Душа смртникa, дом божанства. Интериоризација епифанијског искуства у Есхиловом Агамемнону и Еурипидовим Баханткињама
Human Soul, the Home of Divinity. The Internalization of the Epiphany Experience in the Aeschylus’ Agamemnon and Euripides’ Bacchae

Summary/Abstract: This paper aims at giving an account of the models for featuring the epiphany experienced in the soul. The new, internal epiphany is a big turning point in imagining and presenting deities in the ancient Greek poetry. Proto-dramatic tension marks the early, Homeric and Hesiodic, epiphany presentations. The Attic tragedy, however, essentially develops and structures the internal epiphany, establishing a new relationship between the immanent world of mortals and the transcendent world of the immortals. Aeschylus’ Agamemnon and Euripides’ Bacchae, especially the characters of Cassandra and Pentheus, incorporate this new relationship: the deity enters into a human being and does not act on it from the outside, but, on the contrary, acts on the outside from the interior of the human being. The new idea of an internal, intra-psychical, deeply subjective and inter-personally imperceptible divine presence is a crossing point in the presentation and figuration of the gods in the ancient Hellenic culture. With this basic similarity, there is, however, a key difference between the Aeschylus’ and the Euripides’ tragedy: in Agamemnon, Apollo is located in the interior of Cassandra, but she differs from the god who occupies her inner being and she recognizes him as an ambiguous internal strangeness. The Bacchae, in turn, leads to such a form of internalized epiphany in which the mortal does not recognize the divine presence as a strangeness, but as a part of his own self – thus leading to a decomposition of the soul, with consequences both on the individual and on the anthropological level.

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