“Dionysos is one of the most popular of the Greek gods and also one of the most addictive. He seeps into your consciousness, slowly and subtly at first. Perhaps you red something about him in a book that catches your attention, or you have a strange encounter late one night that takes your breath away. And at first you think that’s just going to be it. After all, he’s not really your kind of god, and you’re certainly not his type of person. But somehow you keep coming back to him (that incident plays over and over again in your mind; random phenomena spill into your life with such frequency that they begin to feel not-so-random after all; his dark and powerful myths intoxicate your soul, though you may find it embarrassing to admit as much) and no matter how hard you try to resist or ignore him he just won’t go away. And then one day you stop resisting. You admit that Dionysos’ ivy has firmly wrapped itself around yo and you’re as good as stuck: he’s become your god, and you wouldn’t have it any other way. Amusingly, it’s not just religiously-inclined people that this happens to. The scholar Jane Ellen Harrison started out writing her masterpiece Prolegomena To The Study Of Greek Religion as an exploration of the Keres or spirits of the dead, and about half-way through found that it had taken on a life of its own, becoming a full-fledged treatise on Dionysian worship with the Keres as an afterthought, a fact she bewilderingly confessed to a friend in a personal letter quoted in the book’s introduction. Walter Otto, who penned the seminal Dionysus: Myth and Cult, wrote so rapturously of the god that many of his colleagues accused him of being a closet pagan. And the there is Friedrich Nietzsche, who started off as an atheist and respected philologist, but came to identify so strongly with the god that in his waning days in a sanitarium he signed all of his letters ‘Dionysus Zagreus’. Such is the powerful intoxication of the god, impossible to shake!”
— H. Jeremiah Lewis - Ecstatic: For Dionysos
