#Im rereading this rn and I apologize for all the rhetorical questions I think I was picturing myself giving a presentation

[northern-polaris]

>:)

DISCLAIMER: I AM NOT A QUALIFIED MYTHOLOGIST NOR IS STUDYING MYTHOLOGY MY PROFESSION i just know about greek mythology because it gives me happy chemicals in my brain. JUST PUTTING THAT OUT THERE BECAUSE I RECOMMEND LOOKING AT ACTUAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION OVER THE VERBAL VOMIT I’M ABOUT TO SUBJECT YOU TO IF YOU WANNA KNOW MORE ABOUT IT

Okay

So Dionysus

Fun wine dude. Guy who throws wild parties. Bro wakes up in a ditch in the middle of nowhere with no idea what day it is. The fucker who invented a dildo(yes you read that right) because he wanted to keep his promise of letting some guy smash but the man died before Dionysus got back from the underworld. 

Totally just a fun superficial dude with no terrifying history involving disembowelment, cults, eldritch horror, insanity, and rebirth haha :]

WEEEeeeelllll

I’ll just start with the widely accepted myth of how Dionysus was born. 

Zeus was doing what he typically was known for doing, having sex with everything but his wife, and picked up a new girl by the name of Semele. Hera, said wife of Zeus, catches wind of her and zips on down to the mortal world in order to investigate. She disguises herself as an old woman and meets with Semele, they talk for a bit before Semele reveals that her lover is none other than Zeus himself and that she is pregnant with his kid. 

At this point, Hera wants her dead, but they never outright kill people in myths because I don’t know so she comes up with a plot to have Zeus inadvertently kill her instead by having him reveal his true form to her.

So Hera responds to Semele with a “they all say they are secretly a god to get some, how do you know for certain that your lover is Zeus? You should have him reveal his true form to you!!” and Semele is all “that’s a great idea, old woman who I have never met before in my life :)” 

So next time Zeus visits, Semele makes him promise to give her one thing that she wants no matter what, dude says yes because idk and she says that she wants him to reveal his true form. He tries to convince her out of it, she insists, so he reveals himself which promptly reduces Semele into smithereens.

“BUT WHAT ABOUT BABY DIONYSUS?????” you might be wondering

Never fear! Mother may be nothing but a pile of dust on the ground, but the baby stayed intact! The little guy was premature so Zeus did the only logical thing to do in this situation which was CUT OPEN HIS ‘LEG’ STUFF THE BABY IN THERE AND SEWED IT BACK UP. 

I also want to mention that saying ‘leg’ was often a euphemism for a dick back then so do with that information as you will 

ANYWAYS baby grape child finishes maturing so Zeus cuts him out and who he gives the baby to changes from myth to myth. They range from Hermes, a mortal king and queen who raise him as a girl, Persephone(IMPORTANT!!!!) etc.

Now. In terms of the other gods in the pantheon, Dionysus is the youngest. What I mean by that is that the Hellenistic version we typically think about when we picture the god was much more recently cultivated than the other godly counterparts. Gods like Apollo, Ares, Athena, even Hermes(the second youngest) all showed up in texts like the Iliad which was written some time between 8-700 B.C. AND THAT'S JUST WHEN THEY BEGAN TO WRITE STUFF DOWN. THE ILIAD WAS AN ORAL TRADITION LOOOONG BEFORE HOMER GOT HIS HANDS ON IT. But Dionysus was not there at all. Absolutely no mention of him. 

Now why is that?

For a good period of time, people thought that Dionysus was what they called an ‘imported’ god. A divine figure that came from traders from outside nations who the people then adopted as their own with a bit of tweaking to make it more appealing. It would explain why people didn’t write about him earlier in the Hellenistic period. But that theory was disproved. Here’s how:

The Hellenistic period of ancient Greece is the time frame typically pictured when you think of ancient Greece like the pantheon and the acropolis, before that time was the “Greek dark ages'' where there is little to no recorded writings from this era, and then there was the Mycenean period. The Mycenean period is the predecessor to the Hellenistic period. People in ancient Greece thought of the Mycenean period as we do for the Hellenistic period. Point is: they are ancient. 

Now we know that Dionysus was NOT an imported god because RESEARCHERS FOUND HIS NAME IN MYCENAEAN WRITINGS OF LINEAR B(linear B was the Greek writing system before they adopted the Phoenician alphabet later on. There is a linear A writing system used by the ancient Minoans who lived on Crete, but it's still untranslated to this day). HE WAS THERE ALL ALONG WITH THE REST OF THE OTHER GODS.

Why wasn’t he mentioned then?

Simple answer was that he wasn’t advertiser friendly yet. 

In the Mycenean inscriptions, Dionysus was less known as a party god and more of a deity of pure insanity and madness. 

He was then picked up by the wine cult that dated back long before the Mycenean period, possibly to the invention of wine itself.

I’m skipping a lot of details but I do want to talk about the Persephone, the queen of the underworld. She had a son named Zagreus. From what little is written about Zagreus, it is inferred that he is a powerful underworld deity. This may seem random but bare with me. It’ll make sense in a second. 

Now, later down the line as the Hellenistic period is slowly building up momentum, Dionysus was picked up by a cult that centered on orphism(life, death, and rebirth, named after Orpheus who ventured into the underworld to bring back his dead fiancé, almost succeeded, but failed). They worshiped figures that entered the underworld and came back out. Persephone was obviously included, but why Dionysus?

Well, there is another retelling of Dionysus’ birth. I’ll try to be short with this but essentially: Persephone is his biological mother(the father is either Hades or Zeus). Dionysus is prophesied to be more powerful than Zeus. Hera is pissed so she orders a bunch of titans to rip apart the baby and eat the bits, Athena saves his heart, gives it to Zeus, and he either sews it into his ‘leg’ or gives it to Semele(i don’t know either but i digress). 

This form of Dionysus is usually depicted with more animalistic features like horns and hooves(think satyr). In the cult, they referred to Dionysus as ‘Dionysus Zagreus’.

What did they do in this cult? Well they got stoned out of their minds and drank.  The people believed that the state of drunkenness was possession from Dionysus and it would allow them to tap into his powers. It was composed of women, slaves, and noncitizens of Greece, basically anyone who wasn’t the favored majority. It was a way to escape oppressive city state governments. 

Now here's that fun disembowelment bit I mentioned earlier. In both tellings of Dionysus’ birth, he ‘dies’ and is reborn. There were symbolic rituals that basically acted out the retellings in order to give tribute per se. It mostly involved bulls cuz Dionysus was represented by bulls, but that… is not the only thing used as the sacrifice. How Orpheus died was not a coincidence. It’s called σπαραγμός (English: sparagmos).

Moving on, there was a few written myths and celebrations of Dionysus in this weird period post-Dionysus Zagreus, but he still isn’t the party dude we know just yet. There were several attempts to suppress the cult from many major city states, but it continued on until one fucker came along. 

One guy who changed everything for better or for worse. Dude’s name was Alexander.

THE BITCH COULDNT STOP CONQUERING SHIT AND EXPANDED THE HELLENISTIC WORLD EXPONENTIALLY. 

A side effect of this was that the rulers of this expanded Hellenistic world became stupidly rich. What did these rich losers like to do? 

Party and get shitfaced

So they picked up our grape boy and made him their patron god of partying while also sprinkling on some conquering associations and TADAHHHHHH

Here we are.

IN CONCLUSION:

I just think he’s neat :>

I have such a terrible need for soup but alas I donut have the money to spare for it 🥺