Bacchants

Bacchants (Bacchantēs, Bacchanals, Maenads), women inspired to ecstasy by the Greek god Dionysus (sometimes called Bacchus), as described by Euripides in the Bacchae. They are depicted wearing the skins of fawns or panthers and wreaths of ivy, oak, or fir and carrying a thyrsus (a wand wreathed in ivy and vine leaves, topped with a pine cone). Freed from the conventions of normal behaviour they roamed the mountains with music and dancing and inspired by the god performed supernatural feats of strength, uprooting trees, catching and tearing apart wild animals, and sometimes eating the flesh raw.