In July I went to a Dionysian wedding—our usual circle of family and friends take us into the oddest corners at times. Dionysian?, you ask. Sure; that’s what they said. It was an attempt to create a new ritual where confidence and faith in old rituals had disappeared. There were hints of a Greek temple in the outdoor setting; the ceremony was a mashup of poems, a little Neruda, a dash of e.e. cummings, some Greeks, some other stuff, perhaps from mid-70s rock songs, while a band improvised between Nick Cave and the Velvet Underground.
It was all wild theatre, an art installation. A small hint of hippy-dippy, without taking itself seriously. There was an Athena and two Maenads, pouring wine and spreading flowers. Silly and fun without any suggestion of religious tradition.
I’m sure you’d like me to say I was offended, but I wasn’t. I’ve been much more offended at some church weddings. The stuff of the wedding and the wedding planner become greater than the moment of the marriage vows and the communal declaration.
I have sensed an incredible lack of confidence in the rituals of marriage in recent years. To be fair, some of those rituals deserve rethinking: A father handing his daughter over to a husband, for example, reeks of patriarchal chattel. Wearing white is a Victorian idea of both purity and wealth (only the rich could afford that much white). North American society has worked very hard (at times a bit too energetically) over the past 50 years to rid itself of some of those harsh 19th-century constructs of gender, sexuality and propriety.
While we chip away at those during a wedding, we find ourselves in an unformed landscape where we haven’t quite found new symbols that could have meaning. So there are unity candles—the couple light a candle together; sometimes their parents also light the candle, sometimes siblings as well. Or, unity sand and salt ceremonies where different coloured sands, or different salts, are poured into one bowl; again, sometimes with other family members adding theirs.
I’ve seen handfasting in churches. A ritual that has Norse and Old English roots, a binding of hands to seal a contract. (Marriage is a corporate act, after all.) It somehow got picked up by neopagans and has become commonplace since the 1991 movie The Doors, in which Jim Morrison gets married in a Celtic pagan ritual.
Rituals morph over time; begged, borrowed, stolen, they take on different meanings in different contexts. They are organic; they change hue with time and setting. We want them, we need them, but we often forget to nurture them, to keep them alive. We force them upon each other. Generations embrace them and reject them; reshape them or bury them completely.
It was at one wedding I witnessed all three of handfasting, sand and candle, in a church, with a minister, rings and a block of Corinthians. So many symbols, as if rings, a prayer and a message weren’t enough.
And they aren’t any longer for many. Church itself is a ritual for many that has lost its meaning. And purpose. It’s a thing people do; or give to their elders or to their fantasies of the perfect wedding. There is hypocrisy in that process, of course; but sincerely approached. Hypocritical sincerity, if you will.
So a Dionysian ceremony, made of papier mâché, a little wit and some glitter, was refreshing. A couple who had no time for religion and no patience for the standard alternatives, chose to celebrate their coupling with their own fresh creation. It was fun. Paperwork was registered with the government to make it real.
