Dionysus was quickly accepted in seventh-century B.C Greece, because he was exactly what the Greeks needed to complete their pantheon of gods; under the name Bacchus he became the god of wine, and his symbol was sometimes an enormous phallus. Frazer speaks of Thracian rites involving wild dances, thrilling music and tipsy excess, and notes that such goings-on were foreign to the clear rational nature of the Greek. But the religion still spread like wildfire throughout Greece, especially among women indicating, perhaps, a revolt against civilization. It became a religion of orgies; women worked themselves into a frenzy and rushed about the hills, tearing to pieces any living creature they found. Euripides’ play The Bacchae tells how King Pentheus, who opposed the religion of Bacchus, was torn to pieces by a crowd of women, which included his mother and sisters, all in ‘Bacchic frenzy’. In their ecstasy the worshippers of Bacchus became animals, and behaved like animals, killing living creatures and eating them raw.
The profound significance of all this was recognized by the philosopher Nietzsche, who declared himself a disciple of the god Dionysus. He spoke of the 'blissful ecstasy that rises from the innermost depths of man’, dissolving his sense of personality. He saw Dionysus as a fundamental principle of human existence; man’s need to throw off his personality, to burst the dream-bubble that surround shim and to experience total, ecstatic affirmation of everything. In this sense, Dionysus is fundamentally the god, or patron saint, of magic. The spirit of Dionysus pervades all magic, especially the black magic of the later witch cults, with their orgiastic witch’s sabbaths so like the orgies of Dionysus’s female worshippers, even to the use of goats, the animal sacred to Dionysus. (Is it not also significant that Dionysus is a horned god, like the Christian devil?)
