods, Dionysus’ words are a trap:

Pentheus makes a fatal mistake and “lets Dionysus in.” He grows an ecstatic curiosity to learn about the religious cult and its taboo, hidden practices.

His fervor borders on a lustful eroticism to see and know these women — and lay eyes upon the strange, twisted, and unconventional.

In other words, Pentheus, as a man of reason, cannot acknowledge the suppressed and spirited desires of his psyche. He sought to destroy the Dionysian spirit, but instead is overwhelmed by the Dionysian madness hidden in his own mind.

The god of wine and chaos knows this too:

Dionysus flashes his infamous, inhuman smile. He promises to lead Pentheus into the darkness of the woods — to uncover the mysteries of his cult, his women, and their strange erotic dances.

Little does the king know, however, that he’s about to be led into the heart of human depravity itself, and uncover a darkness more demonic than anything he’s ever encountered.