2019 180pp Scarlet Imprint landscape paperback. Illustrated in colour throughout. NEW.
 
Peter Mark Adams’ Mystai: Dancing out the Mysteries of Dionysos is the only full length, scholarly study of the ritual process of initiation into the mysteries of Dionysos as depicted in the frescoes of Pompeii’s Villa of the Mysteries.
 
Taking an interdisciplinary approach, Peter Mark Adams interprets the frescoes through the distinct performative lens of the ritualist drawing on current scholarship across the disparate fields of classical philology; the ritual dress codes of Greco-Roman priestesses; art history; and the comparative ethnography of rites of higher initiation to illumine the significance of the ritual grammar and the phenomenology of ritual participation.