Yentl Love, University of Potsdam

“Bacchic Speleology: Bacchus, Queer Geography, and the Liminal Cave”

The proposed paper will build upon the author’s doctoral research on the cult of Bacchus through a Queer Theoretical lens, by analysing the Roman worship of Bacchus within the liminal physical space of the cave. The paper will introduce the approaches of Queer Geography, ‘Peripherie-Denken’ and liminalities of place before using these to contextualise evidence for the Republican and Early Imperial worship of Bacchus in the cave and underground grotto.

Caves have been often cited as a key example of liminality, emphasising paradox in their frequent representations of both the tomb and the womb (Turner 1985, 295; Ackerman 2005, 103). Indeed, the physical nature of caves and their perpetual darkness further emphasises liminality; it allows them to function as a place of artificial night, in which the normal passage of time appears altered, or obsolete (Pettitt 2016, 14).It is perhaps this liminal quality which led to the cave forming a mythologeme in Classical philosophy and literature, where it may signify initiation, transition, or symbolic regression from civilisation (Badiella 2020, 148).

This paper will first establish the cave as a ‘liminal’ space in the Roman cultural imagination through the works of Virgil and Seneca the Younger. Subsequently, the paper will demonstrate the previously overlooked presence of Bacchus and the Bacchic cult within the cave setting, examining archaeological, material and literary evidence. The inscription of Agrippinilla will be further employed in order to establish a link between Bacchus and the cave space (Unwin 2020, 34). The paper will theorise that the perspective of Bacchus as a transitional or liminal deity, skirting the boundaries between male and female, boyhood and adulthood, mortal and divine, Roman and foreign, is reflected in the Roman association of Bacchus with the liminal space of the cave.