Le saut de Leucade : érotique et contre-érotique d’un rituel de précipitation en Grèce ancienne
Love, death and suffering are among some of the most incomprehensible experiences confronting man during his life. They define his nature and make up an integral part of his symbolic universe. The Leucadian Leap is deemed to have been practiced for more than a thousand years.  Appearing in mythical, religious as well as in historical narratives, the ritual is attested by the first historians in Antiquity who explain this phenomenon from the data of the antique historiography.  The traditional meaning of the leap is inscribed in Greek mythological context and the leap is thus relief from passionate love.   The nature of the ritual changes according to literary contexts, from a purely erotic rite, to a apotropaic rite, to see it being perpetuated in a deconsecrated manner in later texts.  Analysis of the different functions of the leap seem to point toward an extreme death-defying experience where death was experienced in a metaphorical manner and provides a hypothesis for the ritual’s ordalic nature as a basis for its pragmatic efficiency.  This study purports to analyze the Greek mental forms as expressed anthropologically through the dialectic of myth and ritual and aims at understanding the interpretation of love suffering within the context of a leaping ritual in Ancient Greece.  The Leucadian Leap would thus appear to correspond to a specific discourse which would testify to a certain conception of human nature, of death, of love and of suffering in Ancient Greece’s collective imagination.
suicide catabase Leucadian Leap greek mythology religious anthropology diving katabasis erotism