When the winds blows warm and wet. When gray winter retreats from blooming-green becoming. When new leaves dance like dyads in the rain. When the passion of the equinox stirs the blood and the sap begins to rise, so then does Dionysus, the god of all that is wet and glistening. The god of wine, the god of bacchanals, The god of joyful excess.
Wet and glistening also includes, rain, dew, the juicy sap of plants, blood and semen. Dionysus is a nature god, the source of new life and growing. The grape vine and phallus are his two most common symbols.
Dionysian festivals begin with the selection of maiden girls to serve as maenads for Dionysus. (The word maenad is linguistically related to mania, or madness). The maenads tie long ribbons around their heads and fasten sprigs of ivy to their hair. Then they are led dancing to double pipes and drums into the forest by a young man appointed to represent Dionysus.
The villagers gayly follow the procession.
The festival begins with wine and ends with wine.
The stimulus of nonstop music, and frenetic dancing amplifies passion which leads to naked orgies and assorted debauchery. Finally, after hours and hours of this, and after darkness falls, the maenads now inspired to divine ecstatic madness make sacrifice to Dionysus by tearing small animals apart with their bare hands.
Joyous exaltation of spring’s fecund wetness, celebrated with music, dance, and rivers of wine ends in bloody sacrifice to ensure Dionysus’s blessings for the next year, too.
Romans continued the Dionysian festivals of the Greeks
in corrupted form. They retained the Dionysian association with agriculture and fertility, but they called their version of the god, Bacchus, and made him the god of drunkenness.
The Greeks did not see drunkenness as the point of the ritual. They saw intoxication by wine, along with music and dance, as a sacramental way to bring on divine ecstasy. It was
a once-a-year event. They did not approve of everyday drunkenness. Rome adopted much of Greek art and culture, though clumsily.
Spring Fertility festivals likely go back to the first awakenings of human consciousness. What could be more natural than to praise the unknown power that magically forced rebirth from winter’s dead hand. Dionysus is one name of many other named deities that serve as metaphor for fertility and fresh growth.
The Dionysian metaphor has a modern remnant in the May Pole dance. The May Pole dance consists of a central pole festooned with bright ribbons each of which are held by young girls who dance in circles until the ribbons, winding seductively around the pole, pull them to it.
I imagine modern mothers would be scandalously shocked to know that in the original version the pole was
a phallus.
Dionysus was also called, “the god who comes”. In this metaphor he represents not only new growth, but newness itself. If modernity has a common god, it must be, “Newness”.
We celebrate novelty as a good in itself. If its new it must
be better.
E. Michael Jones, in his 1994 book, Dionysus Rising, makes a case that the philosophical writings of Nietzsche, plus the music of Wagner, contributed intellectual and artistic support for the organismic shifts of twentieth century music. Dionysian impulses led music, slowly but inexorably, from controlled constructions of Reason & Emotion to riotous Rock & Roll.
It started tentatively with the impieties of jazz, then moved with increasing disregard for propriety to bacchanalian Rock Festivals.
Emotion is always more compelling than intellect.
The fault lies not with Dionysus, but with ourselves.
Rave on!
Maenad dancing in the mad ecstacy of Dionysian festival.