Dionysos only suddenly came into awful (in all meanings) relief for me in 2017 after a series of family deaths, when I encountered The Bacchae and discovered context for a long-standing series of [private experiences]. no one else I know, including the modern pagans I have met, talks about Dionysos with the complex mix of ecstasy, terror, and love that I associate with him, not about the qualities of - strangeness, invasion, out-of-mind fear-and-pleasure that I understand from ancient and academic texts. anyway: I am always quite grateful when you post or reblog your own reading and writing about classics, thank you.
Thank you so much for this message; I am very moved to hear about your experience with Dionysus and I am grateful that you chose to share a bit about those experiences with me. It's also lovely encouragement to continue posting and reblogging all those academic quotes!
(I'm publishing this ask in order that it not vanish, but if you'd prefer that I not, let me know.)
It is such a treasured thing, and a very familiar one to me, to discover context for so intimate, so personal an experience in an ancient text. I do suspect that there are many more modern pagans who have these types of extreme, ecstatic experiences, both with Dionysus and with other gods, than those who talk about them openly - the risks of how one might be seen when talking about these experiences are considerable, and I think a lot of modern paganism is understandably concerned with establishing and defending the bounds of its own respectability, being either taken seriously or at the very least not seen as too crazy, too far outside the bounds of accepted norms for what contemporary religious experience is supposed to include.
The stakes are different for academic work, and I know for myself it feels much safer to write about a text in a more analytic context, to be able to justify an assertion from the text, than it is to say, 'this is my experience, this is what I have felt and seen and know within myself to be true,' though I very much admire the courage it takes to do the latter.
