"Beneath the wild, savage rites of Dionysus lies the recognition of man's need for occasional release from the bonds of law and order. To resist Dionysus is to reject joy- and to incur terrible consequences." -Charles De Houghton
Bacchus, as the ancient Romans called this god of wine and revelry, was adopted by them from the ancient Greek god Dionysus. He is the god of fertility, wine, and ecstatic liberation from everyday identity, and also the patron of drama along with Apollo and the muses. He is the thirteenth Greek god, son of Zeus and the Theban princess Semele. He is the only god whose parents were not both divine. Bacchus/Dionysus is often depicted with grape clusters, grape vines, ivy, pine cones, an ivy-twined cup in hand, and a magical staff. He is also a god of trees in general, and almost all Greeks sacrificed to "Dionysus of the tree." In older portrayals (before 430 B.C.) he is bearded, ivy-wreathed, often wearing a deer or panther skin. After 430 B.C. he is more youthful, beardless, naked, or half-naked. Often he is surrounded by tigers, panthers, and other wild animals. Bacchus/Dionysus has the ability to transform himself into certain animals, especially a bull, a goat or kid, or a lion. This figures into his later worship rituals in the Dionysian cult. There is a striking similarity between him and the Egyptian god Osiris.
When Dionysus' mother Semele was killed by Zeus' jealous wife Hera, Zeus rescued his unborn son, placing him in his own thigh from which he was later born. For this reason he has yet another name: "Born from the Thigh." Later, as an adult, Dionysus went to the underworld, defied the power of Death and rescued his mother, then brought her to Olympus to sit with the immortals. He continued to be persecuted by Hera, who had him torn to pieces by the Titans and cooked for a meal, but he was then restored to life by the earth goddess grandmother Rhea. He was fostered by nymphs on Mount Nysa in India and learned the uses of wine from Silenus, who was a son of Pan, and from the Satyrs. They also taught him the mystery of ivy, a mild intoxicant when chewed and a symbol of everlasting life. Always angry with him, Hera drove Dionysus mad, until his senses were restored by the earth goddess Rhea.
Dionysus/Bacchus wandered the world accompanied by his tutor Silenus, and many Satyrs and Maends or Bacchantes- his former nymph nurses. They caused fountains of milk and wine to spring from the earth; fire could do them no harm- they often carried it in their hands or on their heads; weapons left them unscathed. They were armed with the magical Thyrsos, an ivy-twined staff tipped with a green pine cone. They had super-human strength and could tear apart live bulls and other animals. They traveled as far as India and then back to Greece. As Bacchus went, he founded cities, so it is said, and taught laws and the culture of the vine, and he engaged in battles. He frequently met with opposition from those who denied his divinity, and they paid dearly for their blindness. He took terrible revenge on them, as shown in the play of Euripedes The Bacchae, c.487-407 B.C. After much wandering and many troubles, Dionysus/Bacchus finally came to sit at the High Table of Olympus as one of the great gods, as the last of the gods to enter. This god often appears savage and cruel. But the point is this: horrors occur when Dionysus/Bacchus is denied. If you surrender to him you will have joy- a wild and frenzied joy but not a joy destructive in itself; if you resist the joy becomes a foul and frenzied horror, a punishment for the refusal of joy.
Inspired by this god is the Dionysiac cult, which was introduced into northern Greece at the beginning of the 7th century B.C. as a new religion and a new ethos and rapidly spread south in spite of inevitable resistance. Consequently Bacchus became the most popular figure of the pantheon. The Dionysiac cult is totally different from the mainstream Greek Olympian religion of reason, order, and control. Dionysus encourages the release of irrational impulses which give freedom, identification with the god, and thereby happiness. He is known as "Lusios"- the liberator. Dionysus/Bacchus is the god of far more than wine. Plutarch says he is the god of the whole of "'moist nature'- sap, blood, sperm- " "...all the mysterious and uncontrollable tides that ebb and flow in the life of nature." -Professor E. R. Dodd. His is an orgiastic religion that celebrates the power and fertility of nature. The Bacchanalian rites included wild music and dance to achieve ecstasy, frenzied handling of snakes, insensitivity to pain, the tearing apart and eating of raw animals or even humans. This was the Dionysiac orgy.
God of Many Joys:
"He, the nurturer and the god of rapture; he the god who is forever praised as the giver of wine which removes all sorrow and care; he, the deliverer and healer, 'the delight of mortals', 'the god of many joys', the dancer and ecstatic lover, 'the bestower of riches', the 'benefactor'- this god who is the most delightful of all the gods is at the same time the most frightful. No single Greek god even approaches Dionysus in the horror of his epithets, which bear witness to a savagery that is absolutely without mercy.... He is called the 'render of men', 'the eater of men', 'the eater of raw flesh', 'who delights in the sword and bloodshed'. Correspondingly we hear not only of human sacrifice in his cult but also of the ghastly ritual in which a man is torn to pieces."
-W.F. Otto, Dionysus: Myth and Cult. (trans. Robert B. Palmer)Dionysus' great festival in ancient Greece, which lasted five days, took place in the spring when the grape vine begins to put forth its branches. The cult was accepted by Apollo at Delphi. Comedies and tragedies were played at the theater of Dionysus in Athens. During the festival people gathered in a theater, and the ceremony was the performance of a play. The greatest poetry in Greece was written for Dionysius. The poets who wrote the plays, the actors and singers, even the spectators, were servants of this god and engaged in an act of worship. So he is also the god of holy inspiration. Plato's Ion has Socrates say that "all good poets, epic as well as lyric, compose their poems not by art, but because they are inspired and possessed by a god, namely Dionysus." The release of powerful irrational impulses through ritual drama was seen as a necessary catharsis, according to Aristotle's analysis of the effect of tragedy in his Poetics. This strange god, the gay reveler, the cruel hunter, the lofty inspirer, is also the sufferer, the tragic god. He is the vine, which is pruned, every branch cut away, a dead thing through the winter, then brought back to life in the spring, resurrected. He was the assurance that death does not end all. His worshippers believed that his death and resurrection show that the soul lives on forever after the body dies. He is the embodiment of the life that is stronger than death. He became the center of the belief in immortality. -Sir James George Frazer, The Golden Bough, and Edith Hamilton, Mythology.
As this cult spead over Greece, the pragmatic Greeks incorporated it into the existing state cults. It became one of the most important cults in Greece and was later embraced by the stolid Romans, renaming him Bacchus and placing his worship within the pantheon of the Roman gods and goddesses. However, at first in Rome the cult was forbidden because its ceremonies sometimes culminated in the ritual killing of animals or even human victims.
"The Dionysiac cult recognizes the universal human need to fling off the fetters of habit, if only -willingly- to take up again...the demands of an ordered social life. Dionysus allows us this release, this necessary respite from regime. As Professor E.R. Dodds observes 'Dionysus is beyond good and evil...he is what we make of him.' The god, in fact, is already within us: we have to seek him and allow him to escape, if we do not wish him to break out...and drive us mad. In this sense, we are indeed one with Dionysus; that is why he fascinates us."
-Charles De Houghton