by Sophie Strand
This is the first of several Dionysus as the sacred masculine explorations. This God is too juicy for a cursory treatment! And his cups, although thousands of years old, are still full of freshly fermented wisdom.
“Behold, a God’s son is come into this land…” speaks Dionysus at the start of Euripides’ The Bacchae, setting up the wine God as a new arrival. Although Thebes is often identified as his place of origin, his return to his birthplace is still experienced as the arrival of a stranger. Dionysus is often called the “foreign” god. The Greeks, often seen as the original worshippers of the wine God, did not in fact think of Dionysus as originating with them. He was always seen as having come from someplace else. Who was this fresh-faced, long-haired, young man, dressed in women’s clothing, with the power to transform men into grapevines, women into ravenous, predatory leopards, and water into wine?
His origin stories are so numerous that to recount them all would take several books. The only constant is his mutability: half human, half god, his is born mid transformation, his curling tresses a swarm of snakes, horns sprouting from his head. Son of Zeus and Semele. Son of a snake and the moon (Semele means moon). He was raised on a mountain. In a palace. In a grove. By his aunt. By a satyr. By women. By elementals: nymphs and nature spirits. He was raised as a girl, to protect him from Zeus’ jealous wife Hera. The important thing is that when he arrives it is not as a Joseph Campbell’s solitary hero on a quest for origins or an illusory grail. No. Dionysus arrives grinning, virile, vegetal, embodied, with the grail already in hand. He isn’t in search of anything. Instead, he’s here to share the sacrament he’s already attained. Honeyed mead. Wine. Open air devotional dance and song. And the secrets of a pre-Neolithic existence.
The first mention of Dionysus dates back to 1250 BC in Crete, in Linear B, the oldest version of Mycenaean Greek. When later in Greece and Rome, he is seen as the foreign God I see this experience of distance being temporal rather than spatial. Dionysus arrives, rosy-cheeked, from the Bronze Age. He probably even predates his symbolic wine. He is often mentioned in relationship to bees and honey: the ingredients of the sacred mead of the honeybee Goddesses of Crete. Even as the Greeks inherited wine from the Phoenicians and began to transport wine across seas in stacked amphorae, we can see the echo of honeyed mead in the bee-hive like interlocking structure of the wine vessels in the belly of boats. And like the fluidity of his favorite sacrament, Dionysus does not stay still. He wanders. I see him as embodying a pre-Neolithic peripatetic impulse, following the animals across the land, and the pulse of seasons.
When he does arrive it is always unexpectedly, his magical wand thrust into the air like a lightning rod, symbolizing his connection to his thunderbolt father. And his lunar mother. His celebrations only become calendrical in the time of Roman rule, but are first characterized as almost mushroom miraculous, popping up in full swing, without any real pretense or planning. His celebrations were quite literally like emergent behavior. When enough people felt his presence, smelled mead fermenting in rainwater flooded beehives, felt vines constricting and stroking the walls of civilized life, a type of chaotic wildness would coalesce into a new sort of group behavior. The Bacchanal swarm. The Maenad’s ecstatic frenzy. Women are characterized as prides of lion, hunting the hillsides for prey, working as one feline mind as they sought out an ancient feast of raw meat and blood. Dionysus is like his symbolic vine: he twines and entangles and embraces. He is a foliage of faces, a network of connections, rather than one fixed, monotheistic identity. How can we give this gift back to the masculine? The gift of mutability and natural transformation? Your version of being masculine can shift day to day, city to season to countryside. Let us give back the masculine the ability to experiment with creative, spiritual, and sexual expression knowing full well that this roots them as trees flexible in a strong wind, rather than brittle dead sticks stuck in sand. Let us give masculinity back its “thyrsus”. Its magical flowering wand of reciprocal relationship with the natural world. A man who can dance with plants and honor beasts, a man who can be a woman and an androgen and an animal, is more than a gender. He is a celebration. A hive of humming bees. Secret network of fungus ready to erupt as the air moistens. A murmuration of birds. A cluster of grapes. Throng of singing women. A magician.
Wonderful resources have include the works of:
Yentl Love @thequeerclassicist
The Bacchae by Euripides (both Anne Carson and Gilbert Murray’s translations)
The Immortality Key by Brian Muraresku
The Myth of the Goddess by Anne Baring and Jules Cashford
And the podcast episodes on Dionysus by Ancient History Fangirl and Let’s Talk About Myths, Baby!
Featured image Leonardo da Vinci’s Dionysus
Follow Sophie Strand on Instagram @cosmogyny for more poetic mythology & mythological poetry.
About the author
Sophie Strand is a freelance writer based in Kingston, New York. She finds her poems in the exposed root systems of fallen pines and rattlesnake nests on mountain summits. She has three chapbooks: Love Song to a Blue God (Oread Press) and Those Other Flowers To Come (Dancing Girl Press) and The Approach (The Swan). Her poems have been published by www.poetry.org, Braided Way Magazine, Your Impossible Voice, The Doris, Persephone’s Daughters, and Entropy. Read more @cosmogyny.
