The Pure Light of High Summer The Pure Light of High Summer It was the Greeks who defined the subconscious Dionysian aspirations of the modern drinker, who could be imagined as a pagan remnant who has survived the purges of Christianity. Islam, ironically, gave us distillation just as the Greeks gave us fermentation. Distillation and fermentation: they could not be more different. One rational and scientific in origin, the other mystical and organic.
Dionysus is the god of vegetation, of the theater, of bulls, of women, and of wine. He is the destroyer and the liberator, “the god who crushes men.” But he is the god who also demands that embryos not be harmed. His cult was dominated by women. Its practitioners were primarily female with a reputation for being “raving women,” mainas. He was the god of what the Greeks called zoe, or indestructible collective life, as opposed to mere bios, the life of an individual. He emerged from the thigh of Zeus and was also known as Dios phos, “light of Zeus.”
The Greeks themselves found him baffling and unnerving, They struggled to find the words to describe him. Was he anthropomorphic, or was he like some element of the universe that could only be sensed indirectly? The poet Pindar, invoking his miraculous relationship to the blossoming of orchards, compared him with hagnon phengos oporas: “the pure light of high summer.”
The great Hungarian scholar of Dionysus, Carl Kerényi, began his opus Dionysos, Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, with a remarkable scholarly reverie on the subject of fermentation in Crete. Dionysus, he claimed, arose in some complex and obscure way from the fermentation symbolism of early Crete, where fermented honey and then beer suggested life emerging mysteriously from decay. It was fermentation itself that made Cretans think of the indestructibility of zoe. As things decay, they give off an enigmatic life; they bubble and seethe and self-transform. Like honey and mead, wine suggested zoe and seemed to partake in cosmic life. “A natural phenomenon inspired a myth of zoe … a statement about life which shows its indestructibility.”
The rising of the star Sirius in July became, as with the Egyptians, the time of ritual fermenting—that is, the height of summer. Fermentation and intoxication must have seemed a mystical unity to the Cretans, who also consumed opium, according to Kerényi. The intoxication must have had religious import to them, and from honey and beer they transposed the symbolism to the richer, more luxurious wine. They called their sacrificial bulls “wine-colored” for no particular reason, and a thousand years later Greeks still carried bulls to the altar during Dionysian rites. Around this god many odd symbols crystallized for reasons we cannot now excavate. The bull, the snake, fermented grape juice, and the dolphins one sees on black-figured cups surrounding the ship where Dionysus sails alone under a mast of grapevines. They are the sailors who intended to kidnap him but were foiled and turned, by an act of godly mercy, into cetaceans.
The Cretans created a core mythology around this god of fermentation that the Greeks later continued, sometimes unknowingly. Though since Linear A, the actual language of the Cretans, has never been deciphered, we do not really know. The Minoan hieroglyph for wine, meanwhile, an ideogram in Linear B (early Greek translated into Cretan writing), is very like the Egyptian hieroglyph for the same thing, and we know from paintings of the Eighteenth Dynasty that Egypt already had a vast wine culture by the time Crete became rich, a viticulture that perhaps spread to Crete, as we can see from the Minoan villa rustica excavated at Kato Zakros. The vine was not Cretan or Greek, but in Europe its fermented fruit did become a singular god. A dense and complex core of symbols and myth passed into the occidental bloodstream, making wine a source of religious experience. It eventually became Christ’s blood.
To this day the only place in Greece that is named after the god of wine is the Athens suburb of Sto Dionyso, a few miles north of Kifisia. (The others have been Christianized into “Saint Dionysus.”) In ancient times it was known as Ikarion. This mountain village might have been one of the first places that the new cult established itself around 1500 B.C., coming up from the coast of Attica. The ports of Attica, such as Porto Raphti and Thorikos, had Dionysian festivals in classical times and some of the oldest theaters, and perhaps they were where the first wine deity arrived by sea. It might have been from the Aegean island of Ikaria.
The god arrived. He went to the house of a man called Ikarion, who had a daughter named Erigone. Ikarion had little idea that the tall stranger was the son of Zeus and Semele or that he had been married to Ariadne. The stranger had a gift: a domesticated vine. The people of the Attic mountains only knew the wild vine. Ikarion planted the domesticated variety and under the stranger’s instruction learned to make wine from it. He then poured his first vintage into pigskins and took them into the neighboring villages as a gift. Perhaps it was the god’s instruction.
Not knowing what this new drink was, the villagers quaffed it like water and became murderously drunk. Thinking that Ikarion had poisoned them, they formed a mob and swept down on his house, where they killed him on the spot and buried him under a wild vine tree. When Erigone returned home, her dog, Maira, dug up the corpse.
Erigone then hanged herself in grief from this same tree, from which bunches of wild grapes hung. Father, daughter, and dog were compassionately turned into constellations by the gods (Ikarion became Boötes, Erigone became Virgo, and the dog was converted into Canis Minor). Later, in classical times, Erigone was remembered by the young girls of Athens in a curious festival called the Aiora, or “the feast of the swinging chairs,” during which they swung themselves from trees in little chairs to imitate the giddy sensation of being drunk. This took place the day before the Dionysian Festival and reminded its celebrants, one assumes, that Dionysus was a god of death and sacrifice as well as a god of stage plays and blossoming orchards and wine. In other versions of the myth, Erigone was actually the god’s wife, and in yet others it was Dionysus himself who was torn to pieces and then miraculously reconstituted.
The tame vine—the hemeris—arrives in Attica as a mysterious gift, and it is the god who makes that gift. The gift by its very nature has to be shared, consumed, and is at the beginning devoid of commercial instrumentality. Wine, in fact, is often portrayed as a “gift,” an enjoyment and a balm that has no functional use to the human body and is not at all a food. The god donates it, and it circulates freely, entering into everyone’s bloodstream until it becomes a kind of binding agent that holds a mass of individuals together. It is shared, and it is sacral.
Lewis Hyde discusses Kerényi’s book on Dionysus in his great work The Gift. He remarks that in later times the Greek worshippers of Dionysus “would sing of the dismemberment of their god as they crushed the grapes through the winepress. Dionysos is a god who is broken into a higher life. He returns from his dismemberment as strong or stronger than before, the wine being the essence of the grapes and more powerful.”
Hyde says this about drink itself: “Moreover, when the fermented liquid is drunk, the spirit comes to life in a new body. Drinking the mead is the sacrament of reconstituting the god.”
The vineyard workers of the Mediterranean were ordered by imperial decree in 691 to stop crying “Dionysos!” at harvest time and to cry instead “Kyrie Eleison!” It was the sixth year of the reign of Emperor Justinian II. The Byzantine Empire was in crisis as the Arabs launched assault after assault against it. The effect of this Islamic war against the Byzantines is hard to fully gauge. It is possible that the iconoclastic crisis a century later—when icons and images were banned throughout the empire—was a response to Islam’s seemingly successful severity. In 692 Justinian convened a council known as the Quinisextum that issued 102 canons. It was a watershed, a final denial of classical and pagan culture.
In the 102 canons many things were banned. The pagan festival of Brumelia, where the citizens of Constantinople dressed in disguises and danced through the streets, was abolished. Mimes, pantomimes, and spectacles with wild animals were suppressed. Canon 24 prohibited priests from attending the theater or watching games in the Hippodrome. Canon 62 outlawed women dancing in the streets and the wearing of female dress by men. Invoking the name of Dionysus passed into history. Young men were also forbidden from leaping over bonfires to celebrate the summer solstice.
Dionysus, then, was banished as part of a widespread suppression of public pleasure and pagan freedoms. It was a vast piece of social engineering intended to Christianize the empire once and for all and to make it more like its bitter rival, Islam. (It did nothing to save Justinian, who was soon deposed and defaced by having his nose cut off, so that he was henceforth known as Rhinometos, the “noseless.” He later returned to the throne, presiding over an empire forever altered by his legislation.)
A Christian, however, still drinks wine as a symbol of the blood of a Christ who has been sacrificed, scattered, and reconstituted. Dionysus, a glamorous and youthful male god who incarnates the fermenting mysteries of zoe, or eternal life, is highly suggestive. He is the god who transforms and intoxicates women, whose element is an alcoholic drink.
Greek religion suggested a “Dionysus-dominated universalism.” Dionysus, in other words, spread all over the Roman world and became a world religion. In the tombs of the dead, images of Dionysus were especially common, as Kerényi writes, “for it was in connection with the burial of the dead that the need to celebrate indestructible life was most absolute and universal. This is as true of the Dionysian religion as it is of Christianity. The amplification of the Dionysus cult in late antiquity to a cosmic, cosmopolitan religion was a very natural development, but such a development was possible only insofar as zoe could exert a spontaneous religious influence. This influence, in the mythological and cultic forms here described, had a historical limit.”
But it survives. The drinker slouching his way every night toward his bar-shaped Bethlehem is searching for his or her own version of Pindar’s amazing intuition. We want, even for a few moments, the “pure light of high summer” inside us. For Pindar was suggesting not that Dionysus was like that light, but that he was that light. The god as summer’s light itself: intoxication as pure immanence.