DIONYSUS (Diónysos, Diónysos). - Greek divinity: "the god of ecstasy and terror, of frenzy and exhilarating intoxication, the mad god whose appearance drives men mad."
Scholars disagree on the localization of his homeland. Once Thrace is discarded, after the etymology of the name of D. proposed by Kretschmer proved invalid — an etymology that constituted the principal element of the theory — and once Phrygia and Lydia, or both together, are discarded, especially in view of the improbability of being correct in regarding Semele, mother of D., as a Phrygian or Thraco-Phrygian earth goddess (here too the etymological arguments, among others, have proved inconsistent), no one seems bold who proposed considering Greece itself as the place of origin (according to Thucydides [2, 15, 4] the Anthesteria belonged to the Ionians already before their migration), where the cult of the god, of whom Homer is already perfectly aware, though showing toward him the same reserve as toward Demeter, draws its origins from the lowest classes of the population, and hence, perhaps, from the pre-Aryan stratum. But Greek or not Greek, the important thing is that, as soon as literary and figurative monuments begin to speak, D. and all that is proper to him is expressed in a clearly Greek form, and that at a certain moment, "whatever greatest and most beautiful, from the spiritual and aesthetic point of view, classical Hellas produced, it produced through the influence and under the seal of D.": from him, as F. Nietzsche demonstrated, tragedy takes its origin (τραγῶδαι, from the τράγοι as the actors were called in the scenic representation: cf. M. P. Nilsson, Der Ursprung der Tragödie, in N. Jahrb. f. Klass. Alt., 27 [1911], pp. 609 ff., 673 ff., 687).
The same uncertainty that reigns around the origin of the god seizes anyone who wishes to reduce to unity the figure of D., who was called πολυειδής καὶ πολύμορφος by Plutarch, and wishes to determine his precise role in myth and cult: the action of D. is practically unlimited, and to wish to relegate him to one sphere rather than another means only to lose the meaning of his figure, to betray what the Greeks thought of him. D. and the Dionysiac spirit flow everywhere through the spiritual and the material world; mysteriously he stands at the roots of being, comprehends in his nature all that is proper to being, is being itself, a paradoxical synthesis of contraries, into which finite and infinite, distinct and indistinct, plunge. D. is equally present and absent, near and far, exultant and afflicted; he appears as he who gives and as he who takes away life, as belonging to the world and to the beyond, and in his myths, "just as in the purest art and the purest poetry," possible and impossible, human and divine, material and spiritual are mingled. Without need of a particular exegesis, lending an ear to his mythologemes, examining the cult practices, which are the practical reflections of the mythologemes, it is not difficult to grasp the intimate essence of D.
He is the son of a god (Zeus) and of the Theban Semele (Iliad, XIV, 323), who, a mortal woman, bears an immortal son (Hesiod, Theog., 940 ff.): D. χάριμα βροτοΐων (Iliad, XIV, 325). The mother, for having wished to see her spouse "in all his celestial splendor," is incinerated by his thunderbolt: Zeus takes the premature fetus, sews it into his side, and gives it birth after having brought it to maturity (Pindar, frg. 85; Herodotus, II, 146; Euripides, Bacch., 94 ff., etc.). D. himself, then, will descend to the Underworld to bring his mother to the heaven of the Olympians: Semele will, later, receive divine honors in Greece (cf. Plutarch, Quaest. gr., 12, p. 293 C; Hesiod, Theog., 942). The duplicity of the god's nature, which is already posited in the myth of birth from a mortal and an immortal, is revealed even more clearly in the "epiphany" of the god: the mask is proper to D., normally foreign to the Olympians (there were masks only in the cult of Artemis Orthia), and it is a symbol of double personality. The contradiction persists in the fact that it is proper to D. to bring unbridled joy, the noise with which he impetuously takes possession, in a word the orgiasm, but also the terror and silence of death. The appellation Βρόμιος (cf., e.g., Aeschylus, Eumen. 24; Pindar, frg. 75) indicates his characteristic noisiness; Euripides (Bacch., 141) reveals the joy, the need to dance that seizes even his mother Semele when she carries him in her womb, and of the prodigies recorded at his appearance speak Pausanias (VI, 26, 1), Diodorus (3, 66), Pliny (Nat. hist., 2, 31) and others, while characteristic of his taking possession is the symbolic marriage of the simulacrum of D. with the wife of the archon king in Athens, which took place during the Anthesteria (cf. Aristotle, Athen. pol., 3, 5). The basilissa, assisted by fourteen handmaidens (γεραραι), sacrificed secretly in the temple of D. ἐν λίμνις, and in the evening lay down with the statue of the god in the βουκόλιον of the archon king. Many myths also speak of the ruin that coincides with the appearance of the god (thus, e.g., Iliad, VI, 132 ff.; Apollodorus, 3, 37; Plutarch, Quaest. gr., 38). And as D. benevolent is called Λύσιος, Λυαῖος, in his malefic aspect he bears the appellations of Ἀνθρωπορραΐστης, Ὡμάδιος, and his terror spreads especially among the women who, covered by the bassara or the nebrid, constitute his retinue (maenads, bacchants, thiads), and induces them to tear to pieces their children or the small animals they had shortly before suckled. This phenomenon is the ὠμοφηλία: in the ἐνθουσιασμός or ἕκστασις the Dionysiac retinue feeds on the flesh of animals just killed. Perhaps in this custom was shadowed the idea of a sacrifice, by which one intended to incorporate the spirit of the god enclosed in the body of the sacrificial animal. In the vegetable world the power of D. is revealed in the life of certain plants: the vine, the ivy, the pine, the fig. The ivy has a double flowering (of it too one can say that it is "born twice"), and the turbulent forming of wine, its power to weigh down the body and to liberate the spirit, well suits the contradictory figure of D. who binds and looses. The pine, which, like the ivy, flowers in winter and with whose resin wine is preserved; the fig (D. Σικίτης), from whose wood the phalli sacred to the cult of D. are carved. And, in general, he protected, as lord πάσης ὑγρᾶς φύσεως (Plutarch, Is. Os., 35) all flowering (D. Ἄνθιος, Εὐάνθης, Ἀνθεύς).
And in fact it is also in the moist element ("the element in which dwells the primordial secret of every life"), the element that, like the god, has a clear and happy nature and a dangerous and mortal one, that D. dominates: outside the sea he is called by the Argives to their festival (Plutarch, ibid.); on a boat-shaped cart he arrives at the Anthesteria; in the sea he takes refuge to escape an enemy (Iliad, VI, 130 ff.) and many other myths reveal his belonging to the waters: hence the names Pelagios, Aktaios, Lymaios, Lymagenes. In the moist element, over which D. presides, lies the creative force (cf. Augustine, Civ. Dei, 7, 21), which is quite clearly expressed by the phallus (D. Phallen, and there were phallic processions in honor of the god) and by the bull (D. Bougenes). But if generation resides in moisture, water is also a feminine element ("aqua femina," Varro, Ling. lat., 5, 61), and D. always has around him a retinue of women. "Nymphs nourish and rear the child D. and accompany the adult god" (cf. Homeric Hymn, 26), and the participants in his dances are called "nurses" (τιθῆναι, Iliad, VI, 132): D. himself has something feminine in his nature (ὁ γῆναι: Aeschylus, frg. 61; cf. Euripides, Bacch., 353; Arnobius, 6, 12; Firmicus Maternus, De err., 6, 7), something that leads him to pour out his love, an entirely feminine love, upon Paris, into Ariadne, which accordingly links him to the Minoan world, and which has a nature similar to his own, similar, in its contradictions, to the whole world that surrounds D.: a world of life and of death, as D. himself is life and death. For D. dies (at Delphi his tomb too was shown), as appears in the myth of D.-Zagreus, in which the god is torn to pieces by the Titans no differently than his sacrificial victims: the kids and the fawns in the arms of the maenads. The connection with the waters further justifies the mantic motifs that were attributed to D., who, in union with Apollo, gave the system of divination by inspiration to the sanctuary of D. (v. DELFI, ORACOLO di).
MYSTERIES OF DIONYSUS
The cult of D. also had a mystery organization (v. MYSTERIES). This aspect too, which recalls mystical motifs, attests to the great antiquity of the god. It is known that D. was invoked in the Lenaean Agones (cf. scholia on Aristophanes, Frogs, 479: καλεῖτε θεόν said the priest, to which those present responded Σεμελή: Ἰακχέ πλουτοδότα), by order of the daduch, one of the priests of the Eleusinian mysteries (v. ELEUSINIAN, MYSTERIES). D. would therefore belong, in this case, to the mystery cult of Demeter, and his rite consisted of dramatic representations. Elsewhere too, for example at Lerna in the Argolid (cf. Pausanias, 2, 30, 2), at Sicyon (id., 2, 11, 3), at Patras (id., 7, 19 ff.), there are records of a mystery cult of D. in connection or not with Demeter. Countless, moreover, are the private mystery cults, especially of the Roman age, in which the figure of D. is involved: among them the Bacchanalia.
Outside these festivities the god assumes a central role in Orphism (v. ORPHICS, MYSTERIES), whose theology and asceticism would also play a great part in Greek philosophical speculation, exerting its influence especially on Plato.
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