#the myth of dionysos

[mask131]

The myth of Dionysos (5)

Follow-up of the loose translation/recap of the article I began covering here.

II) The Frenzied God

Voluptuousness and cruelty

In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche associates those two words to define “Dionysism”. Indeed, they are the two faces of drunkenness, and thus the two aspects of the magic of the god. While he is able to create flows of milk, honey and wine for the prosperity of mankind, Dionysos can also cause disaster-and-misfortune-inducing metamorphosis. The daughters of Minyas, that refused to leave their husbands to follow Bacchus, are terrified when milk and wine starts pouring from the ceiling above them.

The women that follow Dionysos become Maenads or Bacchants: under the influence of the “mania” (the divine possession) they become invulnerable, with an enormous strength, and they are plunged in a murderous delirium that forces them to rip into pieces the young beasts they just breastfed – sometimes they even kill their own children. The Bacchic “orgia” (rite, ritual) happens in three steps. First the oribasia, the disheveled race of the women through the mountain ; then the disparagmos, the sacrifice by ripping apart. This is the part of the ritual that is illustrated by Euripides’ Bacchants (405 BCE), with the murder of Pentheus by his mother Agave. “Foaming at the mouth, with rolling eyes, having lost her mind, possessed by Bacchus […] she took with both hands his left arm and, pushing with her foot against the flank of the unfortunate one, she disarticulated and ripped away the shoulder, not just with her sole strength, but with the power the god offered her.” The third time of the ritual is the omophagia, the devouring of the raw, barely dead, meat that was just lacerated.

The Dionysian cult introduces a ritual cruelty. In Arcadia, women are flagellated. In Boeotia, women are chased by the priest of Dionysos, who is armed with a sword ; and as a substitute to a human victim, a young veal wearing cothurnus and symbolizing a child is killed for the god. Through the “mania”, Dionysos imposes upon his followers the cruelty of which he was a victim: he was chased by Lycurgus, he was ripped apart and devoured by the Titans. From this arises the voluptuousness that is tied to the cruelty of the Bacchants, as they can, by satisfying their darkest instincts, life again the suffering of the god that possesses them.

Between life and death: contradictions

The ambiguity of the Dionysian intoxication, bringing joy and fury, life and death, is reflected in the animals that follow the god. On one side, animals of fecundity, such as the goat, the donkey, the bull. On the other side, ferocious and murderous beasts, such as the lion, the lynx or the panther. This contradiction is a symbol of what Nietzsche calls the “deadly-silent clatter”, the Dithyrambes of Dionysos. This god, nicknamed Bromios (the roaring one) is followed by a parade of loud music made by tambourines, flutes and cymbals, loud music that makes the Maenads dance to the point of convulsions. But, the god can also suddenly impose a strong silence, where even the Maenads stay immobile and frozen, as if petrified.

Even the origins of the god are placed in this contradiction, since his birth mixes life and death. Which is probably why the dead have such an important place in both his cult and myth. Horace tells of how Dionysos went into the Underworld to fetch back his mother. In Aristophane’s parody The Frogs (405 BCE), he goes in the realm of Hades to bring back Euripides. The third day of the Anthesteria, is dedicated to the dead, who are supposed to come back to haunt the living. The affinities of Dionysos with dead will even allow Heraclite to identify Dionysos to Hades, saying they both were the “Plouton”, the “giver of riches”. The various versions of Dionysos’ romance with Ariadne also prove this oscillation between life and death: sometimes Dionysos is the one that consoles and comforts Ariadne after Theseus abandonment, other times (such as in Homer’s Odyssey) he is rather a jealous lover who sends death to Ariadne through Artemis. The many contradictions of the Dionysism, and especially its unstoppable cruelty, made it very difficult to locate it within a political system, and it explains as such its subversive role in Greek society.

Disturbing the social and political order

If Dionysos is presented as a foreign god, it is because such an exoticism translates the strangeness of a god with no fixed place, of a cult that disdains temples to rather have a mobile and open worship. The “thiasis”, the very basis of the Dionysian religion, is found outside of all the social norms, since this group gathers without recognizing any distinction between men and women, poor and rich, citizens and slaves. On another hand, Dionysos is composed of a feminine strength and a subversive power that makes the effeminate god a champion of the “dark” or “nocturnal side”, as a counterpart to the diurnal, ordered and masculine power of Apollo. This god, that drags women away from their loom to hunt them down the mountains, can only break down the familial order – and thus, by extension, weaken the political order. The paroxysm of this disturbance is reached within The Bacchants, where the social, then political, dislocation of Thebes is crowned by the destruction of the palace, the very symbol of the royal power.

But even beyond all this, it is the very human values that are disturbed by Dionysos’ very existence: he is a god born from a mortal woman, a deity that stays close to humans and that allows them to be assimilated to him. Unlike the cult of all the other Greek gods, the Dionysian religion destroys the frontier between humanity and divinity.

As such, the cult of Dionysos had a cathartic role in Ancient Greece: it set mankind free (at least for a time) from his civic past and duties, as well as from his cruel desires and instincts. Imported in Rome, the “orgia” degenerated into a licentious feast and will soon be forbidden. Rome will rather honor Bacchus through art, by highlighting his role as a god of wine, and as the joyful musician of the bacchanals, which will be a loved subject of the European classical painting. It is this “weakened” or “watered-down” version of Dionysism that will survive in European culture until the end of the 19th century, when the philosophers and the poets will rediscover the true roots of the god.

[buggeeart]

This just screamed Ariadne and Dionysus to me, so here’s my take on them!

[iktend]

Glorious son of Semele 💜

[crimson-deceit]

—The Bacchae—

An older art piece I did for the play The Bacchae! 💕🍇🍷

[tractim]

it took me a while but here is dionysus with spring flowers <3

[jugganautism]

dionysus redesign cuz i was bored of my old one

[rhobeta-and-epsilon]

It’s him…

[dionysianivy]

Dionysus Androgynos

Happy Trans Day everyone! May you all be blessed and feel comfortable in your own skin. Today we celebrate the joy and beauty of being ourselves 💜🏳️‍⚧️

[apollomes-supremacy]

Posting this sketch of Dionysos and Ariadne now because I have a feeling I wont finish it

[mask131]

The myth of Dionysos (4)

The Dictionary of literary myths does not have just one article about Dionysos… But two! And since I translated the first, let’s journey through the second: it is titled “Dionysos: The evolution of the literary myth”, and it was written by Ann-Déborah Lévy-Bertherat.

According to the imagery of the Ancient Greeks, Dionysos is supposed to be a young god – he is often depicted as a teenager, sometimes even as a child. This perhaps explains why his Greek name was thought to be the counterpart of the Phrygian “Dioskouros”, “the boy of Zeus”. However, it seems more plausible to link Dionysos’ name to Nysa, both nurse and homeland of the god. But no matter which of these explanations is right: both highlight and insist on a foreign origin for the god. A foreign origin that we know to be purely mythical rather than historical – indeed, the Mycenaean texts proved that the cult of Dionysos was implanted in Greece since a very, very old time, and was not a “recent importation” as classical Greeks believed. But then, why make Dionysos a “foreign god”? Maybe because, in a symbolic way, it is important for Dionysos to be a god that “comes and goes”, a “god that arrived” – or maybe, it was a much needed element to explain his strange, bizarre and frightening character.

I/ Births and rebirths of Dionysos

Semele, a mortal woman loved by Zeus, died because of Hera’s jealousy: she asked her divine lover to appear before her in all of his glory, but this resulted in her death struck by his lightning. Removing the child she was bearing in her womb, Zeus placed the unborn into his own thigh, where the baby completed his growth. As such, Dionysos knew a double-birth, and his cult was deeply marked by this. One of the Dionysiac rites is the ritual of the liknites (child in crib) – where a child has to disappear and be searched by women in vain, for he will only reappear one year later.

The Passion of Dionysos: The myths of Dionysos’ childhoods and wanderings depict him as a persecuted god. One time he is dismembered, boiled and devoured by the Titans before being resurrected by Demeter. Another time Hera curses with madness Semele’s sister, Ino, first nurse of the god. In a third tale pirates kidnap the child to sell him as a slave. Homer, in the Iliad, retells of how Lycurgus, armed with an axe and a desire to kill, hunted down Dionysos and his nymph-nurses – the child had to throw himself into the sea, where he was saved by Thetis. The true “passion” of Dionysos (in the Christian meaning of the term) always suffering, always dying, but always resurrecting, seems to be a symbol of the vegetal cycle. As a result, it is no coincidence that the four great holidays of Dionysos are all placed between the end of December and the beginning of April – aka, between the winter solstice and the arrival of spring.

Ivy and vine: Legends insist on the ties between Dionysos and other vegetal deities, such as Cybele or Rhea – two incarnations of the great Earth-mother, two deities that shield Dionysos from Hera’s revenge. There are the agrarian nymphs that constantly surround the god; there is his lover, Ariadne, that was originally a Minoan goddess of vegetation; and there is of course Demeter, to which he is tied through the Mysteries of Eleusis (and Pindar even goes as far as making Dionysos and Demeter a couple). Dionysos is also called Bacchus (a named which, according to Euripides, comes from “bacchos”, the “branch” the “bough”) ; he is said to be a “ploutodotes”, a “wealth-giver” ; he was believed to give strength to plants and to help them grow ; and among his numerous attributes, his most prominent ones are the ivy (of which he is crowned) and the grapevine (which he offered to the world). These two plants have always a savior role in his myths. It was said that the child Semele bore was protected from the lightning by ivy ; the pirates were frightened when ivy and vine started growing around their ship’s mast ; a nymph hunted by Lycurgus turned herself into vine to choke the murderous king… And yet, these two plants are such a contrast they can only make the god ambiguous: ivy is coldness and sterility, where the grapevine is warmth and generosity. Dionysos is almost most famed as the god of wine: it is the wine that symbolizes the presence of the gods during festivals; during the Lenaia festival (January-February) the new wine is offered to the god (symbolized as a bough-decorated mask). Dionysos “polygethes” (joyful, happy) is said, according to Euripides, to have the power to “laugh and put to sleep all our problems”.

Fertility and fecundity: This god, friend of the nymphs, who found a home with Thetis at the bottom of the sea, whose statue is ritually plunged in water at Halai, who was said to have entered Athens on a naval chariot, has too many affinities with water and humidity (an universal symbol of fertility) for his power to limit itself just to plants. Indeed, let us take a look at his cohorts and parades: w find in there donkeys, goats and bulls, usually painted in an ithyphallic position; and he is surrounded by Satyrs and Silenes whose lubricity and lust are meant to parallel the chastity of the Maenads. Dionysos himself, during the Anthesteria festival (February-march) knows a physical and sexual union with the Basilinna, and by doing so ensures one year of fecundity for all of Athens. The exaltation of fertility in Dionysos’ cult is most expressed through phallophoria – but the particularity of Dionysos is that he depicts a complete and “full” fecundity, with both its masculine and feminine attributes. Dionysos, in his myth like in his cult, is surrounded by women: Aeschylus calls him “effeminate”, explaining his youthfulness (he hasn’t grown a beard or body hair yet), and his clothes (he usually wore the women’s peplum). Some even depict him as an androgynous figure, and the ambiguity of his sex reminds the one of the hermaphrodite and their “ideal fecundity”. The French poet Baudelaire will even interpret the thyrsus, a long, leafed staff held by the followers of the god, as the union of the masculine symbol (the straight staff) and the feminine one (the curvy boughs wrapped around it). Dionysos is “polygethes” and “ploutodotes” – but reducing Dionysos to this sole role would be removing from him his “dark side”, the eviler part of his power. For Homer calls him “mainomenos”, the “demented one”. He is a god that disturbs, he is a god that break the order.

More about this next time, in “The Frenzied God”!

[buggeeart]

That image we all know and love but Ariadne and Dionysus!

+Dialogue

+Serapis and Heiro inclusion because they’re all in the Underworld together anyways.

[galusandmalus]

this is the only ancient image of Perseus and Dionysus I've seen lmao.

“Nazzano Painter” AD 380 – 360

"hey check out this cool thing i found" "im not falling for it brother"

love long hair perseus.

[dionysusmybeloved]

ORPHIC HYMN #53

TO LORD DIONYSOS

I call upon Bacchos, the god we worship annually,

chthonic Dionysos,

together with the fair-tressed Nymphs

he is roused.

In the sacred halls of Persephone

he slumbers and puts to sleep

pure

Bacchic time, every third year.

When he himself stirs up

the triennial revel again,

he sings a hymn

together with his fair-girdled nurses.

As the seasons revolve,

he puts to sleep and wakes up the years.

O blessed and fruit-giving Bacchos,

O horned spirit of the unripe fruit,

come to this most sacred rite

with a glow of joy on your face,

come teeming with fruit

that is holy and perfect.

(edited with the Apostolos Athanassakis trans.)

[tractim]

dionysus as the fool for the dionysian tarot deck <3

[aungcha]

So uhm yeah university boys in Mcdonald's!!!

[mythixhekate]

Dionysus ✦

God of wine, fruit, pleasure, ritual madness, lgbtq+ community, fertility, theatre, festivity, insanity and intoxication

Offerings :

Wine

Honey

Olive oil

Apple seeds or apples in general

Grapes

Ivy

Frankincense

Roses

Cinnamon

Pinecone

Fig

Silver fir

Theatre masks

Snake imagery

Bull imagery

Leopard imagery

Pride flags

Cups

Sex toys

Purple candles

White candles

Curved knives or daggers

Devotional acts :

See a theatre show

Go to a party

Wear purple, red or white clothes

Go to a pride event or support lgbtq+

Tell someone you love them

Love yourself.

Write poetry or music

Read poetry

Listen to music that reminds you of him

Drink wine (grape juice if you're underage)

Go dancing or dance at home

Masturbate

Go to festivals

Take care of your mental and physical health

Draw pictures of things associated with him

REMINDER you don't need to do any of these things to worship a deity, these are just suggestions, remember that if you don't want to or can't do any of this that it's totally ok !!