Miscellaneous Myths: Dionysus

Ah, Dionysus. God of wine, life of the party, known primarily for being drunk and having some pretty intense fangirls who killed Orpheus that one time. Wears lots of leaves, not a fan of pants, spends most of the day draped in grapes and turning dudes into dolphins. Is there really more to him than that? Oh, is there? Is there ever? But we'll get to that. For now, let's start simple and cover the basics of the backstory. The official story of Dionysus begins with Zeus, who at this point may as well change his deific designation to God of One-Night Stands, carrying on a semi-secret affair with the mortal woman Semele. Hera, as is her wont, catches wind of their business and decides that she's tired of just outright killing Zeus' children and girlfriends, and for this particular murder, she's gonna mix it up a little with some disguises. Hera transforms into an old woman and ingratiates herself to Semele, who trusts her immediately and confides in her that her boyfriend is Zeus himself. And not only that, she's actually pregnant with his son. But Hera's like, Come on, every guy pulls that I'm really Zeus stunt to get a little mortal action. How do you know for sure he's being honest with you? And tells Semele she should make him prove his god status by showing her his true form. So the next time they meet up, Semele makes Zeus promise her a favor, then demands he drop the mortal shape and reveal himself in all his glory. Zeus isn't one to go back on a promise, so he gods it up a little and immediately vaporizes Semele, Ark of the Covenant style. But good news, sports fans! The mom may be dead, but the baby lives! Zeus takes little demigod baby Dionysus, oh, yeah, that's who the baby is, by the way, and sews him into his leg so the kid can finish growing. A few months later, Dionysus is born for realsies and his exploits can really get started. Keep an eye on that initial theme of rebirth. It's central to some very interesting aspects of his character I'll explore later. But first, shenanigans! Dionysus is, of course, wildly unsafe on Olympus on account of Hera, so Zeus sends him away to be raised in secret. Exactly who raises him varies from telling to telling, with foster parents ranging from Hermes, the Titan Israea, the mortal king Athamas and Queen Eno who raise him as a girl, and even Persephone. Let's also make note of his connection to Persephone in this version. This is all gonna come together later, I promise. So Dionysus grows up to young adulthood and begins his classic godly exploits. He starts off by discovering how to make wine, but before he can spread this knowledge to the rest of the world, Hera drives him temporarily crazy and he wanders around for a while before Rhea fixes his brain. Then he gets on that whole teaching the world how to make wine thing and wanders pretty far afield. There's a story that Alexander the Pretty Alright stumbled on a town called Nyssa during his journeys along the Indus River, which they told him was founded by Dionysus during his meanderings. Dionysus is also a major cutie, which gets him in a spot of trouble when he gets abducted by sailors for unsavory purposes. Of course, they get more than they bargained for, and Dionysus responds by turning the mast and oars into snakes, filling the ship with ivy and the sound of flutes, and possibly turning into a lion. This obviously terrifies and or maddens the sailors, who leap overboard and are promptly turned into dolphins. You may be wondering, hey, how did the cheerfully drunk god of wine do all that stuff you just said? What does feral wildlife and crippling insanity have to do with a fine Chardonnay? Don't worry about that for now. We'll get there. While it's generally accepted modern canon that Hestia, goddess of the hearthfire, gave up her seat as the 12th Olympian to Dionysus and established his godhood, there's actually no mythological precedent implying that ever happened. Listings of the 12 Olympians will generally include either Hestia or Dionysus, but not both. So people kind of assume he supplanted her, but it's not really clear or established anywhere. He also gives Midas his golden touch, which turned out... not good. That was a not good thing that happened. So, now that we've established some canon for Dionysus, forget all that, because there is no canon. There is only an endlessly deep well of mysteries and fragmented mythology, and Dionysus is much older and weirder than he seems. To start our dive down this well, a little historical context. Ancient Greece, as we generally conceive of it, got going around 700 BC. Before that, the civilization in the area was Mycenaean Greece, which existed between 1600 and 1100 BC. After it fell apart in the Late Bronze Age collapse, there were a few centuries of Dark Ages where nothing really got written down, and then city-states started popping up and Greece got its act together over the course of a couple hundred years, starting around 900 BC. Mycenaean Greece and Ancient Greece had a pretty interesting dynamic, since although they were, practically speaking, different cultures, Ancient Greece really seems to have thought of itself as a successor to Mycenaean Greece. Classics like the Iliad and the Odyssey were written in the 700s BC, but explicitly set in the legendary past of Mycenaean Greece. So it's like... Ancient Greece squared. There was also linguistic rollover. Mycenaean is considered an early form of Greek, but was written in Linear B, a syllabic script which was replaced around 900 BC by the basically modern Greek alphabet, which in turn was derived from the Phoenician alphabet. Anyway, this is important because the majority of the Hellenistic pantheon originated in Mycenaean Greece, and we know this because we found their names in Linear B inscriptions. Dionysus is one of those gods. In most cases, we know very little about what roles they played in the Mycenaean religion, although they seem very different from their classical Hellenized characterizations. Poseidon, for example, seems to have filled the role of head god, and he was treated more as a god of earthquakes than a god of the sea. We do know that the Mycenaean religion seems to have put a stronger focus than Hellenism did on worshipping Chthonic gods, deities with connections to the underworld, and that Poseidon's Earthshaker epithet designated him as a Chthonic god and might have been why he was considered so important. While Zeus, in contrast as a Sky God, was barely acknowledged. There's also, fun fact, no Mycenaean equivalent to Hades, although Persephone and Demeter are both Mycenaean in origin. Anyway, regardless of who they used to be, by the time Ancient Greece as we think of it got going and we started getting written records again, all those old Mycenaean gods were pretty solidly locked into their new Hellenized characterizations. Poseidon got nerfed and sidelined and had his Chthonic connections minimized, Chthonic gods in general were shunted to the background, Sky God Zeus got to be the most important dude on the block, and everyone adjusted pretty quick. Well, everyone except for Dionysus. See, here's the thing. In the early days of Ancient Greek historical analysis, everybody knew that Dionysus was a latecomer to the Pantheon, although exactly how late is hard to pin down, but nobody really knew why. Before Linear B was deciphered, the theory was that he was an import god, since a lot of his documented myths had him coming to Greece from somewhere else, or wandering far afield before returning. But after finding his name in Mycenaean Greek inscriptions, that theory went out the window and a replacement was proposed, that Dionysian worship predated Ancient Greece and was deliberately suppressed for several hundred years before undergoing modification and being allowed into the Hellenistic Pantheon. Since Ancient Greece had kind of a known habit of not exactly promoting equality for all its citizens, this wasn't too crazy of a notion. In essence, what distinguishes Dionysus from the rest of his Pantheon is that his character development didn't happen during the Greek Dark Ages, but several centuries after everyone else got with the program. Which is actually pretty appropriate for a guy whose most consistent character trait at this point in history was chronic drunk. But why was he so late to transition? Well, to understand that, we have to understand his cult. And to understand his cult, we have to understand who Dionysus was before he got Hellenized. So let's talk about that. First of all, let's define some names. Dionysus is usually the name used for the Hellenistic characterization we've already established. Orphic Dionysus is the scary older version embraced by the religion of Orphism, a characterization that puts the focus more on themes of death and rebirth. These two have notably different backstories. Confusing matters, Orphic Dionysus has been equated with another figure called Zagreus, and it's unclear whether this was a later syncretism or an early case of multiple names for one god. Orphism, side note, was a 6th century BC religion that basically boiled down to an attempt to understand life and death. It mostly worshipped gods or figures that entered the underworld and left alive, like Orpheus, hence the name Orphic. Other noteworthy figures of worship included Persephone, for fairly obvious reasons. But working from this definition, it's unclear why Dionysus would have caught the attention of a cult focused on death and rebirth, when it seems like the farthest we can stretch his characterization at this point is drunk and rowdy. What connection did Dionysus have with the underworld that would cause an Orphic cult to favor him? Let's talk about an older story of Dionysus' birth. The first difference between Orphic Dionysus and plain vanilla Dionysus is that he's the son of Zeus and Persephone, while in older fragmentary myths, Zagreus is instead the son of Hades and Persephone. Whichever way the parentage swings, Orphic Dionysus is slated to inherit Zeus' status as king of the gods, which enrages Hera, who gets a bunch of titans to murder baby Orphic Dionysus by ripping him apart and eating him. Athena saves his heart, and with Zeus' help, gets him reborn, either by doing the leg implant thing again, or sticking the heart in Semele so she can grow a baby around it. Either way, Orphic Dionysus gets reborn after being ritualistically shredded, and gets on with the whole being a god thing. This myth predates his Semele parentage, and possibly predates Ancient Greece overall, since the Mycenaean characterization also featured this theme of dying and being reborn early in life. It handily contextualizes both his theme of rebirth and his weird connection with Persephone that we touched on earlier, as well as giving him an unexpected link with the underworld that we don't see much of in his later characterization. This is strengthened by his Zagreus epithet. Zagreus, in his earliest references, isn't explicitly connected with Dionysus, but he is strongly linked with Hades and the underworld in general. In his earliest references, from around the 600s BC, it's not even clear if he and Hades are different entities, and he's hugely important in the underworld hierarchy. Zagreus as a standalone entity seems to have been a very important Chthonic god, and by appending his name to Dionysus, Dionysus inherits his strong underworld connections. Going back as far as we can, the Mycenaean inscriptions we have confirm that Dionysus' death and rebirth, as well as his status as a son of Zeus, were original elements of his characterization, not later additions by his Orphic cult. He's also got some themes of being abandoned by humanity and raised by nature, which might play into his later nature and animalistic associations. So this gives us something of a starting point. Dionysus enters the ancient Greek world as a god of death and rebirth with strong connections to the underworld. Those underworld connections appeal to the later Orphic religious movement, causing his characterization to get a bit schizophrenic, as they put focus on an element of his characterization otherwise largely being left behind. Anyway, this alternative birth myth gives us something of a feel for where his characterization started, but doesn't really explain why he would have been excluded from the Hellenistic pantheon. And we also haven't put together where his wine connection came from yet. So now let's talk about what his personal cult can tell us about the rest of his characterization. ["Waitin' on the World to Come"] The cult of Dionysus was, unfortunately for us, a mystery cult, meaning its exact rituals and practices were kept secret from outsiders, but we have pieced together the basics. For one thing, it predates ancient Greece by a wide margin, and might even predate Mycenaean Greece in one form or another. It also most likely started off less as a Dionysus cult and more as a wine cult, worshipping the state of intoxication and the liberation from societal inhibitions that came with it, because wine predates Mycenaean Greece and consequently Dionysus. And the wine cult is very focused on wine and the effects thereof, with the Dionysian aspect almost seeming secondary. It's even possible that the wine cult originated around the same time wine did, a.k.a. 6000 BC, making it very old. Old as balls. If this is true, it also probably originated in this place called the Zagros Mountains, which, yes, does sound a lot like Zagreus. This would be a really convenient etymological link if the two words were actually connected, but sadly, they are not. Still a neat coincidence. Anyway, if this theory holds, the cult probably followed wine export routes to wind up in Egypt, and then Minoan Crete, and then Mycenaean Greece, where it scooped up Dionysus and made him its own. Really, for our purposes, it doesn't matter where or when the wine cult started, just that it wound up in Mycenaean Greece one way or another. The short of it is, a wine-centric cult popped up in the area, and one way or another, Mycenaean Dionysus got wrapped up into it, turning it into a localized Dionysian cult, and potentially affecting his early Mycenaean characterization to incorporate the invention of wine in the first place. We don't really know, though, since the records are limited, and to a certain extent, we're playing around in the recordless Dark Ages, but it would make sense. So by the time the Dark Ages wrapped up, the cult of Dionysus was firmly established and centered on the Dionysian Mysteries, which was this ritual that predominantly focused on getting crazy stupid high. Whoa, Dionysus, the 70s called. They wanna know if they can borrow some of your stash. See, intoxication was, at this point, considered a form of possession by Dionysus's spirit, which in turn allowed the cult members to theoretically tap into his divine power, along with the primordial inhibitionless subconscious mind that Dionysus's madness could release. There was also some pretty hefty symbolism linking the transformation of living grapes into fermented wine with Dionysus's transformative rebirth. Anyway, the whole point was liberation, catharsis, and a connection to the divine, as well as drunken insanity, crazy music and dancing, and symbolic recreations of Dionysus's death and rebirth. A lot of dismemberment happened. Like, a lot. Mostly to bulls, because they were symbolic of Dionysus, but it also happened to other stuff. Ever wonder why Orpheus got ripped apart by those ladies that one time? It's this. He died for a sweet literary reference. He was an artist, it's what he would've wanted. Unsurprisingly, Dionysus's cult attracted a lot of marginalized people, like women, slaves, and non-citizens, because it gave them the opportunity to reject the societal constraints getting dumped on them. Double unsurprisingly, this cult wasn't very popular with the society that made those constraints, which led to several centuries' worth of attempts from various ancient Greek governments to outlaw the cult altogether, which never ever worked, because wine and parties and stickin' it to the man, yo, will never die. So after this had failed enough times, eventually Greece settled on trying to control it a little bit, resulting in the establishment and gradual acceptance of the more chilled-out, Hellenistic Dionysus we all know and love. ♪ Only time... ♪ It's tricky to put dates to this sort of deific character revolution, but we've got a few concrete milestones to work from. To start with, Dionysus is explicitly not in the Olympic pantheon during the 8th century BC, because that's when the Iliad and the Odyssey were written, and Dionysus is notably nowhere to be found. He and Hestia are the only ones of the traditional 12 Olympians to not be referenced, so this is a very noteworthy exclusion. Dionysus was officially integrated into Athens somewhere between 561 and 527 BC, because that's the duration of the reign of famous tyrant Pisastratus, who first brought the Dionysia to Athens. The Dionysia was a formerly rural celebration honoring Dionysus and celebrating the cultivation of wine. When Pisastratus imported it to Athens, it grew to incorporate a competition of performances and plays, which eventually produced the field of Greek theater overall. At this point, however, one gets the impression that Dionysus still wasn't fully popular with the Athenians, as Pisastratus justified the importation of the Dionysia with a myth that outlined all the horrifying things Dionysus could and would do to the dongs of the Athenians who rejected him. This is not a joke, and is also why the Dionysia would feature a parade of people carrying sculpted junk. Contemporary imagery of Dionysus also usually recalled an older visual, where he sported a beard and had an overall mature look, so at this point Dionysus has landed in Athens, but hasn't fully transitioned to his popular young drunk hippie characterization yet. The next milestone comes to us from Euripides, who provides us with a literary missing link in the form of the Bacchae, first performed in 405 BC at the Dionysia festival. The Bacchae shows us a Dionysus in roughly the middle of his transition from terrifying god of uninhibited madness to party guy, as he returns to Greece from a globetrotting exile with an army of maenads to claim his divine status and take revenge on a king who outlawed his worship. This Dionysus is the child of Zeus and Semele, born prematurely roughly in accordance with the Hellenistic version we discussed earlier, but in this case the people of Thebes refuse to believe his divine origins, so he drives them crazy and claims them as his followers. After a sufficiently large number of shenanigans involving natural disasters and plagues of madness, Dionysus begins to warp King Pentheus' sanity, who begins to see through Dionysus' mortal disguise and notices that he has horns, another holdover from the older, scarier characterization that didn't make it to the Hellenized edition. King Pentheus winds up getting dismembered by Dionysus' maenads, including some of Pentheus' female relatives, and it's... a happy ending. Or at least a cathartic one. This mid-transition Dionysian characterization shows us a Dionysus with a mortal mother, no explicit death and rebirth, a serious temper, no regard for the social structures that reject him, an army of crazed followers, the ability to induce madness and hallucinations in whoever he wants, and horns. Despite the absence of his dismemberment and rebirth in his Bacchae backstory, Bacchae story? The theme is still held on in his worship, which is why Pentheus is dismembered in such a familiar way, despite lacking the immediate mythical context. It also shows us that by 400 BC, Dionysus was basically considered an Olympian, even if his characterization wasn't quite all happy-fun-drunk just yet. I should probably just make the Bacchae its own video. But even though Dionysus has attained a level of chill deemed acceptable by polite Athenian society, he's still not really recognizable as the party dude we all know and love. He's getting there, but he's not there yet. So what's next? Well, here's the deal with that. The century after Euripides, a little something happened to Greece called Alexander the Great Gets All Up in Everyone's Business, during which time Alexander the All-Right conquered his way through Persia, the Levant, and Egypt, radically expanding the ancient Greek world and paving the way for centuries of luxury for the kings that ruled this expanded Hellenistic world. These kings focused on two things and two things only. Power and parties. And wouldn't you know it, there was an Olympian all set and ready to embody both of those things. Post the 300s BC, Dionysus' popularity exploded as the ruling class began embracing his extravagance and unrestrained party vibe, with the convenient undertone that Dionysus had been characterized as a conqueror for the past couple centuries, leading these kings to embrace his image even more strongly. Some of them even acted like they were Dionysus, but, like, incarnated or something. A cult that had previously belonged largely to marginalized communities that threatened the ruling class was suddenly being embraced by that ruling class, because, frankly, the cult of Dionysus threw the best parties. And what with all the wealth and power they had to throw around, the Hellenistic kings didn't really want to do anything but party. And with that, Dionysus completes his transformation from death god to party animal. Thanks to the nationalization of his cult during the Hellenistic period, Dionysus, or Bacchus as he was commonly called at this point, settled into his recognizable modern-day characterization, leaving the majority of his more alarming character traits behind. But this goes a long way towards explaining the lingering idiosyncrasies in his characterization. Dionysus probably had one of the most radical transformations in the entire pantheon, and while the toned-down recognizable version was mostly chill, he never completely lost the old-school death and madness god he used to be worshipped as. To torture a metaphor, both Dionysus and Greek wine were watered down for potability, but that didn't make them lose their inherent intoxicating properties. This also goes a long way to explaining why a pantheon of gods with concepts as big as war and wisdom and the entire ocean would bother having a god on the prayer roll whose entire job was being drunk. Closing time Open all the doors and let you out into the world Closing time Turn all of the lights on over every boy and every girl Closing time One last call for alcohol, so finish your whiskey or beer Closing time You don't have to go home, but you can stay here I know who I want to take me home Take me home