Dionysus in Greece

Abstract

It is customary to approach the Greek Dionysus by paying attention, first and foremost, to the public processions and theatrical representations that took place during the god’s festivals, to the private symposia dedicated to him, and, above all, to the cultic practices of the god’s female followers, the maenads, which included frenetic running, dancing, shouting, flute and drum playing, snake handling, fire handling, fire walking, the offering of sacrifices, and perhaps too the breast-feeding of other mammals and even omophagy. Examining the role of Dionysus at Eleusis offers a better start, though, to understand the nature of the god and his connection to the earth. In Eleusis, Dionysus manifests himself as both the younger consort and the offspring of the goddess Earth, to whose womb he leads the initiates back so that they may experience their earthboundness and realise that the impersonal life which is alive in all living beings is indestructible and, hence, the source and the end of all individuated life. Thus, Heraclitus’s identification of Dionysus with Hades, the god of the underworld. This, moreover, explains Dionysus’s non-Olympian identity, as well as his irresistible otherness and his disquieting, yet inescapable, proximity, which his mask and frontal gaze symbolise. Dionysus, however, is also worshiped as a vine, which symbolises, in turn, the ever-living life that springs from the earth and takes many forms; forms whose differences Dionysus does not acknowledge, for he affirms their unity. Consequently too, Dionysus challenges all social differences, although less with the intent of subverting the political order than with the purpose of inspiring mercy towards the other (any other) and of grounding the primacy of the earth over the polis in case of conflict between the two, as in Sophocles’s Antigone. Nevertheless, Dionysus must not be viewed as a disruptive god, but as an integrative god; hence his role in ritualising transitions (e.g., rites of passage). Yet, it is likewise possible to look at Dionysus from the standpoint of the morphogenesis of all things, and to link him, then, not only to Hades, but also to Poseidon and Zeus, who – as Schelling contends – represent the three stages through which life, despite its oneness, becomes multiple. It might be intriguing to reread Melissus in this light, since he was the first to flirt with the para-Dionysian motto (“One is All”) that can be said to haunt the history of philosophy from the Neo-Platonists to Deleuze. Additionally, it might be interesting to ponder, in dialogue with Schelling, the bearing that a philosophy of mythology could have on today’s thought, in connection to the question of the poetic disclosure of the earth.