Bacchantic

English

Adjective

Bacchantic (comparative more Bacchantic, superlative most Bacchantic)

1. Alternative form of bacchantic.
   • 1872 May, Karl Blind, “Freia-Holda, The Teutonic Goddess of Love”, in The Cornhill Magazine, volume 25, number 149, page 612:

     The Perchta legends are of a somewhat wild— occasionally Bacchantic and Korybantic — character, in which the gloomy element is, however, not wanting.

   • 1913 November, W. C. Francis, “Rome Letter”, in Journal of the American Institute of Architects, volume 1, number 10, page 507:

     Another beautiful fragment—noticed also by Mr. Koyl, who is making a releve/ of the villa—was part of a face, having the character of the Bacchantic masks of the Warwick vase.

   • 1972, Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, page 145:

     Here in our newly-won knowledge where, as Hegel puts it in the Phenomenology, "the true becomes a Bacchantic orgy in which no one escapes being drunk", reason seems to have lifted the veil concealing the sacred mystery at Saïs and discovers, as in the parable of Novalis, that it is itself the solution to the riddle.

   • 1996, Contemporary Drama in English - Volumes 4-6, page 15:

     All four plays interrogate the liberating potential of the Bacchantic ritual and the Dionysian spirit, which, especially in Wertenbaker's The Love of the NIghtingale, entails a self-conscious analysis of gender roles, patriarchy, and historical agency.

   • 2011, Johannes Ehrat, Power of Scandal: Semiotic and Pragmatic in Mass Media, page 93:

     Action in Dionysian theatre always took place in a sacred context, which applied a fortiori to the Dionysian and Bacchantic orgies.