GREEK
MYTHOLOGY

Dionysus does not anger easily, but denying his divinity is one of the most surefire ways to piss him off. There’s multiple stories of Dionysus proving his divinity to humans, like the pirate story, but the most famous is definitely The Bacchae by Euripides. On its surface, it’s quite a disturbing myth: Dionysus returns home to his mother’s city of Thebes, which is now ruled by his cousin, Pentheus. Pentheus feels threatened by the presence of Dionysus’ cult (not helped by the fact that his mother and aunts have all gone crazy and gone to join the wild women in the mountains), so he persecutes Dionysus relentlessly. After teasing Pentheus and trying to get him to come round, Dionysus decides that he’s a lost cause and that he must be punished for his hubris. Dionysus entices Pentheus to come to see the women in the mountains, has him dress in drag himself, parades the king through the streets of his own city, and then has him violently dismembered by the Maenads — including his own mother. And then, if that wasn’t already enough, curses the rest of Thebes’ royal family. On the surface, it’s another example of a god being cruel and arbitrary, which begs the question, why do I worship a god who dismembers people? There’s a lot going on here. Part of the reason I think and write about this myth so often is that there are many layers of interpretation within it, and there’s a lot it can tell us about Dionysus. Myths need not be literal, and it’s possible to simply write off myths that don’t mesh with your personal interpretation of a deity (like, for example, I give little mind to the myth of Dionysus’ rape of Aura — apart from being from only one source, it also may be a reinterpreted Anatolian myth). The Bacchae, however, is far too crucial to Dionysus’ mythos to be written off like that. It sits right at the heart of who Dionysus is, both as a character and as a deity. So, I spend a lot of time thinking through The Bacchae and the ways it’s relevant to my life and to my understanding of Dionysus. I’ve written elsewhere that Dionysus is a god of duality. All of the aspects of his dual nature are relevant to this play, but I think there are three in particular that it focuses on: otherness, gender, and rulership. Otherness Although Dionysus is returning home to his mother’s city, he is presented as a foreigner. He and all of his Bacchantes come from Asia Minor, making them apparently “not-Greek” to the people of Thebes, which is why they can get away with so much social transgression. They run wild through the mountains, drunk and half-crazy. If the “Apollonian” sentiment represents everything that Greece is supposed to be — logical, artistic, productive, a shining civilization of bright marble — then the Dionysian sentiment is the precise opposite: It is dark, wild, irrational, hedonistic, and downright savage. Apollo is the god of reason and truth, while Dionysus is a god of frenzy and delusion. His rituals are ecstatic and sometimes violent. On the surface, Dionysus appears to represent everything Greece wants to distance itself from. He subverts its values, and brings its Shadow into full focus. So of course Pentheus is threatened by him. Dionysus’ presence in Thebes threatens to undermine the social order that, as king, Pentheus is set to maintain. Pentheus associates Dionysus with moral degradation and depravity (something Dionysus’ cult would literally be associated with when it was persecuted in Rome — Livy’s comments on it read like the Ancient Roman of Satanic Panic conspiracy fearmongering). Pentheus claims that the Bacchantes are using this new god “Dionysus” as an excuse to have wanton sex in the woods: "They’ve set up their mixing bowls brimming with wine amidst their cult gatherings and each lady slinks off in a different direction to some secluded wilderness to service the lusts of men. They pretend to be maenads performing sacrifices but in reality they rank Aphrodite’s pleasures before Bacchus!" —Euripides, The Bacchae 221–25 (translation by Stephen Esposito) Pentheus is very insistent that the women in the mountains are having crazy sex. Remember that, because it’ll be important later. Pentheus later goes on to complain about the leader of these crazy women, a pretty young man who charms women easily and makes extraordinary claims about Pentheus’ aunt: "They say, too, that some stranger has come here a quack dealer in spells from the land of Lydia his long locks and golden curls all sweet-smelling his cheeks dark as wine, his eyes full of Aphrodite’s charms Day and night he surrounds himself with young girls alluring them with his mysteries of joy. But if I capture him within this land I’ll put a stop to his beating the thyrsus and tossing his hair In fact I’ll cut his head right off his body! This is the guy who claims that Dionysus is a god. Indeed he claims that Dionysus was once sewn into Zeus’s thigh. The truth is that Dionysus was incinerated by fiery lightning along with his mother Semele because she had lied about her union with Zeus. Aren’t these terrible slanders worthy of hanging? What outrageous acts of hybris this stranger commits, whoever he is!" —233–46 As you might have guessed, “the Stranger” is in fact Dionysus, disguised as a priest of himself. The audience already knows this, so it’s a striking bit of dramatic irony when Pentheus accuses Dionysus of hubris. Pentheus describes this young priest in otherizing terms, emphasizing how he is effeminate, how he is a sorcerer (designating something “magic” rather than religion is often a form of othering, see this answer), and how he has offended the gods of Greece. Pentheus calls the mysterious priest “the Stranger,” indicating that he’s from elsewhere. But not only is Dionysus from Greece, Dionysus is from Thebes. His mother is Pentheus’ aunt. They’re first cousins. There’s not actually anything foreign about Dionysus, just as there’s not actually anything un-Greek about everything he represents. All of this weirdness and wanton behavior is from right here, in Thebes. He is everything about Pentheus’ own culture (and that of the Athenians watching this) that he refuses to accept. And when something is almost familiar but slightly “off,” it falls squarely into the uncanny valley. Dionysus doesn’t just threaten Pentheus on a societal level, he also unsettles Pentheus on a personal level. Dionysus undermines Pentheus’ power with his very existence. It’s socially expected that Pentheus would give homage to a new god that comes through. But everything about this god makes Pentheus viscerally uncomfortable. The easiest way for Pentheus to get around having to worship him, then, is to claim that Dionysus isn’t really a god. That’s not real religion, that’s magic, or just an excuse to have sex and break rules. No, you’re committing hybris! Gender One of the things that makes Dionysus so unsettling to Pentheus is his attitude towards gender. Dionysus plays around with gender identity and presentation all the time. There’s various myths about this, but in The Bacchae, gender subversion plays a very distinctive role. Early on, Dionysus incites the women of Thebes to distinctly unladylike behavior. The Maenads are dangerous; they can pillage cities and dismember cattle by themselves, armed with nothing but their fennel wands. While Pentheus is raving against the Bacchae, his father Cadmus and the respected seer Tiresias (who has experience with genderbending) dress up like Bacchantes to worship Dionysus. "If hoary old age weren’t protecting you [Tiresias], you’d be sitting in chains with the rest of the Bacchae for importing these sinister rituals. For whenever the liquid joy of the grape comes into women’s festivals, then, I assure you, there is nothing wholesome in their rites." —258–62 Ancient Greece, if you’ll remember, was absurdly patriarchal. To an Ancient Greek king, women running wild in the mountains (and, *gasp,* having sex!), and men who dress like women, are the scariest things in the world. There is nothing much scarier or more transgressive to the patriarchy than “men in dresses,” men who behave or present in gender-nonconforming ways. This is because patriarchy is based on the assumption that there is a specific way in which both men and women are naturally inclined to behave, and anything that suggests that gender roles are not “natural” — that they are, in fact, arbitrary — is threatening. In a world where men are “inherently” superior to women (physically, mentally, spiritually, and morally), any man who willingly acts like a woman in any way must be “sick.” Because why else would you want to be like women? Homophobia is actually misdirected misogyny — the only reason a man would willingly endure the abject humiliation and emasculation of being sexually passive, i.e. act like a woman (because it’s not “gay” if you’re on top), is if something was wrong with him. (Side note: there’s another myth in which Dionysus invents a dildo and uses it to keep his promise to have sex with a man who died before he could fulfill it. Dionysus has no problem being sexually passive, either.) Hence, the belief that gay men and “men in dresses” are somehow unnatural, sick, or damaged. And if they’re sick, the logic goes, then that also makes them dangerous or violent. I’m going to get political for a moment: “Men in dresses” encompasses three completely separate classes of people. One is drag queens or crossdressers, men who dress up like women because it’s fun. Two is “femboys,” men who adopt a feminine or androgynous gender presentation without intending to pass as women (i.e. they’re not dressed up, they’re just wearing clothes they like). The third is trans-women, who aren’t men at all. All of these different groups are lumped together and assumed to be dangerous because they reject the role that the patriarchy has prescribed for men, in various ways and for various reasons. That’s why there’s backlash against “drag queen story time,” and why that backlash is usually driven by transphobia, even though drag queens are not trans women. Drag queens and trans women are believed to be dangerous to children, not because they are, but because they’re “men in dresses” and “men in dresses” are “inherently” dangerous or perverse. Male femininity induces so much cognitive dissonance in the patriarchy’s collective minds that it is an affront to the social order just by its very existence. Add to that the dangerous “trap” narrative — part of what makes “men in dresses” so scary is that a straight man might be attracted to the feminine man/trans woman, believing him/her to be a cis-woman. When he discovers that he’s/she’s not, that forces him to question his own sexual orientation, which threatens his masculinity, which may as well be his gender identity. It threatens to throw him out of the social order that he’s worked so hard to secure himself in. In the worst cases, which is unfortunately a lot of them, the man will blame the feminine man or trans woman for inducing this cognitive dissonance by accusing him/her of deliberate deception with the express purpose of making him uncomfortable (as opposed to just existing), and react violently. I think that similar cognitive dissonance is going on in Pentheus’ mind when he sees Dionysus. Pentheus’ first impression of Dionysus is that he looks effeminate: "Well, stranger, your body is indeed quite shapely, at least for enticing the women. And that’s why you’ve come to Thebes, isn’t it? Those long side-curls of yours show for sure you’re no wrestler, rippling down your cheeks, infected with desire. And you keep your skin white by deliberate contrivance, not exposed to the sun’s rays but protected by the shade, hunting Aphrodite’s pleasures with your beauty." —453–59 Pentheus calls attention to Dionysus’ beautiful golden curls that flow down his cheeks and onto his shoulders, to his “shapely” body, and to his pale skin (which was associated with femininity in ancient cultures). By Ancient Greece’s standards, Dionysus looks very androgynous. Pentheus tries to insult him by saying that he’s there to seduce women, but there’s more than a little homoeroticism in there. So, what do you think Dionysus has Pentheus do? Dionysus suggests a voyeuristic venture to see the women in the mountains. And Pentheus, who up until this point has only condemned the women as depraved, is suddenly very interested in seeing what exactly it is they do up there. Why? Well, I’m guessing it’s for the same reason that different countries’ porn tastes tend to align with whatever that culture’s taboos are. Remember, Pentheus has been utterly fixated on his idea that the women are using Dionysus’ cult as an excuse to have sex. Dionysus tells Pentheus that to go see the women, he has to disguise himself as one of them, or else they’ll attack him. That’s like Claude Frollo dressing up like a gypsy to access the Court of Miracles. As Pentheus is getting dressed up, he perceives that Dionysus has a bull’s horns, meaning that he’s beginning to perceive Dionysus as he actually is: PENTHEUS: […} And you seem to be a bull leading us in front and horns seem to have sprouted on your head. But were you a beast before? Because certainly you are a bull now." DIONYSUS: "The god accompanies me. Though initially ill-disposed he is in alliance with us. So now, at last, you see what you ought to see." —920–22 Then Pentheus, the King of Thebes, processes through his own streets dressed as a girl. We laugh at him, the same way we laugh at men who pass homophobic legislation and then turn out to like submitting themselves to male sex workers in their spare time — not because being gay is wrong, or because being submissive is wrong, or because hiring sex workers is wrong, but because they’re hypocrites. So much for maintaining his masculine power in the face of Dionysian subversion. Rulership So, you may have noticed that Dionysus is a bit a revolutionary. In fact, he actually has an epithet related to his capacity as a revolutionary: Eleutherios, “the liberator” or “the free.” Many different contexts, both in myth and in real life, establish Dionysus as a god of the socially oppressed and marginalized. He is a guardian of women, and his cult provides a place for women to be free and independent. He’s obviously an ally to LGBTQ+ people, or the nearest Ancient Greek equivalent. Wine is his great equalizer, breaking the chains that bind humans to propriety, bringing out the crazy and bestial sides in all people. His very existence is a massive “screw you” to Pentheus, upsetting the patriarchal power structure that Pentheus represents. Pentheus resists Dionysus’ tide of social change until he is literally rent by it, representing the destruction of that power structure. But Dionysus is a god. Not only does he have a right to be there, he has the right to be there. As son and heir of Zeus, Dionysus is the social order. Thebes is his own mother’s city, and he’s come with his army of Bacchantes to conquer it. Pentheus is inherently wrong for daring to go against a god, and the god thoroughly punishes him for his hubris. What chance did he stand, against Dionysus’ divine sovereignty? "I say these things as Dionysus, born not from a mortal father but from Zeus. If you had known how to behave wisely when you chose otherwise, you would now be happy and have the son of Zeus as an ally." —1340–43 As much as I’d love to interpret Dionysus as a “make love, not war” sort of god, this isn’t the case. Areios, “warlike,” is one of his epithets. Dionysus is a straight-up conqueror-king who canonically brought India to its knees. So, just as Dionysus is many other contradictory things at once, he is also the revolutionary and the conqueror-king, both anti-establishment and the enforcer of the cosmic order that Pentheus transgresses. That’s why Alexander the Great himself and the Ptolemies identified themselves with him! One of the reasons I worship Dionysus is because all of the dualities that he embodies are somehow relevant to my life and my identity. This one is no exception. I’ve always prided myself on having something of a revolutionary impulse. I’m not virulently anti-establishment on a political level, but during my teen years, I did take personal offense at anyone or anything trying to curtail my freedom. A lot of teens are like that, but I was already like that, so I embraced this revolutionary tendency as an inherent aspect of my identity. I remember a feeling of invincibility, like I could put up with literally anything for the sake of making a point (preferable, in many ways, to the adult anxiety that I experience now). I projected an imaginary tyrant onto basically every authority figure in my life. And then a little later, I discovered that the imaginary tyrant was, in fact, myself. Whenever I got offended by someone trying to control me, I would become indignant and sink into a childish evil overlord fantasy, in which I control everything and everyone worships me. This tyrannical part of me was directly at odds with my values, which was that everyone else deserves the same freedom that I want for myself. Turns out, that doesn’t work. Tyrants are the only people with true, absolute freedom to work their will, and living peacefully with others requires surrendering some amount of personal freedom. You can’t live in a society and be completely independent or individualistic all the time. My anti-authoritarian teenage mind made it impossible for me to truly “worship” the gods. I associated worship with submission, and I refused to submit to anyone. That might have been hubris in Ancient Greece, but the gods didn’t hold it against me. Dionysus taught me what worship is actually supposed to look like, which changed my perspective on it. I’m slowly working through all of my hangups around power, especially as it relates to things like sexuality and gender identity. I need to get my sense of power back, and part of that means leaning into or at least examining Dionysus’ “conqueror-king” persona. What does it mean to deserve power? And how do I come to believe that I deserve it? That’s why I’ve been thinking about this myth a lot lately. I’m still trying to figure out that piece. I think my current interpretation is that being weird (see above) does not preclude having power. Dionysus waltzes into Thebes knowing full well that he is the most powerful person around. That’s not something he has to earn, or gain, or even prove — it just is. No amount of complaint or persecution from Pentheus will ever change this. Dionysus wears a dress because he wants to, because he can, and that does absolutely nothing to undermine or cancel out his phenomenal cosmic power. Wearing a dress does not make him weaker, or inferior, or sick, or any of the other things that “men in dresses” are supposed to be. Dionysus is in power, so he can decide what the rules are and make everyone else follow them — all of the powerful men (Cadmus, Tiresias, and eventually Pentheus himself) have to wear dresses, too! That goes for everything else that’s transgressive about Dionysus, not just the crossdressing. Power does not have to look conventional, no matter how often the Pentheuses of the world insist that it does. True power does not have to be justified, either. The Mystery There’s one more aspect to this myth that I haven’t addressed yet, and that’s how it relates to the Dionysian Mystery tradition as a whole. There is no question that Pentheus’ death is brutal. Dionysus has him literally torn apart by a group of Maenads, including his own mother, who carries his head back to Thebes and presents it as a trophy, hallucinating that it’s the head of a mountain lion. And Pentheus is depicted as entirely deserving of this fate. Dionysus is enacting justice by inflicting this horror upon Thebes. After an entire play’s worth of him being amicable and a bit smart-mouthed, intent upon bringing joy to mortals, we suddenly see Dionysus at his most savage: "Appear as a bull or a many-headed snake or a fire-blazing lion to behold. Go, Bakkhos, and with a laughing face cast the noose of death on the hunter of the Bacchae as he falls under the herd of Maenads." —1017–23 The obvious lesson is “don’t underestimate Dionysus just becuase he seems goofy,” a subset of the more general rule, “don’t piss off the gods.” Although that interpretation isn’t wrong, it is a little bit shallow. Pentheus’ death represents far more than a straightforward punishment for hybris. The particular manner in which he dies is significant within the wider Dionysian mythos —sparagmos, dismemberment, is the manner in which Dionysus himself died. Long story short: Dionysus was once a god called Zagreus, the son of Persephone and heir of Zeus, who was dismembered by Titans at Hera’s behest. He is eventually reincarnated in his current form as the son of Zeus and Semele. Therefore, Dionysus is a god of death and rebirth. Sacrifices to the god were interpreted as stand-ins for him and (allegedly) dismembered in the same manner. The fact that Pentheus is also dismembered makes him essentially a stand-in for Dionysus, and implies an eventual rebirth. "The inherent dialectic of the cult, whose sacrificial offering the god himself voluntarily became, made ‘Pentheus’ into the name of a punished enemy of the god, who nevertheless in his suffering comes close enough to represent him. The contradictory nature of the god who suffers and lets himself be killed — a god whose servant, indeed he himself, was the sacrificial ax — was embodied in a man who destroyed himself, a frequent figure in later Attic tragedy." —Karl Kerenyi, Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life Pentheus death is therefore a twisted sort of initiation: In addition to representing the deconstruction of the old, traditionalist ways of thinking that he embodies throughout the play, it also represents the tearing-apart of the old self or the dissolution of the ego. Spiritual death is a necessary step of the initiation process, and often one of the first steps. I relate the sparagmos to alchemical dissolution, which is also inherent in the literal process of winemaking: Grapes are crushed into must that then ferments into wine, enzymes break down sugars to produce alcohol. Dionysus’ cult carries with it the promise of resurrection and eventual transcendence. "Now you have died and now you have been born, thrice blessed one, on this very day. Say to Persephone that Bakkhios himself freed you. A bull you rushed to milk. Quickly, you rushed to milk. A ram you fell into milk. You have wine as your fortunate honor. And rites await you beneath the earth, just as the other blessed ones." —Gold tablet from Thessaly Being an Initiate would allow the spirit of a dead person to appeal to the gods of the Underworld, proclaim their own divinity, and receive a happier afterlife — or even full apotheosis. In order to achieve that resurrection, you have to be willing to die. You have to be willing to let older ways of thinking be destroyed. You have to put yourself in uncomfortable situations, and confront parts of yourself that you would rather ignore. You also have to be able to recognize when God is staring you in the face, and honor it when it does. The real moral of the story, I would argue, is to embrace the things that Dionysus represents — liberation from one’s inhibitions, recognition of the inherent savagery hiding within civilized humanity, revelation through ecstasy, deconstruction of gender norms, pleasure as a spiritual avenue. You’re going to submit to the frenzy either way — if you can embrace the madness, it will be a fun and transcendent experience, but if you can’t, you will be rent by it as a natural consequence. Whether Euripides intended for some cult secret to be displayed on stage in the performance of this play, I have no idea, but his contradictory portrayal of Dionysus is very much in keeping with his duality. Dionysus is both kind and cruel, a divine force of nature and a humanlike friend to his worshippers. Therefore, I don’t interpret this play as intended to scare people into worshipping Dionysus; it is a display of Dionysian worship in all its beauty and terror.