McGovern says, “music, dance and the recital of Canaanite myths accompanied the merriment, along with bouts of sexual intercourse to match any Roman bacchanal.”22 But the main purpose of the marzeah, as with the skull cults and graveyard beers we tracked over ten thousand years from Stone Age Israel and Turkey to Ancient Greece and classical Iberia, was to acquaint its participants with the afterlife and “to secure their beatification after death.”
