Dionysian December

 

Dionysus is one of my all-time favourite Greek deities and I'm hoping that, by the end of this blog post, he might be one of your favourites, too! 

Almost exactly a year ago, in my Christmas blog post 'Christmas Myths and Where to Find Them' (please excuse the JKR reference), I offered Dionysus up as a deity that truly embodies the spirit of Christmas for me personally: he is, in essence, the god of boozing and eating. Or, to make another problematic reference, he is the god of tits and wine. Kind of. 

Grape Expectations 

As a fully-grown god, Dionysus discovered the vine and extracted the grape's juices and cultivated them, being the first to make wine. Then Hera sent a madness down upon him and he forgot for a bit... but his paternal grandma, the goddess Rhea, cured him and he went on to teach the people of Asia and then the Mediterranean how to make wine. 

But why did Hera send a madness down on him? It starts, as many things in Greek myth do, with Zeus being horny. 

Dionysus' birth. Dionysus' birth. 

The thing about Dionysus is that he remains somewhat implacable and mysterious - I know I often talk about how there is no one right myth, and that there are many versions of each story in mythology, but with Dionysus there are seemingly a hundred different versions of each part of his story. There are even, arguably, two Dionysuses, but I'll get to that shortly. However many Dionysuses there are, he definitely had two births.

Bronze Dionysus mask,
bearded and horned
(200BC-100AD)

So, in some versions, Dionysus is the son of Zeus and Persephone, or the son of Zeus and Demeter. This iteration of Dionysus - Dionysus Zagreus, as he was called - was horned, and he was worshipped by the Orphics. Zagreus (or, "the first Dionysus"; or, "the protagonist of the hit game Hades") was a horned child that the Titans killed and ate; Zeus killed them with a thunderbolt and Rhea helped him to gather up Zagreus' ashes and reconstitute him. Interestingly, this Orphic Dionysus was considered a god of the Underworld.

He was born, he was eaten, he was rebuilt, he was born again - hence this version of Dionysus was born twice. 

The version of Dionysus' birth that you may be more familiar with is the one in which he is the son of Zeus and the mortal Semele. She was a priestess of Zeus, and he noticed her when he was flying in the form of an eagle: he either impregnated her in the traditional way, or he gave her a drink of wine that included fragments of his heart. Still not the weirdest Zeus impregnation story, to be honest. 

Second century Roman Statue
of Dionysus,
after a Hellenistic model

Hera, in the guise of an old woman, visited the pregnant Semele and convinced her to request that Zeus show her his true form. Semele made Zeus promise to grant her a wish, and she made this request of him - Zeus tries to convince her not to ask this of him, that it will not end well for her, but she is adamant (since she has been manipulated by his wife). Seeing Zeus' true, godly form burned Semele up, but Zeus managed to save the foetus and sew it into his thigh, where it safely gestated until he was born as Dionysus. 

This version of Dionysus was also born twice, then! Also, when he grew up, he had a youthful, androgynous appearance, which was part of the reason why the ancient Greek historian Diodorus Siculus wrote that there were, in fact, two forms of Dionysus - the older, bearded chthonic god, and the younger, effeminate god (Diodorus Siculus 4.5.2). 

Suffice it to say, Zeus was not about to be a single dad and Hera definitely was not willing to adopt baby Dionysus. So, when Dionysus was born (for the second second time), Zeus gave the baby to another of his sons, Hermes, for safekeeping. Hermes was also not about to rear the infant, so the baby was secretly fostered by a series of people, each of which Hera discovered and targeted with madness and floods and whatnot. 

So, Dionysus has no choice except to go east, to Asia. It is here that he discovers all of the things that he is the god of: the vine, wine, madness, ecstasy, theatre, religious rituals, and so on... 

The prodigal son returns... 

Upon his return to Greece, Dionysus is credited with the invention of the religious procession, as he came back with a harem of wild animals, slaves, lovers, and riches. His procession also included a group of Maenads - mad women / women possessed with ritual, ecstatic madness. He tried to bring his religion to the Grecian lands, but he was often met with opposition from Greek rulers, which he punished with madness. 

Perhaps the most famous story of Dionysian madness is in Euripides' extant drama The Bacchae, in which Dionysus returns to his birthplace, Thebes, which is being ruled by Pentheus. Pentheus and his mother Agave disbelieve Dionysus' divine birth, so he punishes them with madness: Agave and her sisters join a Maenad ritual in the woods; this is not known to Pentheus, who voyeuristically goes to watch the Bacchic ritual, hoping to see an orgy. The Maenads, guided by Dionysus' divine hand, mistake Pentheus for a  lion and rip him limb from limb. Agave literally mounts her son's head on a pike. Pentheus' mother and aunts are then relieved of their madness and are faced with what they have done - Dionysus banishes them and turns other doubters into snakes, but the blind seer Tiresias is spared because he said from the beginning that Dionysus was a son of Zeus and ought to be worshipped. 

Myths, misc. 

So those are the broad strokes of Dionysus' mythos, but there are a few other Dionysian myths that I absolutely love that I want to share with you: 

• When Hephaestus bound Hera to a magical chair (because she threw him off a mountain, so... fair play) Dionysus gets Hephaestus drunk and brings him back to Olympus when he passes out. 
• When Theseus abandons the sleeping Ariadne after she literally gave him all the help he needed to conquer the Minotaur, Dionysus marries her and she lives as his immortal queen. So... she traded up, while Theseus ended up with Phaedra, and how well did that work out for him? (answer: not well at all) 
• When King Midas earned Dionysus' favour, Dionysus is like "hey dude name a wish and you can have it". Midas famously asked for a golden touch - that everything he touched would turn to gold - and Dionysus is like "hey dude are you SURE about that because I really want to give you a good thing here and you're making a really dumb choice" but Midas is ADAMANT so Dionysus gives him what he wishes for, and Midas has lots of fun until he kills his daughter and/or nearly starves to death, whereupon he prays to Dionysus, who tells him to bathe in a particular river to wash the touch away. Midas later earns the ire of the Apollo, who gives him donkey ears. 

• Dionysus' katabasis is my absolute favourite, though. Katabasis means "descent", and refers specifically to descent into the Underworld. Dionysus found himself in need of some directions and was given those directions by Polymnus. In return, Polymnus earned one wish from Dionysus, and Polymnus requested that he become Dionysus' lover. Dionysus gave a very enthusiastic yes, but said that they would have to wait until he got back from the Underworld. Unfortunately, in the time he was away, Polymnus died. To honour him, Dionysus made a phallus out of an olive branch and fucked himself on Polymnus' grave. Hence, Dionysus invented the dildo and pegging in one fell swoop. 
• Anecdote time: I once loudly told this story, including the line "Hence, Dionysus invented the dildo and pegging in one fell swoop", to a guy in a pub who was bothering me and my friends. 

Worship

I mentioned above the Orphic worshipping of Dionysus as a Chthonic deity - i.e. a god of the Underworld.  As well as the Orphic mysteries, Dionysus was also a large part of the worship in the Eleusinian mysteries, where he was identified with the minor deity Iacchus (which genuinely may be because it sounds like Bacchus) and worshipped as part of this cult to Demeter and Persephone. 

There were also cults of Bacchic women who would take to the woods, get drunk and naked and dance in honour of Dionysus. Hence, the god of tits and wine. 

The Dionysia was a festival held around the time of the winter solstice in honour of Dionysus as a fertility god, where phalluses, long loaves of bread, and big jars of water and wine were all laid out in honour of the god. Imagine it like Christmas dinner but with more wooden dicks. Or maybe not, I don't know how you do Christmas. 

A more modern instance of Dionysic worship is the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche who, in his Twilight of the Idols: or How to Philosophize with a Hammer (1889), described himself as 'I the last disciple of the philosopher Dionysus' (VIII, 173 via Pfeffer 1972). Nietzsche interpreted Dionysus as the quintessential personification of his perception of the modern world, which he called his 'tragic world view'. But where does the Classical god of mythical ecstasy fit into Nietzsche's 'tragic disposition' (Pfeffer 1972: 29)? Nietzsche theorised that cultural development can only occur in a 'tragic' spirit, and this is epitomised by the dichotomy between Apollo - the level-headed god of harmony and civilisation - and Dionysus' drunken chaos and ecstasy; though these gods personify opposing ideals, for Nietzsche they enhanced each other, and 'the highest goal of tragedy', i.e. true understanding of the world, is attained 'by a fraternal union of the two deities' (ibid., 31). 

Nietzsche may have been a bit premature in labelling himself the last worshipper of Dionysus, though. In Dreaming in Red (2005), Linda Fierz-David and Nor Hall suggest Bacchic worship as a way for 21st Century women to reconnect with the sublime and break away from patriarchal civilisation. For Fierz-David and Hall, modern women are socialised with an internal guilt-mechanism that chastises them for any form of social deviation, but through Bacchic worship (i.e. acting like Maenads) women can be born again... much like Dionysus himself. Fierz-David and Hall suggest that modern women should go into nature together, dance and drink and act mad, and thus emerge 'cleansed' as a way to remedy the fact that 'today there is no recognised mystery cult to which [women] can turn when the sterility of a merely adapted life* overtakes her' (Fierz-David and Hall 2005: 9-10).  

*i.e. the life of patriarchy that we are forced to adapt

The latest, grapest adaptation of Dionysus, 
in the game 'Hades'

So, people, consider this your call to become the latest disciple of Dionysus and go out into the woods, drink wine, and dance naked. 

Alternatively, bring a massive wooden phallus to the Christmas dinner table and declare it a Dionysia feast. 

Alternatively, just embrace the chaos a bit, because I genuinely think we're all struggling to find any order in the world right now.