Deep inside the Boston Public Library is this statue - the Bacchante, she’s called, a female follower of Bacchus. We know Bacchus as the Roman God of wine and merriment, but he was actually much more than that. In the early period of Roman history his name was Liber Pater, the free father, and he was associated with the inherent freedom and dignity of the individual man. (He had a female counterpart named Libera,) Later the Liber Pater was associated with the Greek god Bacchus, who was often portrayed as a young, feminine male, one of the ancient deities that blended and defied gender norms. As Bacchus he was worshiped by people, including women, who found in his communities of worshippers a relationship with the divine that was separate from the state and the family. Bacchus represented the ecstatic aspect of human experience and he was worshiped in that spirit. In countless Roman carvings his worshippers follow him in processions, wild and merry and fey. There's was a full-bodied worship free of inhibition, a wild state of being. The Bacchante statue is a reminder in the Boston Public Library, a temple to the intellectual and carefully executed, that we cannot just live in our heads, but also freely and wildly in our bodies. To experience the Feminine Divine is to know ecstasy.
I was here some years ago with my daughters. My younger daughter was five and had just spent a year in Catholic preschool. We were sitting at a table having a snack and she kept glancing over at the statue. Finally she said “Mom, I’ll be right back.” She walked over to the edge of the fountain and sat with her legs folded underneath her and her hands in her lap staring up at the statue. And I realized, after a moment, that she saw this statue as Mary holding Jesus. What a wonderful idea that is to me- the Bacchante as Mary- a fully-embodied, uninhibited woman holding her son and showing him the grapes, showing him his future, with joy on her face.
