among deities whose origin has been sought in the personification, if not of the phenomena, at least of the forces of nature, dionysus is prominent.140 he is regarded by many mythologists141 as the “spiritual form” of the new vernal life, the sap and pulse of vegetation and of the new-born year, especially as manifest in the vine and the juice of the grape. thus preller142 looks on his mother, semele, as a personification of the pregnant soil in spring.143 the name of semele is explained with the familiar diversity of conjecture. whether the human intellect, at the time of the first development of myth, was capable of such abstract thought as is employed in the recognition of a deity presiding over “the revival of earth-life” or not, and whether, having attained to this abstraction, men would go on to clothe it in all manner of animal and other symbolisms, are questions which mythologists seem to take for granted. the popular story of the birth of dionysus is well known.
his mother, semele, desired to see zeus in all his glory, as he appeared when he made love to hera. having promised to grant all the nymph’s requests, zeus was constrained to approach her in thunder and lightning. she was burned to death, but the god rescued her unborn child and sowed him up in his own thigh. in this wild narrative preller finds the wedlock of heaven and earth, “the first day that it thunders in march”. the thigh of zeus is to be interpreted as “the cool moist clouds”. if, on the other hand, we may take dionysus himself to be the rain, as kuhn does, and explain the thigh of zeus by comparison with certain details in the soma sacrifice and the right thigh of indra, as described in one of the brahmanas, why then, of course, preller’s explanation cannot be admitted.144
these examples show the difficulty, or rather indicate the error, of attempting to interpret all the details in any myth as so many statements about natural phenomena and natural forces. such interpretations are necessarily conjectural. certainly dionysus, the god of orgies, of wine, of poetry, became in later greek thought something very like the “spiritual form” of the vine, and the patron of nature’s moods of revelry. but that he was originally conceived of thus, or that this conception may be minutely traced through each incident of his legend, cannot be scientifically established. each mythologist, as has been said before, is, in fact, asking himself, “what meaning would i have had if i told this or that story of the god of the vine or the god of the year’s renewal?” the imaginations in which the tale of the double birth of dionysus arose were so unlike the imagination of an erudite modern german that these guesses are absolutely baseless. nay, when we are told that the child was sheltered in his father’s body, and was actually brought to birth by the father, we may be reminded, like bachofen, of that widespread savage custom, the couvade.
from brazil to the basque country it has been common for the father to pretend to lie-in while the mother is in childbed; the husband undergoes medical treatment, in many cases being put to bed for days.145 this custom, “world-wide,” as mr. tylor calls it, has been used by bachofen as the source of the myth of the double birth of dionysus. though other explanations of the couvade have been given, the most plausible theory represents it as a recognition of paternity by the father. bachofen compares the ceremony by which, when hera became reconciled to herakles, she adopted him as her own through the legal fiction of his second birth. the custom by which, in old french marriage rites, illegitimate children were legitimised by being brought to the altar under the veil of the bride is also in point.146 diodorus says that barbarians still practise the rite of adoption by a fictitious birth. men who returned home safely after they were believed to be dead had to undergo a similar ceremony.147 bachofen therefore explains the names and myths of the “double-mothered dionysus” as relics of the custom of the couvade, and of the legal recognition of children by the father, after a period of kinship through women only.
this theory is put by lucian in his usual bantering manner. poseidon wishes to enter the chamber of zeus, but is refused admission by hermes.
“is zeus en bonne fortune?“ he asks.
“no, the reverse. zeus has just had a baby.”
“a baby! why there was nothing in his figure . . .! perhaps the child was born from his head, like athene?”
“not at all — his thigh; the child is semele’s.”
“wonderful god! what varied accomplishments! but who is semele?”
“a theban girl, a daughter of cadmus, much noticed by zeus.”
“and so he kindly was confined for her?”
“exactly!”
“so zeus is both father and mother of the child?”
“naturally! and now i must go and make him comfortable.”148
we need not necessarily accept bachofen’s view. this learned author employed indeed a widely comparative method, but he saw everything through certain mystic speculations of his own. it may be deemed, however, that the authors of the myth of the double birth of dionysus were rather in the condition of men who practise the couvade than capable of such vast abstract ideas and such complicated symbolism as are required in the system of preller. it is probable enough that the struggle between the two systems of kindred — maternal and paternal — has left its mark in greek mythology. undeniably it is present in the eumenides of ?schylus, and perhaps it inspires the tales which represent hera and zeus as emulously producing offspring (athene and hephaestus) without the aid of the opposite sex.149
in any case, dionysus, semele’s son, the patron of the vine, the conqueror of india, is an enigmatic figure of dubious origin, but less repulsive than dionysus zagreus.
even among the adventures of zeus the amour which resulted in the birth of dionysus zagreus was conspicuous. “jupiter ipse filiam incestavit, natum hinc zagreum.”150 persephone, fleeing her hateful lover, took the shape of a serpent, and zeus became the male dragon. the story is on a footing with the brahmanic myth of prajapati and his daughter as buck and doe. the platonists explained the legend, as usual, by their “absurd symbolism “.151
the child of two serpents, zagreus, was born, curious as it may seem, with horns on his head. zeus brought him up in secret, but hera sent the titans to kill him. according to clemens alexandrinus152 and other authorities, the titans won his heart with toys, including the bull-roarer or turn-dun of the australians.153 his enemies, also in australian fashion, daubed themselves over with pipeclay.154 by these hideous foes the child was torn to pieces, though, according to nonnus, he changed himself into as many beasts as proteus by the nile, or tamlane by the ettrick.
in his bull-shape, zagreus was finally chopped up small, cooked (except the heart), and eaten by the titans.155 here we are naturally reminded of the dismemberment of osiris, ymir, purusha, chokanipok and so many other gods and beasts in egypt, india, scandinavia and america. this point must not be lost sight of in the controversy as to the origin and date of the story of dionysus zagreus. nothing can be much more repulsive than these hideous incidents to the genius, for example, of homer. he rarely tells anything worse about the gods than the tale of ares’ imprisonment in the large bronze pot, an event undignified, indeed, but not in the ferocious taste of the zagreus legend. but it need not, therefore, be decided that the story of dionysus and the titans is later than homer because it is inconsistent with the tone of homeric mythology, and because it is found in more recent authorities. details like the use of the “turn-dun” in the dionysiac mysteries, and the bodies of the celebrants daubed with clay, have a primitive, or at least savage, appearance. it was the opinion of lobeck that the orphic poems, in which the legend first comes into literature, were the work of onomacritus.156
on the other hand, müller argued that the myth was really archaic, although it had passed through the hands of onomacritus. on the strength of the boast of the delphian priests that they possessed the grave in which the fragments of the god were buried, müller believed that onomacritus received the story from delphi.157
müller writes, “the way in which these orphics went to work with ancient myths can be most distinctly seen in the mythus of the tearing asunder of bacchus, which, at all events, passed through the hands of onomacritus, an organiser of dionysian orgies, according to pausanias, an author of orphean poems also, and therefore, in all probability, an orphic”.
the words of pausanias are (viii. 37, 3), “onomacritus, taking from homer the name of the titans, established dionysiac orgies, and represented the titans as the authors of the sorrows of the god”.
now it is perhaps impossible to decide with certainty whether, as lobeck held, onomacritus “adapted” the myth, and the delphians received it into their religion, with rites purposely meant to resemble those of osiris in egypt, or whether müller more correctly maintains that onomacritus, on the other hand, brought an old temple mystery and “sacred chapter” into the light of literature. but it may very plausibly be maintained that a myth so wild, and so analogous in its most brutal details to the myths of many widely scattered races, is more probably ancient than a fresh invention of a poet of the sixth century. it is much more likely that greece, whether at delphi or elsewhere, possessed a legend common to races in distant continents, than that onomacritus either invented the tale or borrowed it from egypt and settled it at delphi. o. müller could not appeal to the crowd of tales of divine dismemberment in savage and civilised lands, because with some he was unacquainted, and others (like the sacrifice of purusha, the cutting up of omorca, the rending of ymir) do not seem to have occurred to his memory. though the majority of these legends of divine dismemberment are connected with the making of the world, yet in essentials they do resemble the tale of dionysus and the titans. thus the balance of probability is in favour of the theory that the myth is really old, and was borrowed, not invented, by onoma-critus.158 that very shifty person may have made his own alterations in the narrative, but it cannot be rash to say with o. müller, “if it has been supposed that he was the inventor of the entire fable, which pausa-nias by no means asserts, i must confess that i cannot bring myself to think so. according to the notions of the ancients, it must have been an unholy, an accursed man who could, from a mere caprice of his own, represent the ever-young dionysus, the god of joy, as having been torn to pieces by the titans.” a reply to this might, no doubt, be sought in the passages describing the influx of new superstitions which are cited by lobeck.159 the greek comic poets especially derided these religious novelties, which corresponded very closely to our “esoteric buddhism” and similar impostures. but these new mysteries and trumpery cults of the decayed civilisation were things very different from the worship of dionysus zagreus and his established sacrifices of oxen in the secret penetralia of delphi.160
it may be determined, therefore, that the tale and the mystery-play of dionysus and the titans are, in essentials, as old as the savage state of religion, in which their analogues abound, whether at delphi they were or were not of foreign origin, and introduced in times comparatively recent. the fables, wherever they are found, are accompanied by savage rites, in which (as in some african tribes when the chief is about to declare war) living animals were torn asunder and eaten raw. these horrors were a kind of representation of the sufferings of the god. o. müller may well observe,161 “we can scarcely take these rites to be new usages and the offspring of a post-homeric civilisation”. these remarks apply to the custom of nebrismus, or tearing fawns to pieces and dancing about draped in the fawn-skins. such rites were part of the bacchic worship, and even broke out during a pagan revival in the time of valens, when dogs were torn in shreds by the worshippers.162
whether the antiquity of the zagrean ritual and legend be admitted or not, the problem as to their original significance remains. although the majority of heathen rites of this kind were mystery-plays, setting forth in action some story of divine adventure or misadventure,163 yet lobeck imagines the story of zagreus and the titans to have been invented or adapted from the osiris legend, as an account of the mystic performances themselves. what the myth meant, or what the furious actions of the celebrants intended, it is only possible to conjecture.
commonly it is alleged that the sufferings of dionysus are the ruin of the summer year at the hands of storm and winter, while the revival of the child typifies the vernal resurrection; or, again, the slain dionysus is the vintage. the old english song tells how “john barleycorn must die,” and how potently he came back to life and mastered his oppressors. this notion, too, may be at the root of “the passion of dionysus,” for the grapes suffer at least as many processes of torture as john barleycorn before they declare themselves in the shape of strong drink.164 while preller talks about the tiefste erd-und naturschmerz typified in the zagrean ritual, lobeck remarks that plato would be surprised if he could hear these “drunken men’s freaks” decoratively described as ein erhabene naturdienst.
lobeck looks on the wild acts, the tearing of fawns and dogs, the half-naked dances, the gnawing of raw bleeding flesh, as the natural expression of fierce untutored folk, revelling in freedom, leaping and shouting. but the odd thing is that the most civilised of peoples should so long have retained the manners of ingenia inculta et indomita. whatever the original significance of the dionysiac revels, that significance was certainly expressed in a ferocious and barbaric fashion, more worthy of australians than athenians.
on this view of the case it might perhaps be maintained that the germ of the myth is merely the sacrifice itself, the barbaric and cruel dismembering of an animal victim, which came to be identified with the god. the sufferings of the victim would thus finally be transmuted into a legend about the passion of the deity. the old greek explanation that the ritual was designed “in imitation of what befel the god” would need to be reversed. the truth would be that the myth of what befel the god was borrowed from the actual torture of the victim with which the god was identified examples of this mystic habit of mind, in which the slain beast, the god, and even the officiating celebrant were confused in thought with each other, are sufficiently common in ritual.165
the sacrifices in the ritual of dionysus have a very marked character and here more, commonly than in other hellenic cults, the god and the victim are recognised as essentially the same. the sacrifice, in fact, is a sacrament, and in partaking of the victim the communicants eat their god. this detail is so prominent that it has not escaped the notice even of mythologists who prefer to take an ideal view of myths and customs, to regard them as symbols in a nature-worship originally pure. thus m. decharme says of the bull-feast in the dionysiac cult, “comme le taureau est un des formes de dionysos, c’etait le corps du dieu dont se repaissaient les inities, c’etait son sang dont ils s’abreuvaient dans ce banquet mystique”. now it was the peculiarity of the bac-chici who maintained these rites, that, as a rule, they abstained from the flesh of animals altogether, or at least their conduct took this shape when adopted into the orphic discipline.166 this ritual, therefore, has points in common with the usages which appear also to have survived into the cult of the ram-god in egypt.167 the conclusion suggested is that where dionysus was adored with this sacrament of bull’s flesh, he had either been developed out of, or had succeeded to, the worship of a bull-totem, and had inherited his characteristic ritual. mr. frazer, however, proposes quite a different solution.168 ours is rendered plausible by the famous elean chant in which the god was thus addressed: “come, hero dionysus, come with the graces to thy holy house by the shores of the sea; hasten with thy bull-foot”. then the chorus repeated, “goodly bull, goodly bull”.169 m. decharme publishes a cameo170 in which the god is represented as a bull, with the three graces standing on his neck, and seven stars in the field. m. decharme decides that the stars are the pleiades, the graces the rays of the vernal sun, and dionysus as a bull the symbol of the vernal sun itself. but all such symbolical explanations are apt to be mere private conjectures, and they are of no avail in face of the ritual which, on the other hypothesis, is to be expected, and is actually found, in connection with the bull dionysus. where dionysus is not absolutely called a bull, he is addressed as the “horned deity,” the “bull-horned,” the “horned child”.171
a still more curious incident of the dionysiac worship was the sacrifice of a booted calf, a calf with cothurns on its feet.172 the people of tenedos, says ?lian, used to tend their goodliest cow with great care, to treat it, when it calved, like a woman in labour, to put the calf in boots and sacrifice it, and then to stone the sacrificer and drive him into the sea to expiate his crime. in this ceremony, as in the diipolia at athens, the slain bull is, as it were, a member of the blood-kindred of the man who immolates him, and who has to expiate the deed as if it were a murder.173 in this connection it is worth remarking that dionysus zagreus, when, according to the myth, he was attacked by the titans, tried to escape his enemies by assuming various forms. it was in the guise of a bull that he was finally captured and rent asunder. the custom of rending the living victims of his cult was carried so far that, when pentheus disturbed his mysteries, the king was torn piecemeal by the women of his own family.174 the pious acquiescence of the author of the so-called theocritean idyll in this butchery is a curious example of the conservatism of religious sentiment. the connection of dionysus with the bull in particular is attested by various ritual epithets, such as “the bull,” “bull-born,”175 “bull-horned,” and “bull-browed”.176 he was also worshipped with sacrifice of he-goats; according to the popular explanation, because the goat gnaws the vine, and therefore is odious to the god.
the truth is, that animals, as the old commentator on virgil remarks, were sacrificed to the various gods, ”aut per similitudinem aut per contrarietatem“ either because there was a community of nature between the deity and the beast, or because the beast had once been sacred in a hostile clan or tribe.177 the god derived some of his ritual names from the goat as well as from the bull according to one myth, dionysus was changed into a kid by zeus, to enable him to escape the jealousy of hera.178 “it is a peculiarity,” says voigt, “of the dionysus ritual that the god is one of his offering.” but though the identity of the god and the victim is manifest, the phenomenon is too common in religion to be called peculiar.179 plutarch180 especially mentions that “many of the greeks make statues of dionysus in the form of a bull”.
dionysus was not only an animal-god, or a god who absorbed in his rights and titles various elder forms of beast-worship. trees also stood in the same relation to him. as dendrites, he is, like artemis, a tree-god, and probably succeeded to the cult of certain sacred trees; just as, for example, st. bridget, in ireland, succeeded to the cult of the fire-goddess and to her ceremonial.181
dionysus was even called “the god in the tree,”182 reminding us of artemis dendritis, and of the village gods which in india dwell in the peepul or the bo tree.183 thus pausanias184 tells us that, when pentheus went to spy on the dionysiac mysteries, the women found him hidden in a tree, and there and then tore him piecemeal. according to a corinthian legend, the delphic oracle bade them seek this tree and worship it with no less honour than the god (dionysus) himself. hence the wooden images of dionysus were made of that tree, the fig tree, non ex quovis ligno, and the god had a ritual name, “the fig-tree dionysus”. in the idols the community of nature between the god and the fig tree was expressed and commemorated. an unhewn stump of wood was the dionysus idol of the rustic people.185
certain antique elements in the dionysus cult have now been sketched; we have seen the god in singularly close relations with animal and plant worship, and have noted the very archaic character of certain features in his mysteries. doubtless these things are older than the bright anthropomorphic dionysus of the poets — the beautiful young deity, vine-crowned, who rises from the sea to comfort ariadne in tintoretto’s immortal picture. at his highest, at his best, dionysus is the spirit not only of bacchic revel and of dramatic poetry, but of youth, health and gaiety. even in this form he retains something tricksy and enigmatic, the survival perhaps of earlier ideas; or, again, it may be the result of a more or less conscious symbolism. the god of the vine and of the juice of the vine maketh glad the heart of man; but he also inspires the kind of metamorphosis which the popular speech alludes to when a person is said to be “disguised in drink”. for this reason, perhaps, he is now represented in art as a grave and bearded man, now as a manly youth, and again as an effeminate lad of girlish loveliness. the bearded type of the god is apparently the earlier; the girlish type may possibly be the result merely of decadent art, and its tendency to a sexless or bisexual prettiness.186
turning from the ritual and local cults of the god, which, as has been shown, probably retain the earlier elements in his composite nature, and looking at his legend in the national literature of greece, we find little that throws any light on the origin and primal conception of his character in the iliad dionysus is not one of the great gods whose politics sways olympus, and whose diplomatic or martial interference is exercised in the leaguer of the ach?ans or in the citadel of ilios. the longest passage in which he is mentioned is iliad, vi. 130, a passage which clearly enough declares that the worship of dionysus, or at least that certain of his rites were brought in from without, and that his worshippers endured persecution. diomedes, encountering glaucus in battle, refuses to fight him if he is a god in disguise. “nay, moreover, even dryas’ son, mighty lykourgos, was not for long when he strove with heavenly gods; he that erst chased through the goodly land of nysa the nursing mothers of frenzied dionysus; and they all cast their wands upon the ground, smitten with murderous lykourgos’ ox-goad. then dionysus fled, and plunged beneath the salt sea-wave, and thetis took him to her bosom, affrighted, for mighty trembling had seized him at his foe’s rebuke. but with lykourgos the gods that live at ease were wroth, and kronos’s son made him blind, and he was not for long, because he was hated of all the immortal gods.”
though dionysus is not directly spoken of as the wine-god here, yet the gear of his attendants, and his own title, “the frenzied,” seem to identify him with the deity of orgiastic frenzy. as to nysa, volumes might be written to little or no purpose on the learning connected with this obscure place-name, so popular in the legend of dionysus. it has been identified as a mountain in thrace, in boeotia, in arabia, india, libya and naxos, as a town in caria or the caucasus, and as an island in the nile. the flight of dionysus into the sea may possibly recall the similar flight of agni in indian myth.
the odyssey only mentions dionysus187 in connection with ariadne, whom artemis is said to have slain “by reason of the witness of dionysus,”188 and where the great golden urn of thetis is said to have been a present from the god. the famous and beautiful hymn proves, as indeed may be learned from hesiod,189 that the god was already looked on as the patron of the vine.
when the pirates had seized the beautiful young man with the dark-blue eyes, and had bound him in their ship, he “showed marvels among them,” changed into the shape of a bear, and turned his captors into dolphins, while wine welled up from the timbers of the vessel, and vines and ivy trees wreathed themselves on the mast and about the rigging. leaving aside the orphic poems, which contain most of the facts in the legend of dionysus zagreus, the bacch? of euripides is the chief classical record of ideas about the god. dionysus was the patron of the drama, which itself was an artistic development of the old rural songs and dances of his athenian festival. in the bacch?, then, euripides had to honour the very patron of his art. it must be said that his praise is but half-hearted. a certain ironical spirit, breaking out here and there (as when old cadmus dances, and shakes a grey head and a stiff knee) into actual burlesque, pervades the play. tradition and myth doubtless retained some historical truth when they averred that the orgies of the god had been accepted with reluctance into state religion. the tales about lycurgus and pentheus, who persecuted the bacch? in thebes, and was dismembered by his own mother in a divine madness, are survivals of this old distrust of dionysus. it was impossible for euripides, a sceptic, even in a sceptical age, to approve sincerely of the god whom he was obliged to celebrate. he falls back on queer etymological explanations of the birth of dionysus from the thigh of zeus. this myth, as cadmus very learnedly sets forth, was the result of forgetfulness of the meaning of words, was born of a volks-etymologie. zeus gave a hostage to hera, says cadmus, and in “process of time” (a very short time) men forgot what they meant when they said this, and supposed that dionysus had been sewnup in the thigh of his father.190 the explanation is absurd, but it shows how euripides could transfer the doubt and distrust of his own age, and its attempt at a philological interpretation of myth, to the remote heroic tunes. throughout the play the character and conduct of the god, and his hideous revenge on the people who reject his wild and cruel rites, can only be justified because they are articles of faith. the chorus may sing —“ah! blessed he who dwelleth in happiness, expert in the rites of the gods, and so hallows his life, fulfilling his soul with the spirit of dionysus, revelling on the hills with charms of holy purity “.191 this was the interpretation which the religious mind thrust upon rites which in themselves were so barbarously obscene that they were feigned to have been brought by dionysus from the barbaric east,192 and to be the invention of rhea, an alien and orgiastic goddess.193 the bull-horned, snake-wreathed god,194 the god who, when bound, turns into a bull (618); who manifests himself as a bull to pentheus (920), and is implored by the chorus to appear “as bull, or burning lion, or many-headed snake” (1017-19), this god is the ancient barbarous deity of myth, in manifest contrast with the artistic greek conception of him as “a youth with clusters of golden hair, and in his dark eyes the grace of aphrodite” (235, 236).
the bacch?, then, expresses the sentiments of a moment which must often have occurred in greek religion. the greek reverence accepts, hallows and adorns an older faith, which it feels to be repugnant and even alien, but none the less recognises as human and inevitable. from modern human nature the ancient orgiastic impulse of savage revelry has almost died away. in greece it was dying, but before it expired it sanctified and perpetuated itself by assuming a religious form, by draping its naked limbs in the fawn-skin or the bull-skin of dionysus. in precisely the same spirit christianity, among the negroes of the southern states, has been constrained to throw its mantle over what the race cannot discard. the orgies have become camp-meetings; the voodoo-dance is consecrated as the “jerusalem jump”. in england the primitive impulse is but occasionally recognised at “revivals”. this orgiastic impulse, the impulse of australian corroboree and cherokee fetish-dances, and of the “dancing dervishes” themselves, occasionally seizes girls in modern greece. they dance themselves to death on the hills, and are said by the peasants to be victims of the nereids. in the old classic world they would have been saluted as the nurses and companions of dionysus, and their disease would have been hallowed by religion. of that religion the “bull-horned,” “bull-eating,” “cannibal” dionysus was the deity; and he was refined away into the youth with yellow-clustered curls, and sleepy eyes, and smiling lips, the girlish youth of the art of praxiteles. so we see him in surviving statues, and seeing him, forget his ghastly rites, and his succession to the rites of goats, and deer, and bulls.
