Dionysus

The smell comes first: crushed grapes gone sweet and sharp in the heat, ivy bruised underfoot, and somewhere the resin of pine. Then the sound, a thin reed flute and the slap of bare feet on a hillside at night, women moving faster than women should be able to move in the dark. At the center of it walks a figure who is never quite one thing. Sometimes he is a beardless boy with hair to his shoulders and a strange unhurried smile. Sometimes he is a bull. The torches catch his eyes and there is nothing behind them but invitation, and the people who follow that invitation do not all come back.

Dionysus is the god who arrives. Most of the Olympians simply are, settled on their thrones since the world was young, but he comes from somewhere else, always entering, always being received or refused. The Greeks told his story as the story of a god forcing his way into a world that did not want to admit him, and the cost of that refusal runs through nearly every myth attached to his name.

His beginning is a death. Zeus loved Semele, a princess of Thebes, and Hera, learning of it, came to the girl disguised as an old nurse and planted a doubt. Was her lover truly a god? Semele asked Zeus to appear to her as he appeared to Hera, in his full divinity, and Zeus, bound by an oath he had already sworn, could not refuse. The sight of him burned her alive. From the ashes he snatched the unborn child and sewed it into his own thigh, carrying it to term himself. So Dionysus was born twice, once from a mortal woman reduced to cinders and once from the body of the king of the gods. This is why they called him the twice-born, and why death sits so close to him for a god of pleasure.

The Orphic worshippers told a darker version. There he was Zagreus, the horned child of Zeus and Persephone, and the Titans lured the infant with toys, tore him to pieces, and ate him. Only his heart survived, rescued and made the seed of his second life. The story explained things the cheerful wine god could not, the bloodier rites in his honor, the tearing of living animals, the eating of raw flesh. A god who had been dismembered understood dismemberment.

What he gave humankind was the vine. He found it, cultivated it, learned its secret, and carried it from place to place, and wherever he went he taught the making of wine. The gift was double-edged from the start. Wine loosens the tongue and the limbs, dissolves the wall between strangers, lifts grief for an evening. It also makes men stupid, violent, and helpless. Dionysus is both of those things at once, and he never pretended otherwise.

His followers were the maenads, the raving women, who left their looms and their households and went into the mountains to dance for him. In the grip of his power they could suckle wild animals or tear them apart with their hands. They wore fawn skins and carried the thyrsus, a fennel stalk wound with ivy and capped with a pine cone, harmless until it struck rock and brought forth water or wine, or struck a man and drew blood. Around them reeled the satyrs and old drunken Silenus on his sagging donkey. It was a procession that looked like a party and could turn into a slaughter.

Pentheus, the young king of Thebes, learned this. He refused to admit the new god, called the rites obscene, ordered the women home and the stranger arrested. Dionysus, moving among them in disguise, let himself be chained and then walked free, and bent the king’s own curiosity against him. He dressed Pentheus as a woman and sent him up the mountain to spy on the maenads. They found him. His own mother, Agave, lost to the frenzy, took him for a lion and led the tearing apart, and carried his head down the slope in triumph before the madness lifted and she saw what she held. The god does not argue with disbelief. He demonstrates.

He could be gentler. Sailors once seized him for a slave, taking the calm young man aboard for an easy sale, and the ship would not move. Vines climbed the mast, wine ran across the deck, a bear and a lion appeared from nowhere, and the terrified crew leapt into the sea and became dolphins, leaping still around ships to this day. When Ariadne was abandoned on Naxos, weeping on a beach for the hero who had left her, it was Dionysus who came and married her and set her bridal crown among the stars. He went down into the underworld and brought his dead mother up to Olympus, which almost none of the dead ever leave.

His powers are the powers of release and reversal. He can fill a person with overwhelming joy or overwhelming terror, drive a city to abandon its laws, make the earth flow with milk and honey, change his shape into beast or boy. He answers prayer with abundance and answers insult with insanity. His weakness is the human one he carries by birth. He can be wounded, he can suffer, he was once torn to nothing, and even as a god he keeps wandering the edges of the pantheon, the outsider who has to keep proving he belongs. The vine dies back every winter. So, in a sense, does he. Then both come back.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Dionysus in Greek mythology?

Dionysus is the Greek god of wine, fertility, ecstasy, theatre, and ritual madness, and one of the twelve Olympians. The son of Zeus and the mortal princess Semele, he gave humankind the vine and the art of winemaking, and presided over festivals and the theatre at Athens.

Why is Dionysus called the twice-born god?

Dionysus is called twice-born because he was carried by two parents in turn. His mother Semele was incinerated by the sight of Zeus in his full divinity while pregnant, so Zeus rescued the unborn child and sewed him into his own thigh, giving birth to him a second time when he reached term.

What happened to Pentheus and Dionysus?

Pentheus, king of Thebes, refused to accept Dionysus as a god and tried to suppress his worship. Dionysus drove the city’s women into ecstatic frenzy and lured Pentheus to spy on them, where his own mother Agave, in her madness, mistook him for a wild animal and tore him apart with the other maenads.

What are Dionysus’s symbols and attributes?

Dionysus is identified by the grapevine and ivy, the thyrsus (a fennel staff wrapped in ivy and tipped with a pine cone), and the kantharos, a large two-handled wine cup. He is also associated with the panther or leopard, the bull, and his ecstatic female followers, the maenads.

Was Dionysus good or evil?

Dionysus was neither purely good nor evil but embodied both liberation and danger. He rewarded his devotees with joy, abundance, and release from ordinary cares, but punished those who denied his divinity with a destructive madness, reflecting the double nature of the wine and intoxication he governed.

Related Entries

Semele, Zeus, Hera, Cadmus, Ariadne, Maenad, Silenus, Satyr, Pan, Midas, Persephone, Hades, Apollo, Hermes, Demeter