thegrapeandthefig

[thegrapeandthefig]

Sommelier Satyr

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2024 Rural Dionysia Announcement

Io! The time of the year has come again for the Rural Dionysia!

How to participate

The Rural Dionysia is meant to be a smaller competition than its urban counterpart, as such, we have selected only 3 categories:

Freestyle poetry

Modern hymns

“Complete the fragment”

Freestyle poetry

Your poem can be about any chosen topic (myth, personal experience etc.) in any written format. It doesn't have to be religious in nature.

Modern hymn

An hymn must sing the praises of a deity of your choice. Unlike the "freestyle poetry", your work must be of religious nature to fit in this category.

Complete the Fragment

Each year, we choose a fragment from an Ancient Greek poet to work with. The challenge is that the initial fragment must be included somewhere in your piece in its original order. This means you can fill the gaps however you want, but you can’t switch the order of the words in your piece or remove words from the original fragment.

Here is the fragment selected for this 2024 edition:

Fragment 113 by Alcaeus (trans. David A. Campbell; Loeb 142)

…kiss…(they) began…knowledge…sits…are…mortal

Here is the Greek text for reference. Note that because the word "they" is implied, it will be acceptable to keep or modify this word.

If in doubt for any of these categories, remember that you can check submissions from the previous years to get an idea of how others have done before.

Submitting your piece

Please submit your piece through submissions on this blog. All entries must be tagged for the category they are being submitted to. but you can only choose 1 category per piece and each person may only submit 1 entry per category each year.

Entries must also be tagged for potentially triggering content and squicks. If your entry needs a trigger warning, kindly add them at the end of your submission and we will take care of adding them in. Check the rules below for further information about submissions.

Calendar of the event

Nov. 16: Official announcement and opening of submissions. Dec. 17: Final submission day. Dec. 18: Vote opening. Dec. 25: Vote closing. Dec. 25-26: Announcement of the winners!

No worries though! We will be posting reminders about each step when the time comes.

General rules

Roleplay and fanfic are not acceptable submissions. This is a religious festival, please respect our faith and do not submit an entry if you are roleplaying or writing fanfiction.

Unlike with the City Dionysia, entries do not necessarily have to be about specific deities or Hellenic polytheism except for the “Modern Hymn” category, which has to be dedicated to one or many gods of your choice.

There are no meter restrictions. This is up to the writer.

All stories, myths, and poems must be entered using the submissions button.

All entries must be tagged for the category they are being submitted to. Entries must also be tagged for potentially triggering content and squicks.

An entry may only be submitted to a single category.

Each person may only submit one entry per category each year.

Winners for each category will be decided by popular vote.

Admins of this blog cannot participate, for obvious reasons. As for now, this includes @thegrapeandthefig @verdantlyviolet

Questions about the rules? Check the blog for past answers, your answer might be in there. And if it's not, simply submit an ask. We'll answer in the best delays possible.

[thegrapeandthefig]

I try to keep personal posts to a minimum on this page, but this was too beautiful not to share. I’m so grateful to have worked with an artist so brilliant to complete this devotional piece.

[thegrapeandthefig]

Altars in Ancient Greece

A disclaimer before we get into it: this is a brief explanation of how altars functioned in ancient Greece. I am not telling you how you should set up your own personal altar(s). Rather, I hope this can serve as foundational knowledge for you to consider while figuring out what works best for you and your practice.

Pentelic marble altar from the ancient agora of Athens. Dedicated by the Athenian Boule to Aphrodite and the Graces. c. 194-193 BCE.

The purpose of the altar is to receive offerings for the deity. It is the sacred place where worshipers pour their libations of wine, deposit their gifts of fruit, honey, or cakes, and burn a portion of the sacrificial animal. Offerings in ancient Greece were a key component of religious life; it is how mortals express their honor and build χάρις (kharis, favor). The altar is a highly important point of contact with the divine, and is an essential physical element for any cult to be established.

In fact, we can determine whether or not a deity was worshiped in ancient Greece based on if there were any altars dedicated to them. A god or daimon with no altars was very likely only part of the mythological or literary tradition and did not receive any sacrifices or worship. Altars were generally dedicated to one god or a group of related deities. In rarer cases, they may be dedicated to the whole pantheon (example: the Altar of the Twelve Gods in the Athenian Agora).

An altar for a heavenly (ouranic) god would be a raised surface or pedestal, and it would be oriented towards the East. The typical Greek altar consisted of bricks which were white-washed with lime, or it was carved from stone such as marble or limestone. They could be plain, or they could be decorated with volutes and narrative scenes. They often had the name of the deity inscribed into them. Altars could also come in a variety of shapes, the only real requirement being that the surface on top was flat so it could hold the offerings.

More prominent cult sanctuaries may feature a large, elevated altar with steps leading up to it. There were also natural rock altars, or in very rustic sanctuaries, a collection of stones was grouped to form an altar. If one was worshiping a khthonic god who dwells on or within the earth, they would provide sacrifices at a low-lying altar such as an eschara, or a simple open pit called a bothros.

Indoor altars were very uncommon. At sanctuaries, the altar would be outside of the gods temple, often in front of the entrance. Though a sanctuary could contain several altars and sacrificial sites. Households would have had one in their courtyard for private worship. Other altars were located outside of public buildings or in community gathering places like an agora.

The reason for being outdoors was so that the gods who reside in the sky could observe the sacrifices being made and enjoy the rising smoke of the incense. Meanwhile, a libation poured directly onto the bare earth would seep down below to the khthonic gods. Every altar was ceremonially sanctified when its first sacrifice was performed; from then on, it was considered part of the property of the deity.

Below are my sources. I'll likely make a part two of this post where I go over some ideas for how we can construct our modern altars. Thank you for reading!

Ancient Greek Religion, Jon D. Mikalson

Greek Religion, Walter Burkert

Ancient Greek Cults, Jennifer Larson

[thegrapeandthefig]

Mary Oliver, from a poem titled "Whelks," featured in Devotions: Selected Poems

[thegrapeandthefig]

The November Fox by Shilenok

[thegrapeandthefig]

littlelamb

[thegrapeandthefig]

Eine Bacchantin by Henrietta Rae (Late 19th-Early 20th Century)

[thegrapeandthefig]

And now, let’s stop what we’re doing and watch this Red Fox/räv eat an apple. Värmland, Sweden (May 17, 2024).

[thegrapeandthefig]

Hey I've been looking into something and I figured you might be a good source (maybe adri can also add in if you make this a post).

Do you know anything about the difference between Maenads and Bassarids? I know the terms are used interchangeably, though Bassarids usually wore foxskins (possibly where the name comes from) and that they where common to Thrace. Idk if the terms actually are interchangable or if the Bassarids belonged to a specific place/practice/epithet of Dionysos so using them interchangeably is incorrect (and if they do idk what the difference exactly is but I'm curious). Anything you know could be helpful ^^

It’s one of those topics where I’m not sure I can provide a satisfactory answer, but I’ll try to be as succinct as possible:

1) The epithet Bassareus does exist for Dionysus. We know of one (1) dedication to him under this epithet dating back to the 3rd century BC, in Histria (modern day Romania), which is, in fact in Thrace.

2) We know the term is obviously older, since Aeschylus wrote a now lost play titled Bassarai. The play is unfortunately in a very fragmentary state so there's not much for us to speculate on there.

However, it is possible that perhaps, the term was interchangeable for the Athenians, assuming this epithet/title was foreign or marginal to them but might have been much more important in Thracian cultus.

3) This aside, the most important use of the term as a title, to my knowledge, comes from Torre Nova (Latium, Italy) in the Ist century AD. The document is an inscription listing participants/members of a local Dionysian association, which very possibly performed mysteries of some kind. And it is in this particular context that we find a distinction between the participants:

Some are archibassarai (2 males and 4 females), while others are called belt-wearing bacchants (15 males, 3 females), and then you also find "sacred bacchants" (over a 100 people) and others are simply called bacchants ( about 44 females). And those are not all the titles (there are 27!): I've left out the priests and priestesses, the torch bearers, the phallus bearers etc.

What is interesting in the case of the association of Torre Nova is that there is a hierarchy amongst participants, that might be linked to the level of initiation. However, the problem is that it is very likely that this organization is particular to this association (one of a wealthy roman family, might I add) and not a standardized way of doing things. Not to mention the geographical and chronological context, which is far from 5th century Athens or 3rd century Thrace. It should be noted also, that the term maenad isn’t used in the inscription at all. 

TL;DR To summarize, and coming back to your initial question: we know very little of the use of the term in Classical Greece, but, as you have mentioned, we have some traces of a Thracian use of the term in cultic context. Clear disctinction and use as a cult title is attested much later in Roman Italy. 

[thegrapeandthefig]

Hamlet adaptation where Hamlet is a vlogger and all his soliloquies are breakdowns he uploads to YouTube

[thegrapeandthefig]

beavers are one of those things you just accept without question as soon as adults tell you about it as a kid and then many years later in your adulthood you look up one day and go wait, what do you mean there exists a species of rodent hydrological engineer that knows how to build properly ventilated freestanding houses for itself, that doesn't make any sense

[thegrapeandthefig]

beavers are one of those things you just accept without question as soon as adults tell you about it as a kid and then many years later in your adulthood you look up one day and go wait, what do you mean there exists a species of rodent hydrological engineer that knows how to build properly ventilated freestanding houses for itself, that doesn't make any sense

[thegrapeandthefig]

Canada Goose/kanadagås. Sätra in Stockholm, Sweden (August 25, 2013).

[thegrapeandthefig]

Thinking about Aristophanes' lost Triphales play today

(found some colored pencils)

[thegrapeandthefig]

Dionysus: Wine and Grape Braised Chicken

BY Alison Wiebe