#is it pentheus as threat to dionysus

[poetryqueer]

rotating uvm’s pentheus in my mind always

[sarafangirlart]

I’d love an adaption of The Bacchae or the pirate myth that really leans into Dionysus being this proto-lovecraftian entity. An unavoidable force of chaotic nature given a pleasant face, underestimated and belittled until it is far too late.

I wonder if part of the reason Perseus managed to defeat him (Dionysus got worshipped in Argos like he wanted but still) is exactly because he never underestimate Dionysus, he saw the maneads army and fought against them off immediately, while Pentheus didn’t take the threat seriously until it was too late.

Having Medusa’s head, Hermes sandals and Hades’s helmet probably helped too lol.

[velvet-jellyfish]

Shower thought: The Rocky Horror Picture Show as a modern take on The Bacchae:

Frank N Furter/Dionysus is a charismatic, gender non conforming “foreigner” with alien/god powers who shows up in the normal world leading a band of strange, flamboyant revellers in a party that upsets the conventional and repressed protagonists (Brad and Janet/Pentheus).

Frank/Dionysus then proceeds to seduce and mentally fuck with said protagonists - destabilising their values and sense of self, but also revealing their repressed desires. This culminates in a theatrical spectacle where he mind controls the protagonists, forces them to cross dress, and bends them to his will.

They are different in a lot of ways - Dionysus enters the city to question it’s rules and disrupt normative society, intentionally seeking out Pentheus to get revenge. Brad and Janet, on the other hand, only become Frank’s victims after they leave civilisation behind to enter his castle and it’s alien society.

In the Bacchae Pentheus is killed and Dionysus triumphs, while in Rocky Frank is killed and the protagonists survive. Both plays end with the confused survivors trying to figure out what the hell just happened and what the message of all this was.

Comparing the historical cult of Dionysus and midnight screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show as a “carnival” space where social rules are temporarily relaxed to give freedom to a marginalised group of people who feel ostracised from mainstream society. Despite the violence, pettiness, and vengefulness of their actions in the story, Dionysus and Frank N Furter come out of it as symbols of liberation, freedom, and acceptance. It’s not surprising, they both steal the show with their flamboyance and charisma, and we love a juicy queer villain. They are both criticized in the text for having gone too far, but that’s exactly what the audience wants to see.

I wonder if it’s also because Frank N Furter and Dionysus are primarily a threat to those who reject them and their subversive ways. As a queer audience watching both of these plays, we know that we would have accepted Dionysus as a god and happily partied with the Transylvanians. So maybe we have nothing to fear?

TLDR: a midnight screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show is absolutely a festival of Dionysus, weird problematic bits and all. Also powerful, amoral gender nonconforming beings are hot.

[nysus-temple]

The beginning of The Bacchae:

Pentheus: I think Dionysus is a big threat to our society.

Tiresias: May I ask why?

Pentheus: No.

The almost ending of The Bacchae:

Pentheus: It's a white flag, and you and that god you keep talking about may as well start waving it now, people.

Dionysus, still disguised as a human: The only thing we'll be waving is yoUR DECAPITATED HEAD ON A STICK, RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOUR WEEPING MOTHER, PAL!

Agave:

Cadmo:

Pentheus:

Tiresias: Good lords—

[p1anether]

regarding your tags on that one anne carson post about pentheus... MAY i see that paper 🙏🏼🤲🏼😳

here’s the intro!! :

Pentheus in Euripides’ Bacchae notably goes to extreme lengths to rid Thebes of the Stranger and suppress his influences amongst his people. The god Dionysus, appearing as the Stranger, is a threat entirely to the order Pentheus tries to maintain in his kingdom. There is tension running throughout the play between Pentheus’ traditionalism and Dionysus’ otherness. George Bernard Shaw’s adaptation of the Bacchae, Major Barbara, Anne Carson’s Bakkhai, and Tennessee Williams’ adaptation, Suddenly Last Summer, all center around this same tension. This tension lies within the concept of masculinity, as something that men are innately supposed to embody and naturally conform to its ideals. Despite this belief, it is constantly subverted, undermined, and bended in these plays, revealing it all as a performance and something that has to be actively and consciously maintained. There is a tension within the male characters of Pentheus, Stephen, and Sebastian of who they are supposed to be, according to societal standards, and who they are internally and how they are perceived by others. Euripides’ Bacchae and its various adaptations, particularly through the character of Pentheus, illustrate a tension between the belief that masculinity is both something inherent to men and that it is something that can be imitated and performed.

[finelythreadedsky]

*procrastinates writing my undergrad thesis by scrolling through your blog bc it's vaguely relevant* (the thesis is on the euripedes' bacchae and i argue that pentheus is ultimately brought down by his refusal to see the bacchae as an actual material threat to his person, blinded by the need to put an end to the substantial cultural threat against the male polis that they embody... thoughts?)

i’ll be honest here, i absolutely do not understand what’s going on with the dynamics of the established male order of the polis in the bacchae. dionysus is simultaneously a threat to patriarchal order (encourages ‘bad’ behavior from women, blurs binaries) but also he’s in the right and pentheus is in the wrong (in the simplest terms)? and ultimately his role is absolutely compatible with patriarchal order and it’s pentheus who ‘devolves’ into blurred binaries? the play still ends with and embodies the triumph of bacchic chaos (and gender chaos in particular) over the established order in the polis but then again bacchic chaos kind of is part of the established order of the polis, it’s just that pentheus doesn’t recognize it... i find it really hard to make sense of the larger arc and implications of the bacchae

i’m also cursed to think about the bacchae in juxtaposition with the daughters of minyas, and i’ve recently been publicly confused about them here, but i think that line of thought is somewhat helpful for me right now... dionysus as temporarily and forcibly dissolving boundaries and binaries as a way to ultimately reify them? i guess in that lens pentheus doesn’t recognize the value to the order of the polis that a temporary period of disorder holds, and so he tries to maintain all order, all the time, until he himself collapses into all disorder, not recognizing the importance of circumscribed and limited disorder. idk, not sure how i feel about it all. it probably depends also on the actual role and practice of bacchic rites in historical fifth century athens, and i don’t know much about that

[singofus-a]

HEADCANON - Selene and Lunacy

There are some myths that mention that Selene was a ‘controller of madness’. Some, now outdated, words surrounding madness come from her or her roman name Luna.

Lunatic = ‘moon-struck’

A myth by Nonnus tells of a time that Dionysus calls on Selene/Mene’s help in dealing with Pentheus who was threatening him.

Her response is this:

‘Night-illuminating Dionysos, friend of plants, comrade of Mene, look to your grapes; my concern is the mystic rites of Bakkhos (Bacchus), for the earth ripens the offspring of your plants when it receives the dewy sparkles of unresting Selene. Then do you, dancing Bakkhos, stretch out your thyrsos and look to your offspring; and you need not fear a race of puny men, whose mind is light, whose threats the whips of the Eumenides [Erinyes] repress perforce. With you I will attack your enemies. Equally with Bakkhos I rule distracted madness. I am the Bakkhic Mene, not alone because in heaven I turn the months, but because I command madness and excite lunacy. I will not leave unpunished earthly violence against you . . .’

She gave Pentheus both visual and auditory hallucinations until he forgot what he had been previously been doing and he was terrified.

My own headcanons:

Selene struggled in adolescence with mental illness, including elements of depression, mania and psychosis, but has since held control over it. She is able to influence the mental state of others - particularly mortals.

She may use this to help Dionysus in his Bacchic festivals.

When she loses Endymion, her control weakens and she struggles with another great period of mental illness which her family help her out of.

[sinningarchive]

lilith, mephistopheles, belphigor, pythius -- also feel better 💕

ASK A GOD ABOUT THEIR DEMONS. / ACCEPTING. 

LILITH: WHAT WAS YOUR BIGGEST REBELLION AGAINST AUTHORITY? WHY DID YOU DO IT? 

immediately after claiming godhood, zeus expected him to bow. every other god did, however sarcastically or begrudgingly. he was king. they were not. in the end, zeus was supposed to have final word. his word is supposed to be law. 

dionysus did not bow. 

it sent olympus into an uproar almost instantly. ares immediately wanted to challenge zeus for the throne, claiming he would make anyone bow. athena tried to kill ares to kiss up to zeus, aphrodite immediately started whispering into other gods’ ears, trying to plan the downfall of them all, & so on. 

dionysus, a new god, pulsing with power & might, let this chaos insure for a minute. he was forgotten almost instantly when the fighting started, because they didn’t consider him a threat. after all, he’s a chaotic god. that fight, among so many loud & powerful beings, all brought on because of one simple no, that was intoxicating. 

the gods all ground to a halt when vines sprang from the floor & separated every god from each other, holding them, trapping them, leashing them like dogs & hovering them in the air. they all stared at the black eyed demon controlling it all. 

as for why? he had been living under nymphs his entire life thus far, & freedom had taken a hold of him already, pumping his veins with gushing gold. he had the world, & he wasn’t going to limit himself based on the idea that his father is superior just for being born first. he’s going to take what he wants, & that was the beginning. 

MEPHISTOPHELES: HAVE YOUR EVER HELPED A LOVED ONE DESTROY THEMSELVES? 

destruction comes with dionysus. it’s part of who he is. he destroys people daily: alcohol poisoning, drug addictions, overdoses, the people that are dead because of him. the list goes on. 

loved ones are more complicated. who he is makes most things complicated, but add in caring about someone, & it gets messier. many, many people that live in his house are drug addicts with almost no hope of recovering. he doesn’t get rid of their addiction, have healers fix their bodies, & help them live. he doesn’t. because it makes him stronger. it’s part of who he is. 

what sometimes troubles him, especially after the car wreck, is when he meets teenagers who are on the path to death from drug or alcohol addiction. the kids who can’t make it through the day without pills to make them function, the kids who will have a meltdown if they don’t shoot up every few hours, the kids who drown themselves as many nights as they can in a row. those are the people that pull at what little humanity is left in him. 

they’re usually the ones he helps. he weens them off, gives them ecstasy & freedom instead, gives them a taste of life instead of death. he doesn’t do it with every teenager he meets, because then that’s all he’d do with his time, but sometimes he does. it’s fairly rare. 

BELPHIGOR: IF YOU COULD PICK 3 FORMS TO SHAPESHIFT INTO, WHAT WOULD THEY BE? 

i’m going to answer this within the idea that dio does not need to shapeshift, & simply can if he wants to. 

he would definitely have a difficult time with this. leopards are the closest to his soul, so he would have to pick them as his first. snakes come in a close second, if he has to pick three. & a human form, for the third. he can’t do what he does as a cat or snake. he has to at least look human sometimes to do what he needs to so that he can thrive. 

the decision would kill a large part of him, however. dionysus is not meant to be very contained, & three options would be terrible on him. 

PYTHIUS: OUT OF ALL THE LIES YOU HAVE EVER TOLD, WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE? 

probably when he fooled pentheus into believing he was not dionysus. he plainly lied to his face, then lead him to death by the women he claimed to rule over. dionysus got a specific pleasure out of seeing pentheus’ mother be part of his slaughter.