By Emily Chow-Kambitsch
In an undergraduate Greek Mythology course I first encountered Euripides’ Bacchae. Within my native Southern Californian frame of reference, when I pictured Dionysus in my mind’s eye, I saw Charles Manson. Euripides’ ‘Lydian stranger’—Dionysus in mortal disguise—I read against the slight, long-haired Manson, who, like Dionysus, enjoyed among other things breaking out of prison, proclaiming himself to be the son of God, and revealing disarming charisma and an enigmatic duality of love, ecstasy, and spiritual harmony on the one hand, and violence on the other.
A closer look reveals a range of uncanny similarities between the character of Dionysus in Euripides and the figure of Charles Manson, and a chief factor therein is the profound level of psychological influence each of these figures held over women. In Euripides’ interpretation of Dionysus’ origin myth, the god orders Agave, mother of Pentheus, king of Thebes, to kill and dismember her own son (although in her ecstatic state she thinks she has caught a lion, and initially revels in her successful kill). Manson took advantage of his female followers’ unquestioning allegiance to him to orchestrate the horrific, pseudo-ritualistic Tate-LaBianca murders of 9 and 10 August 1969 in Los Angeles.
At face value it may appear to border the sensationalist, or at least the insensitive to present Manson and his ‘violent women’ as comparanda to Dionysus and his Bacchants in Euripides’ play. Despite viewing these events partially through the lens of antiquity, this article does not aim to trivialize or sterilize the brutal murders of Sharon Tate, Wojciech Frykowski, Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, Stephen Parent, and Leno and Rosemary LaBianca as well as others whose murders Manson committed or ordered during the summer of 1969. Rather, it will invite readers to reappraise these events through the thematic features of Euripides’ tragedy that resonate surprisingly well with the socio-cultural backdrop of late 1960s America against which these events occurred.
Charles Manson has made no indication of intentionally emulating the figure of Dionysus, despite his drawing on a breadth of spiritual traditions, from the Nazarene Church to Scientology, to construct his own brand of religion with himself, the ‘reincarnation of Jesus Christ’, at the centre.[1] While it may seem arbitrary to draw a comparison between him and Dionysus, the resemblance between these two figures has been mentioned before.[2] Indeed, scholars of Greek tragedy and its reception call Dionysus an ‘elusive god who defies definition’, whose connections with ecstasy, performance art, intoxication, and sexual liberation are often interpreted in modern contexts.[3] In the 1960s, cultural theorists preoccupied themselves with reading the ‘Dionysiac’ in the counter-culture of sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll, including Beatles songs (to which Charles Manson incidentally attributed prophecies used as a pretext for the Tate-LaBianca murders).[4] Against the ‘Dionysiac’ stood the ‘Apollonian’ straight world of laws, boundaries, and social conservatism, principles which we could naturally align with Pentheus, the king of Thebes, the denier of Dionysus’ divinity who as a result becomes the victim of slaughter at the hands of his own mother.[5] In fact, in a 1960 Phi Beta Kappa speech at Columbia University, eventually printed in Harper’s Magazine as “Apocalypse: The Place of Mystery in the Life of the Mind”, Classicist Norman O. Brown advised his young audience to revel in ‘holy madness’ rather than uphold Penthean rationalism:
‘…Dionysus has returned to his native Thebes; mind—at the end of its tether—is another Pentheus, up a tree. Resisting madness can be the maddest way of being mad. And there is a way out—the blessed madness of the maenad and the bacchant…’[6]
As the decade progressed, young people in America would no longer need license from Professor Brown to follow their Dionysiac impulses during a period of significant social and political turbulence, including the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the country’s entrance into the Vietnam War, and racial tensions that peaked during the Watts Riots in Los Angeles in 1965, and the riots in major US cities that followed the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. Political activism among youth was on the rise, with free speech movements at universities led by Students for a Democratic Society and other groups giving way to organized protests, particularly against the Vietnam War.
Social revolution was in close attendance. The arrival of ‘the pill’, Time Magazine’s cover story in April 1967, was heralded for its role in the sexual liberation of women. With LSD widely available, particularly in places like the Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco and the hippie sanctuaries throughout Laurel Canyon in the Los Angeles area, the expansion of the boundaries of the mind and the imagination became a significant part of youth counterculture. Music became an all-important channel for the frustrations, ecstasies, political movements, and psycho-spiritual discoveries of the generation. Woodstock, the single event most frequently memorialized for the relationship between music and the political and social activism of this tumultuous period, drew the harsh criticism of such voices of ‘Penthean resistance’ as Ayn Rand. In her November 1969 lecture, ‘Apollo and Dionysus,’ delivered at the Ford Hall Forum in Boston, Rand reminded her listeners that Americans are essentially ‘Apollonian’ people of rationality, and denounced hippies as a serious political liability, ‘a desperate herd looking for a master. . . . Theirs is the mentality ready for a Führer’.[7]
As scathing as Rand’s criticism was, it revealed a consequential paradox in the Dionysus myth, as told by Euripides: in the guise of female sexual liberation from the conventional patriarchy (Pentheus’ insistance that he will have the Bacchae ‘laboring at looms, instead of beating on their maddening drums’),[8] the influence of Dionysus actually renders women servants for a new (male) master. The god alters the perception of his female followers, who cannot differentiate their will from his, and commit filicide unwittingly, only to be returned to rationality to realize the brutal truth.
A ‘loss of self’ is thus intimately related to the suffering of the victims and the violence dealt by the followers of the god. These three pillars, which according to Albert Henrichs make up the ‘modern reception of Dionysus’,[9] I would like to place in parallel with the actions of the Manson women, and their relationship with and conceptions of Charles Manson himself. This is not to absolve these women of blame for their actions, nor is it to raise Manson to godlike stature. Rather, this comparison works to address the disturbing realization of dynamics of collective psychology in Euripides, wherein ‘sanity’, ‘liberation’, and ‘truth’ all become uncomfortably muddled concepts.
A Loss of Self: Charles Manson and His Followers
A 1995 documentary, ‘Charles Manson: Journey Into Evil’ (viewable on youtube) begins with a sinister quote from Manson, not so much delivered as hurled at his interviewer: ‘When I stand on the mountain and I say, “Do it!”, it gets done. If it don’t get done, then I’ll move on it. And that’s the last thing in the world you want me to do.’ The ‘mountain’ in this case may be figurative, a reference to Manson as Christ delivering the Sermon on the Mount. He was known to re-enact the Crucifixion before his LSD-dosed followers.[10] Or, perhaps it is a literal reference to orders Manson gave to Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, Linda Kasabian, and Leslie Van Houten,[11] the female perpetrators of the Tate-LaBianca murders, as they assembled at the secluded Spahn Ranch in the hills of Los Angeles, home of the Manson family, before setting out on their evil errands over two consecutive nights in August 1969.
For periods throughout 1968-1969 the Manson women considered the ‘mountain’ of Spahn ranch—the vast, 500-acre ‘bucolic paradise’ and derelict Hollywood film set dotted with Old Western building facades—a sanctuary, a home.[12] The isolation of the place provided a backdrop for these women to undergo the various stages of ego dissolution, in accordance with their belief in Manson’s message. The women abandoned their previous identities and took nicknames—Susan Atkins became ‘Sexy Sadie’, Patricia Krenwinkel was known as ‘Katie’—which initially made it difficult for the police to trace the true identity of the murderers, referenced only by pseudonym in interrogation interviews. Van Houten explains in ‘Journey Into Evil’ that Manson would test the women’s ability to mimic his body movements and facial expressions as a means of evaluating their readiness to assume his behaviors and, by extension, ideas and instructions.
Women who wished to join the Manson family were put through a series of tests of sexual submission, combined with psychological conditioning, which, according to Jeff Guinn, Manson developed out of methods learned during an earlier prison stint from Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936).[13] The key feature of this psychological conditioning was Manson’s prodigious ability to manipulate his recruits into thinking that his ideas and worldviews were their own. In ‘Journey Into Evil’, Leslie Van Houten speaks to this process: ‘It didn’t happen overnight. He spent a lot of time taking middle-class girls and re-molding them’. The documentary cuts to Manson’s rebuttal:
‘I never broke nobody’s will. I never told anybody to do anything other than what they wanted to do…I said, ‘You do what’s best for you. You do what you feel is right….All I’m doing is…I’m holding the line with you. What you do is up to you. It’s got nothing to do with me’’.
The locus of Dionysiac ritual in the Bacchae is Mount Cithaeron, a place beyond the city of Thebes, where only the initiates of the cult of Dionysus are allowed to venture. Thus, when Pentheus is convinced by Dionysus in the guise of the ‘Lydian stranger’ to spy on the rituals of Dionysus’ female followers, he assigns himself to his grim fate. The chorus in the Bacchae is made up of female followers of Dionysus, who throughout the play express their emotional and psychological affinity with the god’s will.
For instance, after Dionysus stages an earthquake and frees himself from Pentheus’ prison, the chorus leader addresses him: ‘O Light, without you there was no dance, I was lost without you, Light.’ Dionysus answers, ‘Were you lost when I was locked in there? In the dark there, in the net of Pentheus? Did you think that I was lost?’ And the chorus leader blends Dionysus’ words with her own, in response: ‘I was lost. What else, without you, but lost?’[14]
Such an exchange prepares the receiver of this play to understand the extent to which Agave’s perception depends on the inspiration of the god, which directs her to imagine that the severed head in her arms belongs to the lion she takes pride in having slaughtered with her bare hands. Later, in conversation with her father Cadmus, she realizes in horror that it belongs to her son.
Similarly, given the considerable influence over the women exercised by Charles Manson (with the help of regular dosings of LSD), it is horrific, yet plausible to imagine their readiness to assent to his command to obey his male deputy Charles ‘Tex’ Watson at all costs, and to ‘do something witchy’ at the home of actress Sharon Tate and director Roman Polanski on Cielo Drive on the night of 8 August 1969.[15] What resulted that night was a scene of grotesque terror, deemed ‘ritualistic slayings’ by the Los Angeles Times,[16] where the pregnant Sharon Tate was stabbed to death alongside four other people, and the word ‘PIG’ was written in Tate’s blood by Susan Atkins on the door of the house.
Violence and Suffering: The Murders and the Victims
The obvious ‘Pentheus’ in the story of Charles Manson and his violent women was not the recipient of their violence, although his association with Manson did bear a relationship with the deaths of those at the Tate and LaBianca residences.
Recognizing that music in the late 1960s was the vehicle for messages of socio-political import for young people, Manson wanted nothing more than a record deal. Even during his prison years he had assured his fellow prisoners that he was a musical prodigy (despite his ability to play only a few chords on the guitar), and he would one day be bigger than the Beatles.[17]
From Spahn Ranch Manson would use his women’s sexual favors as leverage to persuade powerful figures in the music industry, such as Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys, to give him a chance at pursuing a recording contract.[18] Manson’s last hope was Terry Melcher, son of actress Doris Day and producer at Columbia Records, who, after a visit to Spahn Ranch to be serenaded by Manson and his chorus of half-naked women, politely declined to pursue a recording contract with Manson. Jeff Guinn sees this failure as a major turning point that in part induced Manson to order the Tate-LaBianca murders.[19] If the reincarnation of Jesus Christ showed failure to secure something as mundane as a record deal, he would have risked losing followers. Thus prior to the murders and during his struggles as a musician, Manson, an ardent racist, began to prepare his followers for an apocalyptic race war he called ‘Helter Skelter’ after a ‘prophetic’ Beatles song. In order to catalyze ‘Helter Skelter’, Manson ordered the women to stage the murders of wealthy (or middle-class, in the case of the LaBiancas) white people alongside ‘witchy’ iconography (paw prints and slogans of ‘death to pigs’ and ‘war’ written in blood or carved into the victims’ flesh) that police and the media would readily associate with the Black Panthers.
Although this plan did not work, Manson did gain the fame for which he had strived so ferociously. He sent his followers to kill everyone in the Cielo Drive house, which had once been the home of Terry Melcher, the symbol of ‘rational’ resistance to Manson’s plan of indoctrinating the world through his music. As Melcher saw it, Manson, although endowed with a unique and rather ominous charisma, just was not that accomplished of a musician.
It took police several months to apprehend Manson and those women involved in the murders, and by the time of their capture the Family had retreated to an even more remote location than Spahn Ranch, Barker Ranch in Death Valley. During the trial, Manson’s hold over the women in his family was still powerful. The women carved ‘X’s into their foreheads in imitation of his Manson’s own demonstration of his removal from society. They sang his original songs in a chorus of solidarity and quasi-spiritual oneness.[20]
That year The Performance Group in New York City produced an adaptation of The Bacchae called Dionysus in ’69, created and directed by Richard Schechner. The play was received with mixed reviews, and, with its experimental component of soliciting audience participation in the orgiastic ritual scenes, was criticized for its ‘Dionysian’ paradox of forcing audience members into action under the guise of ‘liberation’ from conventional audience passivity.[21]
It would appear that in the late 1960s, Dionysus in innumerable forms (as Charles Manson, Woodstock, the Vietnam War, the Watts Riots) beckoned Americans from all walks of life to participate in a dynamic environment of experimentation, revolution, intoxication, and ecstasy, and, paradoxically, to use violence to break away from old patterns of convention, only to submit to a new order of rules (in the case of the Manson family, a new patriarchy).
Unlike in Euripides’ play, the victims of the Manson Family’s violence were not symbols of Apollonian/Penthean resistance. Despite the perplexing similarities shown here between the myth and the modern reality, life does not strictly imitate art. But what the suffering of the victims of these murders teaches us is to cultivate sympathy with Pentheus and the world he inhabits: the world of sanity, which, despite the marginalized status to which scholars attribute the maddened chorus, is in itself a lonely, isolated place. Not even respected Theban elders Cadmus and Tiresias are prepared to share Pentheus’ denial of Dionysus’ divinity. Cadmus even assents to the possible un-truth: ‘But besides, even if the god isn’t a god, say he is: it’s a pious lie’.[22] Tiresias, himself wearing a fawnskin and about to depart for Cithaeron, declares, ‘May the god have pity on the wild man….’[23]
The actions of the ‘Manson women’ have left a legacy of fear and fascination in American cultural memory. The experiences of these women provide a valuable reference point for understanding the psychological dynamics of their archetypal, mythic predecessors, the ancient ‘violent women’ in Euripides’ play. The brutal dehumanization of the Family’s victims, represented in the crude labelling of them as ‘pigs’, can be read more fundamentally than for its function as a ‘witchy’ feature at the crime scene meant to frame the Black Panthers. The delusion that precipitated the fundamental transgression—the kin-killing—in Euripides’ play is resonant with the perverse perception the Manson women chose to maintain—for they were not operating under the will of a god.
And the ending in Los Angeles is as irrevocable as it is in Thebes, where the house of Cadmus has fallen to ruin: Charles Manson, Patricia Krenwinkel, Susan Atkins (deceased), Charles Watson, and Leslie Van Houten were all imprisoned for life. The families of the victims must live to remember the actions of a group whose existence they were not even aware of prior to the victims’ suffering.
I would like to reiterate that this is not an instance of ancient cause—modern consequence. Yet the ancient precedent (if we can call it that) can help us reflect on the universal wisdom that can be derived from a play delivered to an Athenian audience in the 5th century BCE for purposes of aetiological storytelling, behavioural education, and/or emotional catharsis. Today, when we look back to events in our own cultural milieu that resonate strongly with narratives in the ancient world, we can interpret the modern and the ancient in tandem, and thereby work to understand complex conflicts of order/disorder, otherness/kinship, liberation/confinement, and delusion/reality as both culturally constructed and trans-culturally abiding.
Next time on SPARAGMOS: critical reflections from students working in research and development on By Jove’s upcoming production of Medea.
Emily Chow-Kambitsch holds a PhD in Classical Reception from University College London, an MA from Oxford, and a BA from University of California Santa Barbara. She has numerous interests in classical reception, including working with ‘living Latin’. She teaches ancient languages and literature at University College London.
[1] Guinn, J. (2014). Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson. Simon and Schuster Paperbacks: London,192.
[2] Recently by Judith Butler at her UCL Housman Lecture, ‘Kinship Trouble in the Bacchae’ (8 February 2017). The lecture is available on Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixwrw0PMC8I, Accessed 2 July 2017), with this comment made at roughly 42:30.
[3] Friedrich, R. (2001). ‘Everything to Do with Dionysos? Ritualism, the Dionysiac, and the Tragic’. In (ed. Michael Silk) Tragedy and the Tragic: Greek Theatre and Beyond. Oxford University Press: Oxford, 258.
[4] Carlevale, J. (2005). ‘Dionysus Now: Dionysian Myth-History in the Sixties’. Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, Third Series, 13 (2), pp. 95. For the Beatles and Charles Manson, see Guinn (2013: 344).
[5] Carlevale, J. (2005) 93-4.
[6] Reported in ibid, 85.
[7] Reported in ibid, 97.
[8] Euripides’ Bacchae (page numbers from 1990 Translation by C.K. Williams; Noonday Press: New York), 33.
[9] Henrichs, A. (1984). ‘Loss of Self, Suffering, Violence: The Modern View of Dionysus from Nietzsche to Girard’. Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 88, p. 206.
[10] Guinn (2013) 177.
[11] Van Houten helped commit the LaBianca murders on 9 August, whereas the other women were enlisted to participate in both sets of murders.
[12] Guinn (2013) 172.
[13] Guinn, J. (2013), 61.
[14] The Bacchae, 40.
[15] Guinn, J. (2013) 245.
[16] ‘“Ritualistic Slayings”: Sharon Tate, Four Others Murdered’. 10 August 1969. Los Angeles Times.
[17] Guinn (2013), Chapter 5
[18] Ibid, Chapter 9
[19] For additional motivations for the murders, see Ibid, Chapter 12.
[20] ‘Journey Into Evil’.
[21] See Carlevale (2005: 98-9) for reception of the play in its original context.
[22] The Bacchae, 22.
[23] Ibid, 23.