iRead : Dionysos
Dionysos by Richard Seaford
I dropped out of uni and went to culinary school. Stuff with pages of footnotes is not my thing. I literally read this out loud to myself, so I could understand it. I copy/pasted choice quotes and then had to re-do my notes, bc I couldn’t understand what was being said. Each sentence has 3-7 extra words and academic phrasing. On several occasions, Dionysos is called imaginary, created, a social construct, and forgotten.
Man, tho.
This was good.
The book connects Dionysos’ seemingly random traits and domains into a single cohesive deity, showing him in relation to a true huan need. Reading (and understanding) this was actually a mystical moment for me. I felt like I knew Dionysos suddenly. I wanted to worship him.
In order to save you the burden of reading this, I’ll provide the sparknotes.
DOMAINS
Transformation & the Stranger
Not a chapter in the book, but sprinkled throughout, and really the first point of Dionysos. He is the transformer (robots in disguise), the herald of change, and often violent transformation. He himself is not any end point, but the act of change itself. He isn’t X to Y, he is the to, the bridge between while holding all three states simultaneously.
He (as well as his satyrs) sit on the nexus of three worlds : natural(animal) / mortal(human) / divine(gods). Humanity comes from nature and aspires to divinity. Dionysos, as the bridge, can bring humanity along in either direction.
Dionysos, in many ways, is the other. He is the foreigner (and the local), the opposite (and the original). The opposites he holds form a unity, while retaining their uniqueness as opposites. He evades definition and exists as paradox. He can share this paradox, by forcing a new perspective to become the unfamiliar opposition.
Dionysos shows what each of us has in the stranger inside them.
It feels like a cop-out : oh, a god can be anything. Dionysos’ sheer point is a cohesive identity… in lack of identity. He is the Liberation, Liberator and Liberated.
Nature (wine, vegetation, animals)
There are several nature-related gods, but Dionyos is the god of nature but make it dangerous. He is the tamer of the untamable. Wild animals pull his chariot. He, more than other Theoi, appear as wild beasts.
While he shares domain of “green stuff” with Demeter and Kore, he is the ripener of fruits, the act that changes flowers into food (again with change, and fertility).
Wine is the central symbol of this domain. The vine itself is wild, pure nature. Wine is transformed nature, by human labour, and still dangerous. In many appearances, Dionysos brings ever-flowing springs of wine — transformed wine, miraculous and divine.
Satyrs, like Dionysos, straddle the line between animal, human, and divine — but in an achievable way. In some celebrations, participants would dress up as satyrs. They’re beasts, who belong both in the company of the god and the heart of the civilized polis (“city”).
Communality
Phat word meaning unity but a lil to the left. The arrival of an outsider dispenses tension and unifies a group under a new focus. Any outsider, then, falls under Dionysos’ purview. In his festivals, slaves would celebrate as free men and prisoners would be released from jail. His days were also the days to announce freed slaves.
Myth: Return of Hephaistos
The craftsman god Hephaistos was hurled out of Olympos by his mother Hera for his deformity, and took revenge by sending her a throne with invisible fetters by which she was held fast. Only Hephaistos could release her, but he refused to return. But Dionysos made him drunk, set him on a mule, and brought him back to Olympos. In one version, a condition for Hephaistos’ return is his marriage with Aphrodite. In another, Dionysos is rewarded by being made one of the Olympian gods.
Maenads are a band of women, united by Dionysiac power. Religious initiation merges her soul into the whole, so they think and act as one. (The image of maenads running like a flock of birds taken flight is a great quote) It shows Dionysos doesn’t need wine or charm to unite people.
The traditional image of maenads as women in rags on a mountainside is traditional for a reason. In ancient Greek society, this was the other — a symbological reversal of the polis. The polis was constructed of male-led households, of solitary women — as the men joined the polis in civil and work duties. Dionysos’ great power was uniting these women with each other, then him, and the wilderness.
Mystery-Cult
Unless you reconstruct from Orphic traditions, Dionysiac mystery-cults may not be super useful, but the historical context is gold.
Mystery-cults were politically powerful and religiously important, as secret societies. The purpose was to join a group of this life, and the afterlife. As death was the fundamental rupture of personal identity, the mystery-cults looked to prepare for it and control it. So, they destroyed each other’s identity in controlled ritual. They also performed rituals on behalf of the polis, on Dionysos’ festivals.
Rituals, almost always, harkon back to myths. Festivals center on several myths, in reenactments and celebrations to give them meaning.
Orphic Myth: Dismemberment by the Titans
Dionysos is the natural-born son of Persephone and Zeus, but is ripped apart by Kronos and the Titans. His blood flows free as wine. Athena cradles his heart and puts him back together, wherein he is reborn. Wine’s psychological wholeness is then Dionysos’ wholeness.
Death
Dionysos likes going down-under. Does it a lot. He travels there to retrieve his mother, the prideful Semele, who Zeus raises as a goddess. In some myths, “by his witness” (weird, unknowable phrasing), Ariadne dies and he begins their romance in the Underworld as he rescues her and raises her as his bride (Zeus, sighing: Alright, once more). Both these myths (and several others of his) involve death or destruction before divinity.
Death, as the Orphics saw it, as the most fundamental and irreversible change to identity. Dionysos defies it. He raises once-mortals to Olympos. He charms the gloomy Underworld — notably, in art, making Cerberus a good doggo.
Dionysos is a god of united opposites, the center where they meet — nature/civilization/Olympos, animal/mortal/divine, fertility/death/immortality. His festivals celebrate the union of life and death — dominated, always, by life. He’s closer to mortals than many gods, by his actions (revelry, wine, dancing, frequent manifestations), but also by a crucial mythical act. Death. Dionysos is both born and killed.
Myth: Semele
Hera grows indignant as Zeus takes another lover and coerces Semele to ask her divine lover to see his true form. Semele tricks Zeus into an oath. Forlorn, he shows her his power — and she is promptly incinerated. Zeus sifts the ashes for the fetus Dionysos, who he sews into his flesh. In time, Dionysos regains strength and is born anew.
Ecstasy / Trance / Madness / Altered States
Dionysos’ madness was considered a cure for everyday madness — the worst kind. Dionysian madness was a temporary gateway, the storm before the calm. After the intensity of ritual and invoked state, there is the exhausting liberating calm of Dionysos himself. I compare this to a good workout — after exhaustion, the endorphins kick in. Caffeine, alcohol, lust, drugs — these intoxications all begin with extreme physical senses, before altering states.
This book talks less of “madness” and more of “trance”. Madness is a hard word to define. The book discusses “trance”, of a mind being influenced or united with something other than itself. Maenads sing of joining the soul-bird to the thaisos (band of maenads). The rituals pull on Dionysos’ dismemberment myth, seeing it not as his body but mind being broken apart and then reassembled through madness into calm.
Think astral travel or controlled dissociation, disconnecting the consciousness from the body and latching it to a new whole — in part, connecting it to Dionysos as the bridge. As a god, he relieves powerlessness. Humans are subjugated to two main forms: remoteness of deity and human oppression. Through ecstatic communality with others (and himself), he relieves both. He remains intimately close to those who join with him.
Theatre
Took us a while to get here, but do you see it?
Theatre was a happy accident of everything else that Dionysos is. It was created through other Dionysiac ritual. It combines the mystery-cults’ transformation of identity, ritual death, and costumes. Because the mystery-cult rituals were private, they opened up just enough. Hymns rewritten to new patterns. Ritual reenactments, interspaced with satyrs and maenads.
If you’ve ever been in a crowd at a concert or movie theatre or stage show, you probably know where I’m going. As an observer, you dissolve into the waves of shared emotion. You are both only an observer of the show, but part of a whole. The experience of a crowd is uniquely Dionysian — and explicitly how maenads join together.
Traditional tragedy follows a pattern in Dionysian myths: people resist his influence, they’re stricken into madness or kin-killing, they embrace him and establish a new regime.
Comedy even comes from the word komodia (“a song sung at komos”, komos being a revelry common at Dionysian festival).
Why does Dionysos matter in the modern world?
God, one of the best chapter headings. I came back to Hellenism because, to me, it’s familiar religion. I like the meaning of sacrifice, of kharis, and ethics. I like the aesthetic.
This made it again about the gods.
Dionysos matters because we need him. We always have. In the modern post-capitalist dystopia, we need him more than ever. For all the times I’ve had to paraphrase this book, I’m actually gonna quote it because this slaps.
The psychological fragmentation and forced homogeneity of our consumerist culture creates an intense need for transcendence. … It cannot be fulfilled by institutionalized religion, because such religion is part of social control that tends to limit the moral and religious experiences. True liberation can be achieved only by adopting an outsider’s perspective from which to perceive the culture’s narrowness.
Consumer capitalism destroys the emotional wholeness of communality. The intense emotion of a gathering of people can seem strangely insignificant and powerless, in our society, for significance and power always seem to be elsewhere.
Myth: Midas
Midas captured Silenos, the wise companion of Dionysos, and asked him what is best for humankind. Silenos spoke of natural and ancient things of his lord. As a reward for releasing Silenos, Midas was offered by Dionysos the fulfilment of any wish, and chose the power to transform all things by his touch into gold. Midas’ own answer to his question is money. Midas’ touch is the reaction of the Greek mythical imagination to the astonishing power of precious metal as universal equivalent: everything can now be valued in money — but nothing of true worth.
As humanity grows more alienated, from individuals and each other, we’re left with a sense of loss, of absence. An absence implies a presence that had once been there. An absence and presence of a transcendent power that unites us with nature and humankind and the divine.
Dionysos.
