Dionysus 

Euripides

Euripides the great Greek dramatist wrote the book on Dionysus. In a play commonly called the Bacchae, he tells the tragic tale of Dionysus and his devotees:

Pentheus, ruler of Athens, does not believe in Dionysus. But his mother does. She ends up ripping him limb from limb, because so it pleases Dionysus. How this woman is expected to live the rest of her life realizing she ended her son's life in such a horrible fashion, with her own two hands, the god does not explain.

A Mocker

How does the 'competition,' namely Christianity, deal with the use of alcohol? It is not forbidden; on the other hand, nothing like the Dionysian revels is to be thought of. Paul commands believers not to get drunk, pointing out that alcohol does not necessarily bring out the best in people's characters,

"And do not be drunk with wine, in which is dissipation; but be filled with the Spirit, speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord, giving thanks always for all things to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, submitting to one another in the fear of God." (Ephesians 5:18-21).

Drunkenness is condemned in harsh terms in the scriptures, both Old and New Testament. There is no absolute prohibition against drinking wine in a temperate measure:

While it would be legalism to add to scripture a prohibition against something allowed, namely drinking wine, to be faithful to the whole counsel of God, the believer must live a temperate, sober, and self-controlled life:

The Historical Dionysus

In antiquity, Euhemerus formulated the theory that the gods were really men. Certainly some of the things 'the gods' are reported to have done could have been done by men. 'Saturn' is both a planet in the sky, and also a beloved king in Italy from times gone by, when people ate acorns. There is no reason to disbelieve that there was a king by that name, nor that his reign was remembered gratefully by his subjects. His connection to the planet of the same name, however, must be conceded to be a little bit sketchy. Was there ever a 'historical' Dionysus?

The cult of Dionysus, which originated in areas to the north of Greece, spread like wildfire over the ancient world. Like the 'hippies' of the 1960's, they found in intoxication the secret of a happy life. One can readily imagine how that turned out: the ruined and blasted lives, the human detritus collecting in the gutters. The story tells, that Dionysus invaded India, with his troop of dishevelled, drunken women, many of whom met a miserable death at the hands of their Indian captors. The Indian king charged with protecting homeland security got it right:

"'No god, no god is that man; he has lied about his birth.'" (Demiades, quoted, in Nonnus, Dionysiaca, Book XXXIX, line 53).

Pentheus wasn't buying it either, telling Dionysus: "You also have a touch of your deceitful mother. Semele was a liar, and Cronides burnt her with his thunders: take care that Cronides does not crush you like your mother. . .You are no Olympian offspring of Cronion: for the lightnings cry aloud the shame of your perishing mother, the thunders are witnesses of her illicit bed. Zeus of the Rains burnt not Danae after the bed; he carried Europa, the sister of my Cadmos, and kept her unshaken — he did not drown her in the sea. . .If you have in you the blood of Zeus, migrate to the vault of Olympos and live in heaven, leave to Pentheus his native Thebes." (Nonnus, Dionysiaca, Book XLVI). Of course we know what happened to him. As the history is told by acolytes like Nonnus, Dionysus romped through the ancient world preceded by brutal, senseless, alcohol-fueled murders, which are actually OK because the parties involved were turned into stars or trees or whatever. Dionysus was no god, just a mere man, demon-possessed as it may have been, but with his hand on no door to open into heaven.

Did it happen? Certainly many of the details of the account of Bacchus' triumphal procession from west to east and back are made up; I doubt he was really accompanied by pans, satyrs, and other mythological creatures. However there is probably also a kernel of fact, because there is nothing supernatural or mythical about Timothy Leary and others of the pied pipers who tried to lure a generation of young people down the same dead end. What was promised was bliss, what was delivered may not have been bliss, but only brain damage. Just visualize the dancing frenzies of the Middle Ages, which might, indeed, have been themselves revivals of the Dionysian religion. Mass assemblages spontaneously formed and rolled through the countryside, in Germany and other nominally Christian countries including Belgium and the Netherlands: "So early as the year 1374, assemblages of men and women were seen at Aix-la-Chapelle, who had come out of Germany, and who, united by one common delusion, exhibited to the public both in the streets and in the churches the following strange spectacle. They formed circles hand in hand, and appearing to have lost all control over their senses, continued dancing, regardless of the bystanders, for hours together, in wild delirium, until at length they fell to the ground in a state of exhaustion." (The Dancing Mania, Justus Friedrich Carl, Section 1). "Peasants left their plows, mechanics their workshops, housewives their domestic duties, to join the wild revels, and this rich commercial city [Metz] became the scene of the most ruinous disorder." (The Dancing Mania, Justus Friedrich Carl, Section 1). If Bacchus invaded India in this manner, surrounded by a core of armed men ready to kill and be killed in the midst of a vast procession of drunken dancing maenads, that is far from being historically impossible.

In the religious literature of India, there remains a deposit of information about 'Soma:' "Beautiful Vayu, come, for thee these Soma drops have been prepared: Drink of them, hearken to our call. Knowing the days, with Soma juice poured forth, the singers glorify Thee, Vayu, with their hymns of praise. Vayu, thy penetrating stream goes forth unto the worshipper, Far-spreading for the Soma draught." (Rig-Veda, The First Book, Hymn 2). This substance was ingested or imbibed to produce blisssful union with the gods. However this literature seems to have been monkey-wrenched and disabled to the point where one cannot recognize any really existing substance. One must suspect originally it was just Dionysus' wine,— he did after all come from India,— but a later and a wiser generation realized this is one of the worst and most delusive scams you can run on people, to promise heaven but deliver alcoholism. Still they felt the literature was holy and they could not just discard it. This is one false religion which will not only land you in Hell, but will also ruin your life on your way there.

Other Gods

Who are the "other gods" of the Bible? While we know they are "no gods," this does not mean necessarily that they are non-entities altogether. The pagans acclaim the sun, the moon, and the stars; deny that any of these 'gods' exist, and you've taken leave of your senses. The sun, moon, and stars do exist, though they are "no gods." Euhemerus in antiquity proposed the theory that the gods were men. Certainly, some of the things they are reported as having done could have been done by men. Saturn is more than a planet in the sky, there was an Italian king by that name. The possibility exists that some of the things done by Dionysus were done by a real Timothy O'Leary type of pied piper, and that this person made a triumphal procession across from India. That he was produced from Zeus' thigh is a bit sketchy.

There are people nowadays who allege that Jesus never existed. As evidence, they adduce, for instance, the miracle at the marriage of Cana, where Jesus changed water into wine:

The argument goes, this miracle is the kind of thing the pagans would have ascribed to Dionysus. True enough, because he was the god of wine. But Dionysus is not real. Therefore, Jesus is not real. But this seems a bit reductive. Poseidon was the god of the sea, but not everybody who goes on a sea voyage is non-existent, just because Poseidon was. And the idea that Dionysus is really very much like Jesus disappears upon first contact with the Dionysiac literature. A student of comparative religions might legitimately poinnt out that there are parallels between Jesus and Dionysus; for instance, Jesus says that He is the vine: "I am the vine, ye are the branches. . ." (John 15:5).

If a Jesus mythicist wants to make the claim, however, that Jesus of Nazareth never existed, the evidence offered being that He was, rather, patterned after the pagan god Dionysus, the reader can fairly expect a high degree of correspondence. If Jesus is actually patterned after Dionysus, would the divergences between the two figures be expected to be significant, or minor and inconsequential? If one figure is actually patterened after the other, why should there be any difference at all? Examine, for instance, their moral character; inspect how Dionysus treats Agave, his loyal servant. Like the song says "He forgets not His own;" at least, He doesn't torment them. I challenge anyone, believer or atheist, to read the Dionysus literature and come back saying, 'that's Jesus,' because it just isn't. The difference between the two figures is the difference between heaven and hell. So the mythicists' claim fails.

Mother Nature

During the Renaissance, people revived the old pagan gods, though not really as serious threats to the sovereignty of the living God. Rather, they were seen as poetic personifications of various forces of nature, various agricultural crops, astronomical actors, and natural phenomena generally. What are people nowadays saying when they talk about 'Mother Nature'? They probably do not seriously believe there is any such personality; rather, they are giving a nod to the generally benign character of the natural world. The Renaissance poets believed it was a convenient shorthand, if you wanted to talk about 'love' and 'war,' to talk about Venus and Mars instead, in the belief that this was approximately the same thing. It is undeniable that, in a sense, Demeter is the wheat crop, and Dionysus is the vintage. And make no mistake, the corn crop is a real thing, as is the annual wine production. By this way of thinking, Euripides' Dionysus might be a shorthand way of referring to the delusive promise of alcohol, which is looked to to bring bliss, but brings misery instead.

The problem with this way of looking at things is inauthenticity, because the pagans did not think their gods were poetic personifications. This doesn't mean that modern readers can't appreciate Euripides' great drama 'The Bacchae.' We don't think Dionysus is a god, but he still destroys lives.

We can agree with the ancients that alcohol is a powerful force. It can take over people's lives, and once it has made you its slave, it is not a merciful master. We cannot agree that that force acts with awareness or intentionality, much less with justice, as if when Bacchus makes of one a Bowery bum collapsed in the gutter, and another abstemious, modest, and hard-working, he is punishing the first and rewarding the second. In any event, looking at Agave, we can see how Dionysus rewards the faithful. Finding oneself on his bad side is bad, being a loyal favorite is worse. If these are the gods, one should flee from such gods and hide in a cave in hopes of escaping their detection.

Religious Liberty

It is an article of faith with atheistic detractors of Christianity that paganism was wondrously tolerant, and that religious intolerance was introduced by the Christians. "The [Roman] religions on the whole were massively inclusive and highly tolerant." (Bart D. Ehrman, The Triumph of Christianity, p. 94). They go so far as to claim it was Christianity that invented intolerance: "Because of the enormous significance of 'right belief' for eternal life, the intolerant potential of this exclusivist religion came to be fanned into white-hot passion early on, leading to widespread though certainly not universal intolerance." (Bart D. Ehrman, The Triumph of Christianity, p. 266).

But if this is so, how to explain the conflict between Dionysus and the civic politicians of the ancient world? The conflict between Dionysus the god and the civic authorities ran both ways. On the one hand, the government was a terror to his disciples; but if you ran into him and you failed to recognize and acknowledge his godhead, you were in big trouble. It is foolish to pick a fight with a god. They thought his deity spurious. they mistook him for an imposter, and paid the price. This encounter with pirates illustrates the problem:

It would appear that Dionysus won the contest with the civic authorities in those places where it was joined, because we find him an accepted and non-controversial god, a familiar fixture in the pantheon, in later centuries. The saga of Dionysus' triumphal march across the Mediterranean world is a good check on the fable of the ancient world as a paradise of religious toleration. Admittedly the case of the Bacchantes is a very difficult one. All of a sudden women are running wild in the woods tearing animals to pieces. Is this conducive to good civic order? In more than a few cases, the city fathers thought not. A wine-god was by no means new to the Romans when Bacchante-o-mania hit town; they had always worshipped Father Liber. But this business of gathering in the woods, secretly, by night, scared the pants off the city fathers.

The super-tolerant Romans thereupon banned the religion, concerned, it would seem, about the potential for conspiracy:

"Great panic seized the Fathers, both on the public account, lest these conspiracies and gatherings by night might produce something of hidden treachery or danger, and privately, each for himself, lest anyone might be involved in the mischief. . .that it should be proclaimed in addition in the city of Rome and that edicts should be sent through all Italy, that no one who had been initiated in the Bacchic rites should presume to assemble or come together for the purpose of celebrating those rites or to perform any such ritual. Before all, it [p. 259]was decreed that an inquiry should be conducted regarding those persons who had come together or conspired for the commission of any immorality or crime. Such was the decree of the senate. (Livy, The History of Rome, Book 39, Chapter 14, 4-8).

This wasn't right; you don't deal with criminal activity by banning the religion which might have instigated it. It's not like there weren't real problems, though:

This is a tough case and they say tough cases make bad laws. Still, it's not the case that the Romans never banned outright a particular religion; they did in this case, and they would subsequently do so with the religion of Isis. Remarkably tolerant? Not so much. Nor were the Christians intolerant at first; Constantine enacted the wonderfully tolerant Edict of Milan. Would that they had continued that policy.

I would like to draw attention, in Livy's account, to the recruitment which is evidently going on. All in all, the atheists' case that there was no missionary religion until Christianity cam e on the scene does not seem to be accurate: "In fact, we don't know of any missionary religions in the pagan world." (Bart D. Ehrman, The Triumph of Christianity, p. 116). The Dionysiac cult is growing; they are bringing people in. This is scarcely surprising; it is what cults do, but believe it or not, Bart Ehrman claims the Christians invented proselytizing, no one previously ever having thought of it. I would imagine some Christians find this flattering; but I would suggest it's just counter-factual. The political authorities are becoming alarmed by the rapid growth of this movement, which could not be occurring with no one making the effort to spread it.

Another 'new god,' or so he claimed, was Apollonius of Tyana. Apollonius is held up not so much to put Christianity to shame as to provide a precise parallel. Or so it is alleged. In the end, Apollonius is not much of an improvement over the others, and certainly no peer of Jesus:

Mixing Bowl

The ancient Greeks used to mix wine with water. Unmixed wine was associated by them with intoxication, even madness:

"For the wand of Dionysus suffices to punish the drunkard, unless hot temper is added and makes the undiluted drink a cause of savagery and madness instead of a dispeller of care and an inspirer or the dance. (Plutarch.  Moralia, On the Control of Anger, Kindle 45428, Delphi Complete Works).

This would seem to be a custom the Jews picked up from the Greeks:

Which is an improvement over the habits of the Centaurs, even if only an incremental one. I would suppose that, without that saving grace, Dionysus might have got them all, and not only one of their best and boldest, Alexander the Great. Athenaeus, in his Deipnosophists, offers a twist on the familiar tale when he attributes to Dionysus the invention of mixing wine with water, as was the Greek custom:

"And Philochorus relates that Amphictyon, the king of the Athenians, having learnt of Bacchus the art of mixing wine, [63]was the first man who ever did mix it: and that it is owing to him that men who have been drinking on his system can walk straight afterwards, when before they used to blunder about after drinking sheer wine: and on this account he erected an altar to the Straight Bacchus in the temple of the Seasons; for they are the Nymphs who cherish the fruit of the vine." (Athenæus. The Deipnosophists, or Banquet of the Learned of Athenæus, Book II, Chapter 7).

The part of that story which is true is that the Greeks did commonly use wine mixed with water.

Sometimes you hear that Christmas Day is the birthday of a crowd of characters: “By the way, December 25 is also the birthday of Osiris, Adonis, and Dionysus.” (Chapter 55, The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown). By the way, is that true?

Dancing Manias

A strange phenomenon swept across Europe during the Middle Ages, which had not been seen before nor was ever seen afterwards, the dancing manias:

"Scarcely had the panic of the black death subsided when a delusion arose in Germany, a demoniacal epidemic, called the dance of St. John or St. Vitus, which seized upon people, convulsing body and soul, and leading them to perform a wild dance, screaming and foaming with fury. Assemblages of these fanatics became prominent in 1374, and continued more or less to exhibit the same fascination for about two centuries. They first broke out at Aix-la-Chapelle among crowds who were said to come from Germany, who formed circles hand in hand, whirling about for hours together in wild delirium, shrieking, and insensible to the wonder, horror, and jeers of the bystanders. After the fit they fell down and groaned, as if in the agonies of death, when their companions swathed them in cloths tightly drawn round the wrists, and then thumped or trampled on the parts affected." (Curiosities of Christian History Prior to the Reformation, Croake James, 1892, Chapter IV, 91, Dancing Manias).

What could possibly have caused such strange behavior, which spread across Europe like wildfire?— Because it was 'contagious,' if you will. Some have looked for neurological causes, perceiving these dancing manias as one of the sequelae of epidemic disease; others have suggested ergot poisoning. There is another possibility.

There are two points to call attention to here. One is that contemporaries viewed the phenomenon in terms of demonic possession. This was not a predominant focus in that era's medical thought. The medical theories which had held on since antiquity were often materialist, looking for the cause of illness in 'humors,' the moist and the dry, cold and hot, the four elements, etc. Yet in this phenomenon, they looked for the demon. Strange or foreign gods, they would have perceived as demons: "But I say, that the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils, and not to God: and I would not that ye should have fellowship with devils." (1 Corinthians 10:20).

Another point worth mentioning is that Europe was imperfectly Christianized. All too often, tribes were mass-baptized upon military defeat. When an observer pointed out to the pope that these people were not Christians, he sagely observed, 'No, but their children will be.' Except the children were not so much made into Christians by the weight of institutions, as that Northern Europe entered into a long twilight period of being half-pagan, half-Christian.

What pagan god do we know whose votaries served him by dancing? Our old friend Dionysus. If there was a Dionysiac revival at that time, it would explain why the church felt it had to resort to exorcism to combat the dancing manias:

"In Liege the priests had recourse to exorcisms, and endeavoured by every means in their power to allay an evil which threatened so much danger to themselves; for the possessed assembling in multitudes, frequently poured forth imprecations against them, and menaced their destruction." (Justus Friedrich Carl Hecker, J. F. C. The Black Death and The Dancing Mania (p. 57). Kindle Edition.)

Pagan religion was in large measure about making the crops grow and protecting the people from pestilence. It tended to focus on the things of this world more than the next. Perhaps a populace disenchanted and disillusioned by the failure of the Catholic Church to protect them from plague and famine turned in desperation to earlier saviors, who themselves had not done such a great job in those departments either.

When a population is forcibly Christianized, as were the African slaves brought to the Caribbean, one strategy they can adopt, when forced to discontinue worshipping, as their fathers did, the old deities, is to re-name the old gods according to 'saints' or other figures prominent in the new religion which is being imposed upon them. The pagan gods are still there, but they have taken on assumed names and disguises. The result is a hybrid, like Santeria, a religion which combines Catholicism with indigenous African religion. The popular religion of Europe in the Middle Ages may have been a similar mashup, which is why Dionysus remained available to the people; the people had not entirely forgotten him. Rather, he had gotten amalgamated with John the Baptist. Now, at the opportune time, with the people at a loss, he pulled away the cloak and resumed the dance.