The women that follow Dionysos become Maenads or Bacchants: under the influence of the “mania” (the divine possession) they become invulnerable, with an enormous strength, and they are plunged in a murderous delirium that forces them to rip into pieces the young beasts they just breastfed – sometimes they even kill their own children. The Bacchic “orgia” (rite, ritual) happens in three steps. First the oribasia, the disheveled race of the women through the mountain ; then the disparagmos, the sacrifice by ripping apart. This is the part of the ritual that is illustrated by Euripides’ Bacchants (405 BCE), with the murder of Pentheus by his mother Agave. “Foaming at the mouth, with rolling eyes, having lost her mind, possessed by Bacchus […] she took with both hands his left arm and, pushing with her foot against the flank of the unfortunate one, she disarticulated and ripped away the shoulder, not just with her sole strength, but with the power the god offered her.” The third time of the ritual is the omophagia, the devouring of the raw, barely dead, meat that was just lacerated.