Dionysos

The Cult of Dionysos

Origins of the Cult

"And bull-voices roar thereto from somewhere out of the unseen, fearful semblances, and from an image as it were of thunder underground is borne on the air heavy with dread."
     - Aeschylus/

"...The sound of the bull-roarers is believed to be the voice of Supernatural Beings; hence it is the sign of their presence among the initiates."
"The bull-roarer, which figured in the Orphic-Dionysiac ceremonies, is a religious object characteristic of primitive hunter cultures. The myths and rites illustrating the dismemberment of Dionysos and of Orpheus - or Osiris - are strangely reminiscent of the Australian and Siberian" shamanic accounts.
     - Mircea Eliade, Rites and Symbols of Initiation

"The notion that, by eating the flesh, or particularly by drinking the blood, of another living being, a man absorbs his nature or life into his own, is one which appears among primitive peoples in many forms. It lies at the root of the wide-spread practice of drinking the fresh blood of enemies = a practice which was familiar to certain tribes of the Arabs before Mohammed, and which tradition still ascribes to the wild race of Cahtan - and also of the habit practiced by many savage huntsmen of eating some part (e.g., the liver) of dangerous carnivora, in order that the courage of the animal may pass into them. The flesh and blood of brave men also are, among semi-savage or savage tribes, eaten and drunk to inspire courage."
     - E. A. Wallis Budge, The Book of the Dead

"The Aryans entering Greece, Anatolia, Persia, and the Gangetic plain, c. 1500-1250 B.C., brought with them...the comparatively primitive mythologies of their patriarchal pantheons, which in creative consort with the earlier mythologies of the Universal Goddess generated in India the Vedantic, Puranic, Tantric, and Buddhist doctrines, and in Greece those of Homer and Hesiod, Greek tragedy and philosophy, the Mysteries, and Greek science."
     - Joseph Campbell, Creative Mythology

"The fertility god Dionysos (Greek Dionusos), whose cult emblem was the erect phallus, was also a god of healing, and his name, when broken down to its original parts, IA-U-NU-ShUSh..."Semen, seed that saves', and is comparable with the Greek Nosios, 'Healer', an epithet of Zeus."
     - John M. Allegro, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross

"Bacchus, as Dionysos, is of Indian origin. Cicero mentions him as a son of Thyone and Nisus. Dionysos means the god Dis from Mount Nys in India.... Dionysos is preeminently the deity on whom were centered all the hopes for future life; in short, he was the god who was expected to liberate the souls of men from their prisons of flesh."
     - M. P. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled

According to mythology, Dionysos' "mortal mother was Semele of Thebes, whom Zeus had taken as a lover. Jealous Hera appeared to Semele in the guise of her old nurse and dared her to demand that Zeus appear in his real form. Semele was incinerated by his thunderbolt, but Zeus salvaged the unborn boy and sowed him into his thigh; a few months later Dionysus was born and given to Hermes to entrust to the care of nymphs on Mount Mysa. When he grew up these nymphs became his female devotees, the Maenads. Hera drove him mad and he fled to the east where the oriental earth goddess Cybele cured him. They then returned to Greece, establishing his cult in different places and proved to the world that his father was Zeus."
     - David Bellingham, An Introduction to Greek Mythology

"Boeotia was the main center for the propagation of the Dionysiac cult throughout Greece. Herodotus gives us a description of the Festival of Dionysos as practiced in his country. He points out that Melampus, son of Amytheon, introduced the name of Dionysos to Greece and probably got his knowledge of the worship of this god 'through Cadmus of Tyre and the people who came from Phoenicia to the country called Boeotia'. Although Herodotus was ever ready to find an oriental origin for Greek religion, similar cult practices can be seen in the Dionysiac cult and Ugaritic religious literature of the second millennium B.C. An essential rite of the Bacchic orgies was the practice of omophagia, the dismemberment of the sacrificial victim and the eating of raw flesh. A text from Ugarit reveals that the goddess Anath came upon her divine brother Baal unawares when he was beating his timbrel and perhaps singing. The goddess ate her brother's flesh 'without a knife and drank his blood without a cup'. The timbrel also was the sacred musical instrument peculiar to the bacchic festivals."
     - M. P. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled

"In Classical art he [Dionysos] appears as a beautiful youth with long hair and a thyrsos, a wand bound with ivy and topped with a pine cone; round his head he wears an ivy wreath and often carries an upturned wine cup. In later art he becomes increasingly effeminate in appearance."
     - David Bellingham, An Introduction to Greek Mythology

Rites of Ecstasy

(1) The Bacchants

"Although the image [of the soul as a raven] recalls the beliefs of the primitive shamans, such tales of soul journeys - and the ability of a disembodied spirit to function independently of the constraints of the physical form - mark a significant advance in the concept of the soul. This notion of the soul freed from the body was a core belief of a cult devoted to the worship of Dionysos, the Greek god of wine.
"Known as the personification of the sheer exhilaration produced by wine, Dionysos, according to one legend, once briefly assumed the throne of his father, Zeus, the supreme god of the ancient Greeks. After his ascent, he was attacked by jealous Titans...Changing shape in order to escape his foes, Dionysos took flight in the successive forms of a lion, a horse, and a serpent. When he transformed himself into a bull, however, the god was overcome by his enemies and, like Osiris before him, was brutally dismembered."
     - The Search for the Soul

"Appear, appear, whatso they shape or name, O Mountain Bull, Snake of the Hundred Heads, Lion of the Burning Flame! O God, Beast, Mystery, come!"
     - Euripides, Bacchae

"After dismembering him, the Titans first boiled the pieces in water and afterwards roasted them. Pallas [Athena] rescued the heart of the murdered god, and by this precaution Bacchus (Dionysos) was enabled to spring forth again in all his former glory. Jupiter, the Demiurgus, beholding the crime of the Titans, hurled his thunderbolts and slew them, burning their bodies to ashes with heavenly fire. Out of the ashes of the Titans - which also contained a portion of the flesh of Bacchus, whose body they had partly devoured - the human race was created. Thus the mundane life of every man was said to contain a portion of the Bacchic life."
     - Manly P. Hall, Masonic, Hermetic, Quabbalistic & Rosicrucian Symbolical Philosophy

"Early worshippers of Dionysos reenacted this gruesome scene by whipping themselves into a frenzy and tearing a live bull to pieces with their hands and teeth. These grisly rites, accompanied by loud music and the crashing of cymbals, were intended to propel the revelers into a state of ecstasy, a word literally meaning 'outside the body' to the Greeks. Through this ecstasy, the cultists hoped to transcend their earthly bonds and allow the soul a temporary liberation from the body. Only in this way could the soul achieve a condition of enthousiasmos, meaning 'inside the god,' which the worshipers believed was a taste of what they might one day enjoy in eternity."
     - The Search for the Soul

"Unarmed they [the Maenads] swooped down upon the herds of cattle grazing there on the green of the meadow. And then you could have seen a single woman with bare hands tear a fat calf, still bellowing with fright, in two, while others clawed the heifers to pieces. There were ribs and cloven hooves scattered everywhere, and scraps smeared with blood hung from the fir trees. And bulls, their raging fury gathered in their horns, lowered their heads to charge, then fell, stumbling to the earth, pulled down by hordes of women and stripped of flesh and skin more quickly, sire, than you could blink your royal eyes."
     - EuripidesThe Bacchae

"The female votaries of the phallus god Bacchus were known as the Bacchants...They were characterized by extreme forms of religious excitement interspersed with periods of intense depression. At one moment whirling in a frenzied dance, tossing their heads, driving one another on with screaming and the wild clamor of musical instruments, at another sunk into the deepest lethargy, and a silence so intense as to become proverbial. The Bacchants both possessed the god and were possessed by him; theirs was a religious enthusiasm in the proper sense of the term, that is, 'god-filled'. Having eaten the Bacchus or Dionysos, they took on his power and character..."
     - John M. Allegro, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross

"They wore wreaths of ivy, oak or fir, and skins of animals, and carried the thyrsos....In their ecstasy they would range through the mountains in dizzying dances, and tear some animal apart with their bare hands and ate it raw. There is no doubt that this was a communion in the god's own body and blood; indeed at one center the god was worshipped under the cult-title Raw. The inspiration of the god was believed to confer miraculous power, and, as often, as belief in miracles leads to the performance of miracles. We hear of them caught in a snowstorm so that their clothes were frozen stiff, but rescued unharmed, or falling asleep from sheer exhaustion in an enemy village during wartime, and being protect for their holiness."
     - John Ferguson, An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Mysticism and the Mystery Religions

"In 186 B.C.E. the Roman Senate met the increasing suspicion about the Bacchanalia with decisive action. The official worship of Dionysos in the Greco-Roman world was ordinarily more domesticated and respectable than the frenzied revels of the Maenads in The Bacchae, but the orgies (Greek orgia) did continue in some circles. Such apparently was the case in Rome during the early second century B.C.E. Men had joined with the women in secret Bacchic ceremonies held in the evening, and according to the testimony of the witness Hispala, all sorts of criminal and immoral behavior transpired under the cover of darkness. Upon hearing about this, the Senate adopted a decree that called for the destruction of most Bacchic shrines and the strict control of all Bacchic worship in Italy."
     - The Ancient Mysteries: A Sourcebook, Marvin W. Meyer, Editor

"From the time when the rites were held promiscuously, with men and women mixed together, and when the license offered by darkness had been added, no sort of crime, no kind of immortality, was left unattempted. There were more obscenities practiced between men than between men and women. Anyone refusing to submit to outrage or reluctant to commit crimes was slaughtered as a sacrificial victim. To regard nothing as forbidden was among these people the summit of religious achievement. Men, apparently out of their wits, would utter prophesies with frenzied bodily convulsions: matrons, attired as Bacchantes, with their hair disheveled and carrying blazing torches, would run down to the Tiber, plunge their torches into the water and bring them out still alight - because they contained a mixture of live sulfur and calcium. Men were said to have been carried off by the gods - because they had been attached to a machine and whisked way out of sight to hidden caves; or to submit to violation."
     - Titus Livy, History of Rome, Book 39.13

(2) The Second Birth and Dragon of Ether

"Come, O Dityrambos,
Enter this my male womb."
     - Euripides, The Bacchae

"This cry of Zeus, the Thunder-hurler, to the child, his son, Dionysos, sounds the leitmotif of the Greek mysteries of the initiatory second birth...The word 'Dithyrambos' itself, as an epithet of the killed and resurrected Dionysos, was understood by the Greeks to signify 'him of the double door', him who had survived the awesome miracle of the second birth."
     - Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces

"A fourth-century BC hymn in honor of Dionysos contains the invocation: 'Come to us, King Dithyramb, Bacchus, god of the holy chant.'"
Dithurambos, Dithyramb "comes to be used of a Dionysiac song which possessed some infectious quality that led his votaries to take it up as a ritual chant. Later it became the subject for competition at Dionysiac festivals, and with its formalization it lost any spontaneity it may have possessed originally."
"At the beginning of the fifth century BC tragedy formed part of the Great Dionysia, the Spring festival of Dionysos Eluethereus. Three poets completed, each contributing three tragedies and one satyric play. The latter was performed by choruses of fifty singers in a circle, dressed as satyrs, part human, part bestial, and bearing before them huge replicas of the erect penis, as they sang dithyrambs."
     - John M. Allegro, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross

"Kore-Persephonia...you were wived as the Dragon's spouse,
When Zeus, very coiled, his form and countenance changed,
A Dragon-Bridegroom, coiled in love-inspiring fold...
Glided to dark Kore's maiden couch...
Thus, by the alliance with the Dragon of Aether,
The womb of Persephone became alive with fruit,
Bearing Zagreus, the Horned Child."
     - Nonnus, The Dionysiacs (5th Century BC)

"Ezekiel in describing the necromantic ritual of the witches, says they fastened 'magic bands' (kesatot) on their wrists and with them 'trapped souls like birds' (Ezekiel 13:20). This rare word is related to the Sumerian KI-ShU, meaning some kind of magical imprisonment, but we have to look to Greek for its precise significance. In the form kiste, Latin cista, it appears as a container used in certain mystery rituals of the Dionysiac cult, supposedly for the carrying of secret implements. In fact, wherever the cista is graphically represented it is shown as a basket from which a snake is emerging. Thus on sarcophagi inscribed with Bacchic scenes, the cista is shown being kicked open by Pan and the snake raising itself from the half-opened lid. The snake is an important feature of the Dionysiac cult and imagery. The Maenads of Euripides' Bacchae have serpents entwined in their hair and round their limbs, and the snake was the particular emblem of the Phyrigian Sabazios (Sabadius) with whom Dionysos is identified."
     - John M. Allegro, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross

(3) Catharsis

"My father, wishing to celebrate it [the Dionysos' festival] with splendor, had set out all that was necessary for the diner in a rich and costly fashion; but especially a precious cup to be used for libations to the god, one only second to the famous goblet of Glaucus of Chios. The material of it was wrought rock-crystal; vines crowned its rim, seeming to grow from the cup itself; their clusters dropped in every direction; when the cup was empty, each grape seemed green and unripe, but when the wine was poured into it, then little by little the clusters became red and dark, the green crop turning into the ripe fruit. Dionysos too was represented hard by the clusters, to be the husbandman of the vine and the vintner. As we drank deeper, I began to look more boldly and with less shame at my sweetheart; Cupid (Eros) and Dionysos are two of the most violent of the gods, they can grasp the soul and drive it so far towards madness that it loses all restraint; Cupid fires it with the flames which are his attribute, while Dionysos supplies wine which is as fuel to the fire: for wine is the very sustenance of love."
     - Achilles TatiusThe Adventures of Leucippe and Cltophon Book 2.2-3

"I see nothing with my eyes, my ears hum,
sweat pours from me, a trembling seizes me all over,
I am greener than grass,
and it seems to me
that I am little short of dying..."
     - Sappho

"She is overwhelmed by Eros. Passion for her (as for Homer) was a divine interference, something beyond the constraints of human intent."
     - David Maybury Lewis, Millenium

"The body is disabled by paroxysms of ecstasy. Normal Judgment is, to say the least, suspended. Surrounding objects are obscured by frank hallucinations of vortexes and floodlights, or else they're transformed by luminous halos and revelatory detail. Voices from elsewhere are heard dictating instructions or secret messages. Then, there's that painful sense of the meaningfulness of everything. Seized by the immanent symbolism in the world, the subject reports talking to, seeing, or becoming God."
     - David Pursh in Omni, October '93

Dionysos in Ptolemaic Egypt

"Osiris is he who is called Dionysos in the Greek tongue."
     - Herodotus, The Histories

"...Osiris is the same as Dionysos, and who should know better than you, Clea, since you are at once the leader of the Thyades [female initiates who celebrated on sacred sites the nocturnal orgies of Bacchus] at Delphi and have been consecrated in the Isirian rites by your father and mother?"
     - Plutarch, Isis and Osiris

"The Ptolemies, Greek successors of Alexander the Great and rulers of Egypt, established the cult of Sarapis, a name which derives from that of Osorapis, a god who combined the attributes of Osiris and the sacred bull god Apis. Apis was supposedly transformed into Osiris after death, thus gaining the kind of divine immortality which was open to the human devotees of Osiris. The cult center of Osorapis was at Memphis in Lower Egypt. The liturgy of the new worship of Sarapis was a combination of Egyptian and Greek, and the popularity of the god grew quite rapidly. By the first century A.D. it became officially recognized in Rome. The ritual was chiefly concerned with the three figures of Osiris (or Sarapis), Isis, and Horus their son, but the dominant member of the triad was the goddess."
     - Ninian Smart, The Religious Experience of Mankind

In Memphis (in the northern sector of Saqqara) is the Serapeum where the huge tombs of Apis bulls are located. Worshipped as the incarnation of Ptah, the god of Memphis, during its lifetime, each Apis bull was mummified at death. "Being then identified with Osiris under the name of Osiris-Apis (or Osorapis), he was taken with great pomp to is last resting place prepared for him in the Serapeum....Here Ptolemy I had "the object of founding...a cult area that would enable Egyptians and Greeks alike to join in a community of beliefs acceptable to each..."
     - Jean-Philipe Lauer, Saqqara

"...As for what the priests openly do in the burial of the Apis when they transport its carcass on a raft, this in no ways falls short of Bacchic revelry, for they wear fawn-skins [symbolizing rebirth] and carry thyrsus-rods [tipped with pine-cones and garlanded with ivy] and produce shouts and movements as do the ecstatic celebrants of the Dionysiac orgies..."
     - Plutarch, Isis and Osiris

"The touch of the rod of power (thyrsus) on the head, which formed part of the ancient ceremony, in the hand of the initiating hierophant, always had the same effect - the attainment of spiritual illumination."
     - Geoffrey Hodson, "The Still-functioning Greater and Lesser Mysteries"

"The retinue of sacred animals ridden by Dionysos as a child or as a young man...shows that proper 'Dionysiac rites were practiced there and proves without doubt the establishment in Egypt of the cult of Serapic and of Greek ideas by Ptolemy I at the beginning of the third century BC. This is also the case with the strange semi-circle of Greek poets and philosophers erected at the junction of the avenue of sphinxes with the dromos [paved avenue]."
     - Jean-Philipe Lauer, Saqqara

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