PAGAN REGENERATION

A STUDY OF MYSTERY INITIATIONS IN THE GRAECO-ROMAN WORLD

BY HAROLD R. WILLOUGHBY

[b. 1890 d. 1962]

Chicago., Ill., The University of Chicago Press

[1929, copyright not renewed]

CHAPTER III

DIONYSIAN EXCESSES

IN A characteristic passage in the Bacchae, Euripedes, “the Rationalist,”
speaks of Demeter and Dionysus as the greatest of the gods. He puts into the
mouth of the aged prophet Teiresias this preachment for the instruction of the
honest but irreconcilable Pentheus:

Two chiefest powers,
Prince, among men there are: Divine Demeter–
Earth is she, name her by which name you will.
She upon dry food nurtures mortal men;
Then follows Semele’s son, to match her gift
The cluster’s flowing draught he found and gave
To mortals, which gives rest from grief to men,
So that through him do men obtain good things.

This juxtaposition of Demeter and Dionysus is not at all surprising; for
among the friendly rivals of the Eleusinian mysteries in Greece the most vigorous,
the most distinctive, and the most widespread was the worship of Dionysus. Three
centuries before Alexander made his conquest of the Orient, Dionysus had made
his conquest of Greece. Coming as an immigrant from Thrace, attended by a wild
crew of satyrs and maenads, he took Greece by storm, and sometime between Homer
and Phidias, he won a place for himself on Olympus and the patronage of the
most dignified city-states in Greece. The type of religious experience exemplified
by his cult is of exceptional interest to the student of personal religion.
In order to understand the Dionysian experience, however, it is necessary to
know who Dionysus himself was.

I

Notwithstanding his elevation to Olympus, Dionysus was anything but an aristocratic
sky-god. He was rather an earth-deity, a god of the peasantry. Though his father
was Zeus, the sky- and rain-god, his mother was of the earth earthy. Dionysian
mythology named her Semele, the daughter of Cadmus, founder of Thebes, and this
name betrays her real significance as a personification of the earth (cf. Nova
Zembla, “new earth”). In the Hope collection there is a vase painting representing
the youthful Dionysus rising out of an earth mound–the vase-painter thus emphasizing
the earth-born nature of the god.

But Semele, the god’s earth-mother, was not only the fertile earth of springtime
absorbing the warm showers of the sky and naturally productive; in local legend
at Thebes see was represented as the thunder-smitten earth also. For Hera in
her jealousy had craftily persuaded Semele to ask her lover to prove his deity
by appearing in all his power and glory as god of heaven. Zeus acceded to her
request appearing to her armed with all his terrors, destroyed her with his
lightnings. Even as the mother was dying, however, Zeus rescued their unborn
child from her tortured body.

In birth-bowers new did Zeus Cronion
Receive his scion;
For hid in a cleft of his thigh,
By the gold clasps knit, did he lie
Safe hidden from Hera’s eye
Till the Fates’ day came.

Lucian, in his usual satirical vein, made the most of his opportunity to
parody this mythological theme. Thus, in popular legend the earth-born Dionysus,
the son of Semele, was himself represented as a twice-born deity. He was dithyrambus,
which for the Greeks meant “he who entered life by a double door.” In this peculiarly
artificial sense he was Dionysus, the son of Zeus, as his name suggests.

Quite naturally this son of earth and sky functioned as the personification
of vegetable life. As such he was a yearly divinity, who came and went with
the seasons. His experience in relation to men was characterized by recurrent
theophanies and recessions as the life of nature died and revived year after
year. Plutarch noted among various peoples this characteristic conception of
Dionysus:

“The Phrygians think that the god is asleep in the winter and is awake in
summer, and at one season they celebrate with Bacchic rites his goings to bed
and at the other his risings up. And the Paphlagonians allege that in the winter
he is bound down and imprisoned and in the spring he is stirred up and let loose.”

In the popular phrases of his worship, Dionysus was apprehended in very concrete
terms. He was, on the one side, the god of vegetation in general and the wine-god
in particular. Thus he made his chief impression on the Greeks. It may be, as
Miss Harrison has suggested, that in his native Thracian home he functioned
as a beer-god, Sabazius or Bromius, the god of a cereal intoxicant; but certainly
he came to Greece and won his signal triumph there as the wine-god. Even as
the olive was constantly associated with Athena, so the vine was characteristically
associated with Dionysus. Other familiar symbols of Dionysus were the grape
cluster and a two-handled drinking cup. By these accessories the god may easily
be identified in Greek vase paintings and on cult monuments. The various cult
appellatives emphasizing this aspect of Dionysus are far too numerous to be
listed. Greek literature, too, rang with the praises of the god who “made grow
for men the clustered vine,” but the fact is so familiar that it does not demand
special citation.

What is particularly noteworthy is this, that the relation of the god to
the drink was not merely that of creator to the thing created. Many times the
relationship expressed was that of identification even. The god was in the wine;
he was the wine, even. He was not merely the god of libation. To quote Euripides
statement, he was the libation, “The god who himself is offered in libation
to the other gods.” In this passage the identification of the god with the wine
is as absolute as the identification of Christ in Catholic thought with the
consecrated wine of the mass, or, to cite an illustration from the far away
religious system of the Vedas, the identification of the god Soma with the soma
drink. It is not surprising, therefore, to find in Attica the festival of the
theoinia or the “god wine,” celebrated by those families who were believed to
be the direct descendents of Dionysus’ original followers, in whose vineyards
grew vines which were offshoots from the vine spray that the god himself had
given them. Under such circumstances the devotees of Dionysus would be sure
of the presence of the very god himself in the consecrated wine made from the
sacred grapes. That this realistic identification of the deity and the fruit
of the vine was not merely a primitive conception is proved by the existence
at Philippi in Paul’s time of a religious brotherhood dedicated to Dionysus
Botreus (“Dionysus the Vine Cluster”).

Dionysus was the god of animal life as well as of vegetable life. As such
he was variously represented in different animal forms. It was inevitable that
these animal embodiments should be varied in different localities. In a goat-raising
country the normal representation of the power of life and generation would
be the goat. Similarly, in a cattle-raising country the embodiment of the divine
power in the form of a bull was to be expected. And so we have various animal
theophanies of Dionysus recorded in Greek literature. Euripides chorus of Bacchanals,
for example, thus variously invoke their god in their moment of supreme anxiety:

Appear, appear, whatso thy shape or name
O Mountain Bull, Snake of the Hundred Heads,
Lion of the Burning Flame!
O God, Beast, Mystery, come!

Of the less frequent animal forms under which Dionysus was revered, that
of the goat should especially be noted. What makes this conception of Dionysus
peculiarly important is the fact that as a goat-god he was involved in the obscure
beginnings of Attic tragedy, and thereafter he remained the patron deity of
this highly artistic literary form (trag-odia, goat-song). Another less familiar
animal embodiment of Dionysus was that of a kid. There was a common legend that
Zeus, in order to save his son from the jealous wrath of Hera, transformed him
into a kid. A mystic expression nebrizein, “to play the fawn,” was common in
the Dionysus cult. While it is an expression of doubtful import, yet it is clearly
reminiscent of another primitive conception of Dionysus as a fawn.

By far the most generally accepted and most significant of the animal embodiments
of the god, however, was that of a bull. There were a multitude of cult appellatives
emphasizing this conception of Dionysus. He was variously addressed as the “horned
child,” the “horned deity,” the “bull-horned,” and the “bull-browed.” The Argives
worshiped him as “the son of a cow” or “bull-born,” and the ancient Elean chant
addressed him directly as a bull. “Come, hero Dionysus, come with the Graces
to thy house by the shores of the sea; hasten with thy bull-foot.” So ran the
hymn itself, while the chorus repeated “goodly bull, goodly bull.” One readily
recalls, also, that the residence of the king-archon at Athens, where the sacred
marriage between Dionysus and the basilinna was celebrated, was called the boukolion,
or “ox stall.”

With all this background of realistic thought, it is strange that we do not
have a representation of the bull-Dionysus in Greek vase paintings. Plutarch,
however, states that the Greeks not infrequently imaged the god in bull form
in sculpture, and in classical literature this representation of the god was
a stock one. Thus the Bacchae of Euripides is permeated with the conception
of Dionysus as a bull-god. Of Dionysus’ second birth it is said:

Then a God bull-horned Zeus bare, And with serpents entwined his hair.

When Pentheus attempted to imprison Dionysus, “a bull beside the stalls he
found.” And finally when the god led the king in a hypnotized state out to his
doom, Pentheus seemed to see a bull going before him. In his hallucination the
king exclaimed:

A bull you seem that leads on before;
And horns have sprouted upon your head.
How, were you a brute?–Truly you are a bull now!

These passages reflect perfectly the realism of primitive thought about the
god. Far more than being represented by the bull, Dionysus was thought of as
being actually embodied in the bull, so that the animal, like the wine, was
the god.

II

With these primitive conceptions of Dionysus in mind, it is possible for
the modern student, even, to appreciate something of the vivid, central experience
of the god’s devotees. Wine played a prominent part in Dionysian worship. Bacchic
literature reeks with wine and rings with the joys of intoxication. The chorus
in Euripides’ Bacchae sings:

The cluster’s flowing draught….
….gives rest from grief to men
Woe-worn, soon as the vine’s stream fills them
And sleep, the oblivion of our daily ills,–
There is none other balm for toils.

This Bacchic joy puts an end to woe.

When blent with the flute light laughters awaken,
And the children of care have forgotten to weep
Whensoever is revealed the cluster’s splendour
In the banquet that men to the high Gods tender
And o’er ivy-wreathed revellers drinking deep
The wine bowl drops the mantle of sleep.

The truth is that sheer physical intoxication from the drinking of wine was
the essence of Dionysian religion. In the service of their god the Bacchanals
drank wine until they were intoxicated. There was indeed point to Plato’s criticism
that an immortality of drunkenness seemed to be considered the Dionysian reward
of virtue. For the Bacchanals themselves, however, the experience was something
more and higher than drunkenness. It was spiritual ecstasy, not mere physical
intoxication. The wine they drank was for them potent with divine power–it
was the god himself, and the very quintessence of divine life was resident in
the juice of the grape. This the devotees of Bacchus knew as a matter of personal
experience when, after drinking the wine, they felt a strange new life within
themselves. That was the life and power of their god. Their enthusiasm was quite
literally a matter of having the god within themselves, of being full of and
completely possessed by the god. So they themselves described it in their own
language (entheos, enthusiasm). They might be intoxicated; but they felt themselves
possessed by the god. The drinking of wine in the service of Dionysus was for
them a religious sacrament. Even Plato, who had few kind words to say for intoxication,
made one exception to his usual rule that it was unfitting for a man to drink
to the point of drunkenness. That one exception was “on the occasions of festivals
of the god of wine.” At such times drunkenness was a matter of communion with
the god. So Euripides could say that he who knows the Dionysian mysteries “is
pure in life, and revelling on the mountains, has the Bacchic communion in his
soul.”

The devotees of Dionysus had other realistic means of attaining to communion
with their god. They had a sacrament of eating as well as a sacrament of drinking.
This rite was the “feast of raw flesh.” To be an initiate into the mysteries
of Dionysus one must be able to avow

I have …. Fulfilled his red and bleeding feasts.

The victim varied. Sometimes it was a goat, as was probably the custom in
Thrace. The Bacchanals of Euripides follow this practice and know

The joy of the red quick fountain
The blood of the hill-goat torn.

They

Quaff the goat’s delicious blood,
A strange, a rich, a savage food.

Sometimes the victim was a fawn, and the sacred fawn-skins with which the
maenads were clothed were the skins torn from these luckless animals. One of
the familiar depictions of the maenads on Greek vases was to show them carrying
a fawn in their arms or tearing it to pieces in frenzy. More frequently, however,
the Dionysian victim was a bull. This was particularly the case in Crete where,
to quote Firmicus Maternus, “the Cretans rend a living bull with their teeth,
and they simulate madness of soul as they shriek through the secret places of
the forest with discordant clamors.”

This quotation well suggests the orgiastic character of the feast of raw
flesh. The denvotees tore asunder the slain beast and devoured the dripping
flesh in order to assimilate the life of the god resident in it. Raw flesh was
living flesh, and haste had to be made lest the divine life within the aniinal
should escape. So the feast became a wild, barbaric, frenzied affair. In the
Bacchae one of the herdsmen describes to Pentheus an attack of the maenads upon
the royal herd. Doubtless the description gives an adequate impression of one
of the Bacchic feasts.

Down swooped they then
Upon our pasturing kine with swordless hand,
Then had you seen your mother with her hands
Rend a deep uddered heifer bellowing loud:
And others tore the calves in crimson shreds.
Ribs had you seen and cloven hoofs far hurled
This way and that, and flakes of flesh that hung
And dripped all blood bedabbled, ‘neath the pines.
Bulls chafing, lowering fiercely along the horn
Erewhile, were tripped and hurled upon the earth
Dragged down by countless clutching maiden hands
More swiftly was the flesh that lapped their bones
Stripped, than you could have closed your kingly eyes.

This orgiastic rite furnished the Fathers of the early church with just the
material for which they were looking to use in discrediting paganism. With genuine
satisfaction they described the barbarous ceremonial in all its revolting detail.
Clement of Alexandria said:

“I will not dance out your mysteries as they say Alcibiades did, but I will
strip them naked, and bring them out on the open stage of life, in view of those
who are spectators at the drama of truth. The Bacchi hold orgies in honor of
a mad Dionysus. They celebrate a divine madness by the eating of raw flesh.
The final accomplishment of their rite is the distribution of the flesh of butchered
victims. They are crowned with snakes, and shriek out the name of Eva, that
Eve through whom sin came into the world, and the symbol of their Bacchae orgies
is the consecrated serpent.”

In a similar vein, Arnobius wrote of the “feasts of raw flesh in which with
feigned frenzy and loss of a sane mind you twine snakes about you, and to show
yourselves full of the divinity and majesty of the god, you demolish with gory
mouths the entrails of goats bleating for mercy.”

The fact should not be blinked that in its primitive this rite probably involved
the sacrifice of a human victim. Porphyry knew a tradition that in Chios a man
was torn to pieces in the worship of Dionysus Omadius, the “Raw One.” At Potniae,
according to Pausanias, a priest of Dionysus was once slain by the inhabitants
and a plague was sent upon them in punishment. They sought relief, and the Delphian
oracle told them that a beautiful boy must be sacrificed to the deity. Immediately
afterward, Dionysus let it be known that he would accept a goat as a substitute.
This story records the ancient transition in cult practice from the cannibal
to the animal feast. Also in the fearful fate that met Pentheus at the hands
of his own mother, as recorded by Euripides, there is a late literary echo of
the primitive cannibalistic ritual.

To focus attention on these savage features, however, is to miss entirely
the significance of the crude ceremonial. The real meaning of the orgy was that
it enabled the devotee to partake of a divine substance and so to enter into
direct and realistic communion with his god. The warm blood of the slain goat
was “sacred blood,” according to Lactantius Placidus. The god Dionysus was believed
to be resident temporarily in the animal victim. One of the most remarkable
illustrations of this ritual incarnation of the god was described by Aelian.
Of the people of Tenedos, he said: “In ancient days they used to keep a cow
with calf, the best they had, for Dionysus, and when she calved, they tended
her like a woman in childbirth. But they sacrificed the newborn calf, having
put cothurni on its feet.” The use of the tragic buskins symbolized the conviction
that the god was temporarily incarnate in the calf–pious opinion did not doubt
that. Primitive logic easily persuaded men that the easiest way to charge oneself
with divine power was to eat the quivering flesh and drink the warm blood of
the sacred animal. Some went farther and sought to assimilate themselves to
deity by wearing the skin of the animal. The central meaning of the celebration
was that it enabled the devotee to enter into direct and realistic communion
with his god.

Another means of inducing the divine possession, and the usual concomitant
of the sacraments of eating and drinking just described, was the vertigo of
the sacred dance. In preparation for the Bacchic revel, the devotees of the
god properly equipped themselves with the gear of Dionysus. Like him they carried
the thyrsus, a wand tipped with a pine cone and usually entwined with ivy. In
their hair serpents were twisted and over their shoulders was thrown the sacred
fawn-skin. Sometimes they wore horns on their foreheads. In clothing and equipment
they were as like their god as possible.

The dances in honor of Dionysus were usually held at night time by torchlight
and were preceded by fasting. They were accompanied by the weird music of wind
instruments and the clashing of tambourines. Mingled with this strange music
were the shouts of the Bacchanals themselves as they waved their torches in
the darkness, thus giving to the scene an unearthly light. The dances were wild
and irregular and were characterized by a tossing of the head and a violent,
whirling bodily motion. Thus, by the very movements of the dance a physical
frenzy was quickly induced, quite as the “dancing dervishes” of Mohammedanism
lose control of themselves in the delirium of their ritual. It was for this
ecstatic experience that the Bacchae of Euripides were yearning when they sang
together:

Ah, shall my white feet in the dances gleam
The livelong night again? Ah, shall I there
Float through the Bacchanal’s ecstatic dream,
Tossing my neck in the dewy air?

Significant of the maddening experience of the sacred dance were the names
applied to the female followers of Dionysus. They were the maenads or “mad ones,”
and the thyiads or “rushing distraught ones.” These epithets were but different
ways of describing the female devotees who were under the influence of and possessed
by their god. A more frequent designation was the more intimate one which called
the devotees after the name of the god himself. The women who shared in the
frenzied rites of Bacchus were themselves called Bacchae even as the men were
Bacchi. Each one, without distinction of sex, by the very experience of divine
possession became a personification of the god. Their delirium, induced by purely
physical means, was for them a spiritual experience, and eventuated in the conviction,
deep and strong, that they had their god within themselves. Plutarch connected
the Dionysian frenzy with the Bacchic custom of chewing ivy leaves during this
ceremonial, and affirmed that thus “the violent spirits which caused their enthusiasm
entered into them.”, Dionysus was god of the ivy quite as much as god of the
vine. By the realistic ritual act of chewing ivy, then, the maenads of Dionysus
incorporated his spirit within themselves. Herodotus, in speaking of the initiation
of the Scythian king, Scyles, cited a particular and notable instance of Dionysian
possession. The historian said of the king that “the god took possession” of
him so that “he was maddened by the god and played the part of Bacchus.” Thus,
in the frenzy of the ritualistic revel, as in the orgy of eating raw flesh and
drinking wine, the Bacchanals experienced communion with their god.

Apparently, in later times, at least, a sharp distinction was drawn between
those who merely indulged in the physical excitement of the Bacchic revel and
those who really shared in the spiritual experiences of the cult. At least we
are acquainted with a familiar proverb, quoted by Plato, to the effect that
“many are the bearers of the thyrsus, but the Bacchanals are few.” Unless the
initiate himself was conscious of contact with the divine de did not shared
in the genuine Bacchic experience.

III

This predominantly emotional experience, whether induced by the dizziness
of dancing or the crude sacraments of wine and raw flesh, marked for the Bacchanal
the beginning of a new life. In a very real sense it was a new birth for the
individual who experienced it. Hitherto he had been a man merely. Now he was
something more; he was man plus god, a divinized human. Certain aspects of his
new divine life deserve to be noted in order to emphasize the contrast with
life as it was lived at the ordinary levels of human experience.

In its temporary emotional aspect it was characterized by excessive indulgence
as contrasted with the reasoned moderation that was typical of Greek life generally.
For Greek self-control was one of the four cardinal virtues and “nothing in
excess” was a fundamental Hellenic principle of life. The Bacchic experience,
however, cut sheer across this principle. In the Bacchae, Euripides said of
Dionysus, “By halves he cares not to be magnified.” And Plato admitted that
“madness sent by god is better the moderation of men.” Such was clearly the
conviction of the followers of Dionysus.

Bacchic experience also caused a break with the customs and conventions of
ordinary life and a return to the freedom of nature. The devotees of Dionysus
deserted their homes temporarily, wandered free on the mountains, and indulged
in certain wild, primitive, half-animal passions. Euripides gave a picture of
the matrons of Thebes leaving their homes, their work, their babies even, to
wander and revel in the mountains. They dressed themselves in fawnskins and
wound snakes around their bodies.

Some cradling fawns or wolf cubs in their arms
Gave to the wild things of their own white milk
Young mothers they, who had left their babies.

With this return to the life of nature there was mingled a recrudescence
of certain very primitive impulses. There was a lust for hot blood and a certain
ferocious cruelty in the tearing to pieces of hapless victims.

The Bacchic revel also caused the joy and abandon of self-forgetfulness.
The Bacchanals were no longer themselves, and this very fact brought a sense
of freedom from former limitations and restraints. To what ridiculous extremes
this self-abandon might be carried Euripides gave illustration when he represented
aged Cadmus and blind Teiresias clad in fawnskins and gamboling off to join
the. Bacchic revel. The ancient founder of Thebes gleefully affirms:

I shall not weary, nor by night nor day
Smiting on earth the Thyrsus. We forget
In joy our age.

Again, in a beautiful strophe by the chorus, Euripides glimpsed in more serious
and appreciative fashion the sense of freedom which characterized the Bacchanal’s
experience. The simile he used was appropriately that of the faun escaping nets
and huntsmen:

Till sheltering arms of trees around her close
The twilight of the tresses of the woods;-
O happy ransomed one, safe hid from foes
Where no man tracks the forest solitudes!

Altogether, therefore, the new Bacchic life was one of joyful self-abandon,
of freedom from the complexities and restraints of civilization, of return to
the direct simplicities of nature.

More than all this it was a life of miraculous power; for by the very fact
of divine possession the Bacchanal believed himself to have acquired the power
of the god. Hence, he could heal diseases, control the forces of nature, and
even prophesy. Plato reflected the popular conviction that the Bacchae could
work miracles in his famous comparison of the lyric poets to the maenads. He
said:

Lyric poets are not in their right minds when they are composing their beautiful
strains; but when failing under the power of music and meter they are inspired
and possessed; like Bacchic maidens who draw milk and honey from rivers when
they are under the influence of Dionysus but not when they are in their right
mind.

The Bacchae of Euripides literally teems with miracles. There

flows with milk the plain,
and flows with wine,
Flows with the wild bees’ nectar dews divine.

The credulous herdsman of Pentheus tells of particular wonders wrought by
the maenads:

One grasped her thyrsus staff, and smote the rock,
And forth upleapt a fountain’s showry spray:
One in earth’s bosom planted her reed-wand,
And up there through the god a wine-fount sent:
And whoso fain would drink white-foaming draughts
Scarred with their finger tips the breast of earth,
And milk gushed forth unstinted: dripped the while
Sweet streams of honey from their ivy staves.

In the battle between the Theban folk and the Bacchae, later narrated, this
strange portent occurred: the javelins of the townspeople drew no blood while
the wands of the maenads caused wound after wound. The same drama of Euripides
also tells of the prophetic power of one who was possessed by Dionysus. Again
it is Teiresias, himself a professional prophet, who thus testifies of Bacchus:

A prophet is this god, the Bacchic frenzy
And ecstasy are full fraught with prophecy:
For, in his fullness when he floods our frame
He makes his maddened votaries tell the future.

The life of the Bacchant was, therefore, a dynamic life in which the peculiar
power of the deity operated to perform wonderful deeds through men.

Most important of all, the new Bacchic life in its emotional and dynamic
aspects was viewed as but the foretaste of a happy existence in the future.
The Thracians, among whom the Dionysian cult originated, seem to have early
attained the belief in a blessed future life with the gods. In speaking of the
Getae, a tribe of the Thracians, Herodotus affirmed, “They were the most valiant
and most just of the Thracians,” and then he added in explanation of these characteristics
that “they believe themselves immortal; they think that they do not die, but
that the dead go to join their god Zalmoxis.” Pomponious Mela, a Latin geographer
of the early imperial period, repeated a similar testimony concerning the Getae,
only more in detail. There is considerable probability that this Zalmoxis was
an indigenous Getan divinity, and was related to Sabazius, the Thracian prototype
of the Greek Dionysus. Whatever may have been the relationship, it is clear
that Dionysus functioned in Hellenistic cults as god of the underworld, and
his devotees had the same expectation in relation to him that the ancient Getae
had concerning Zalmoxis.

Being a yearly divinity Dionysus was a natural candidate for this function.
His experience in nature was characterized by a constant dying and rising again.
Yet it was only by proxy that Dionysus passed through these experiences; just
as he was immolated by proxy in the rending of the sacred victim. The real Dionysus
was the permanent spirit back of the phenomena of nature which caused the recurrent
revival of life. He was a god, and immortality was one of the distinguishing
characteristics of godhead. Immortality and divinity were all but interchangeable
terms in primitive Greek thought.

Thus when the Bacchanals by the sacraments of eating and drinking entered
into direct communion with their god, they became partakers of his immortality.
In assimulating the raw flesh wherein the god was temporarily incarnate and
in drinking the juice of the grape, they received into their bodies an undying
substance. In life mystically united with their god, in death they could not
be divided, and when the time came for them to go to the invisible world, they
were sure of sharing the blessed life of their god. So the unusual emotional
experiences fostered by the Dionysian rites, the intoxication of wine or of
the dance, the frenzy of the orgy, the divine gift of foresight or miracle-working
power–these were more than merely proofs of divine possession. They were a
definite foretaste and assurance of a blessed future life. In the crude physical
emotionalism of Bacchic ecstasy, therefore, the devotees of the wine-god found
a new birth experience which guaranteed them a happy immortality.

IV

The question of the influence of the Dionysus type of experience in the Graeco-Roman
world remains to be discussed. As early as the seventh century before the Christian
era the state religions of the serene and placid Olympians were failing to satisfy
the religious needs of great masses of the common people in Greece. In their
dissatisfaction they turned to the more intimate gods of the earth who had to
do with the common things of life: to Demeter, the goddess of grain, and to
Dionysus, the god of the vine. These were divinities who suffered with men in
their toil and who gave them joy at harvest time. The cult of Dionysus coming
from the northland spread in a great wave of religious enthusiasm over Greece
proper, over the island states of the Aegean, and across to the mainland of
Asia Minor. At first it met with violent opposition, as the legends of Lycurgus
and Pentheus prove. In those early days rarely was the god graciously received
as he was, for example, by Icarus in Attica. In spite of opposition, however,
the contagious enthusiasm of the wine-god spread with unusual rapidity throughout
Greece. In order to restrain Bacchic excesses the city-states of Greece had
no other alternative than to adopt the Cult, bring it under state patronage,
and by official regulation temper its enthusiasm somewhat. At Delphi Dionysus
was associated with Apollo, and there the sacred maidens went mad in the service
of the two gods. In Athens he entered into civic partnership with Athena and
yearly wedded the Basilinna. At Eleusis he was brought into relation with Demeter
and led the march of the candidates along the Sacred Way from Athens. In Teos
and Naxos he even became the paramount state deity, the “god of the city” and
“protector of the most holy state.”

It was as a private cult, rather than as a state religion, however, that
the worship of Dionysus made its deepest impression on both Hellenic and Hellenistic
life. In the private brotherhoods, the natural emotions aroused by the cult
practices were allowed free play and the guaranties offered to initiates were
of a very realistic order; hence the appeal of the cult was strong, particularly
to the masses and to women generally. At the beginning of Aristophanes’ comedy,
Lysistrate, impatient with waiting, complains that if the women had been invited
to the shrine of Bacchus “there would be no getting along for the crowd of timbrels.”
Indeed, the prominence of women in the worship of Dionysus is one of the most
striking features of the cult.

Such a religion as this, which overflowed the political boundaries of states
and appealed not to local interests but to certain elemental human desires and
emotions, had a great opportunity in the Helenistic period. With the conquests
of Alexander the eastern Mediterranean world was thrown open to Dionysian influence.
It is difficult, however, to trace the independent existence and influence of
Bacchic mysteries for the simple reason that they fused so readily with similar
cults all over the Mediterranean area. The religion of Dionysus lived on in
altered form in Orphism. In Asia Minor it merged with the cults of Attis and
Sabazius. Plutarch noted the affinity between the rites and legends of Adonis
and their Dionysian counterparts, while Tibullus, in one of his elegies, clearly
recorded the identification of Dionysus and Osiris.

Notwithstanding this widespread syncretism, the literature of the Hellenistic
and Graeco-Roman periods is full of references which show the strength and extent
of peculiarly Dionysian influences. At the very beginning of the Hellenistic
period stands the classical instance of the estrangement of Philip of Macedon
and his queen Olympias. Plutarch was of the opinion that Bacchic orgies had
much to do with this unfortunate situation. He said that Olympias was more zealous
than all the rest of the women of that country in her devotion to Dionysian
orgies and

“carried out these rites of possession and ecstasy in very barbarous fashion.
She introduced huge tame serpents into the Bacchic assemblies, and these kept
creeping out of the ivy and mystic likna and twining themselves around the thyrsi
of the women and their garlands and frightening the men out of their senses.”

Philip was jealous and suspicious of his queen’s exclusive devotion to the
Dionysus cult. In Italy, at the beginning of the second century B.C., Dionysus
worship spread with such rapidity and created such a disturbance in society
that the Senate, as a result of reported excesses, took strenuous measures for
the suppression of the cult. The affair ended with the promulgation of rigid
regulations governing the conditions under which meetings of the brotherhood
might be held. The Sicilian Diodorus, writing in the Augustan age, said, “In
many of the Hellenic states every other year, Bacchic bands of women collect,
and it is lawful for maidens to carry the thyrsus and join in the enthusiasm;
while the women forming in groups, offer sacrifices to the god, and revel, celebrating
with hymns the presence of Dionysus.” Plutarch, in his writing, made many references
to Dionysian practices and told strange tales concerning the Bacchantes of Delphi
especially. Once when the thyiades on Parnassus were overtaken by a violent
snowstorm, the good people of Delphi went out to rescue them, and their coats
actually crumbled to pieces they were frozen so hard. Again, during a sacred
war between Phocis and Delphi, the thyiades lost their way and came to Amphissa
without realizing where they were. Here they threw themselves down in the agora
and fell asleep from sheer exhaustion. The women of the city guarded them so
long as they were asleep, refreshed them when they awakened, and set them on
their homeward way in safety. These tales are recalled in order to show the
reverence with which the devotees of Dionysus were held in the first Christian
century. Pliny told of the popularity of the Dionysian cult in Thrace even in
his day, while Pausanias referred to the worship of the god in many widely scattered
localities. Even in the later days of paganism, Firmicuss Maternus said that
the Cretans still practiced their orgiastic rites in honor of Dionysus.

These are but samples of an array of evidence which might be assembled to
prove the widespread influence of the Bacchic type of experience with all of
its excessive emotionalism in the first-century Graeco-Roman world. People in
general were thoroughly familiar with it, as contemporary literature fully proves.
Accordingly, in reckoning up the satisfactions offered by pagan religions to
the seekers for salvation in the day of Jesus and Paul, the emotional rebirth
experience in the Dionysian cult be counted as significant.