iii. The red quick fount'n, the blessing of the raw flesh.

xl. Lumps of flesh, caught on a branch, were hanging from the pine trees, blood dripping.

lxxx.  Hunt the hunter - The herd of maenads closing like a noose!

lxxxii. Down streamed the man, reeling, with one long incessant scream searing the air.

lxxxiii. And setting her foot against his ribs, she burst his shoulder open.

lxxxiii. And you could see the ribs, laid bare by clawing. White, so clean.

ci. Blessed hunting! Now take part in the feast!

cxx. We, Queen of this land, with this very hand, gave death to him, and tore this pretty animal's limbs apart!

cxxi. no two parts of him in any single spot.

To Pull to Pieces

Thus current scholarly opinion interprets the sparagmos less as a literal practice than as an imaginary act with several potential connections with the social conditions under which the female worshippers of Dionysus lived. It has been variously suggested that sparagmos is an expression of female power, briefly but intensely experienced, or conversely that in its strangeness represents the marginal position of women in their society. What does seem clear is that it belongs to the large category of rituals in Greece which affirm the normal social order by a brief period of abnormality. In normal sacrifice, a domesticated animal is ritually selected, cut up and cooked and eaten, whereas the sparagmos involves a supposedly spontaneous attack on a wild animal, which is torn apart and eaten raw by women away from their normal dwelling place within their homes in the city. Raw meat itself is sometimes offered to Dionysus, although not through sparagmos, and such an offering has been similarly interpreted as a brief violation of the normal social order. Since the Dionysus of myth and tragedy is so strongly associated with violations of social norms, such offerings provide one common link between the god of tragedy and the god of cult.