Plato on Euripides and baccheia as a metaphor of higher cognition

Research in the past twenty years has proven that since the Neolithic period, when viniculture and wine production was developed in the upland regions of the Taurus and Zagros mountains, humans experimented with the psychoactive effects of wine by adding herbs, seeds, and other soluble substances to it. The Greeks adapted this practice from an early time. Apart from wine, they also used music, dance, hallucinogens, and strong emotions, all of which were incorporated in religious mysteries and divination rites, to stimulate cognition and provoke states of altered consciousness during which our perception is heightened or intensified beyond the norm. As Ustinova noted,

These mental states, which today would be referred to as ‘altered states of consciousness’, were enthousiasmos (‘engoddedness’) or mania for the Greeks.

Such episodes, typically affecting poets, prophets, and mystics, were regularly described with vocabulary pertaining to baccheia, an orgiastic rite celebrated by the Bacchants/Maenads in honour of Dionysus, the god of religious enthusiasm and drunkenness, and/or the Korybants, the frenzied dancers of Cybele. Their symptoms, detailed in Euripides’ Bacchae, exerted a normative effect on other claims to transcendent experiences. Furthermore, as a social activity, in line with Dionysus’ civic profile, inducing states of altered consciousness allowed Greek communities to forge certain sociocultural self-projections and self-awareness among their members.
Steeped in the literary traditions of his time, Plato was able to tap into the prevalent cultural norms about wine drinking to defend the value of Socrates’ well-known eccentricities, often the target of fifth-century BCE Athenian anti-intellectualism. In the Phaedrus, Plato famously identifies four modes of altered consciousness as the most beneficial types of mania: next to the prophetic (associated with Apollo), telestic (associated with Dionysus), and poetic mania (inspired by the Muses), Plato added erotic frenzy (inspired by Aphrodite and Erōs) which can inspire exceptional lovers to devote themselves to the pursuit of wisdom—to become “lovers of wisdom”, that is, philosophers. In this context, Plato also endorsed a fifth kind of altered consciousness—Socratic/philosophical inebriation—as the most beneficial form of mania of all.
However, like Socrates, Plato most likely had personal experience of self-transcendence; thus, in the first part of the chapter, I relay my theoretical premises to explain why Plato had to resort to metaphors to relate the mental and ethical optimization achieved through philosophy. Then, I discuss Euripides’ Bacchae in relation to Plato’s metaphor of baccheia, palpable in the Symposium, the Phaedrus, and the Phaedo. In the final part of the chapter, I turn my attention to the late Laws, where Dionysian choreia is presented as underpinning the educational program of Magnesia. Here, Plato prescribes regular wine consumption (which still operates at metaphorical level) as a means for average citizens to rehearse, to the ability of each, the educational tenets of the Dionysian Choir and the exceptional perception of the philosophically inclined Nocturnal Council. Thus, in the Laws Plato transforms baccheia into a metaphor about sharing philosophical and ethical perspectives across the citizenry.