Blessed are they who keep the rites of the mother, Cybele!
ANCIENT HYMN TO DIONYSUS FROM EURIPIDES, THE BACCHAE
What does the term Greek god suggest to you? Most people will think of Apollo—god of light and truth. Blond, bronzed, and made of muscle, he is the prototype of our cartoon superheroes. The sensuous Dionysus is everything Apollo is not. Born male, Dionysus was raised as a girl by the nymphs. Greek art portrays him sometimes as an old man, most frequently as an effeminate youth. On Olympus he took the seat of the goddess Hestia, both replacing her and carrying on her tradition.
Our society is not comfortable with Dionysian ambiguity. The ancient Greeks, on the other hand, had a fairly relaxed idea about what constituted the proper expression of male sexuality. And so we have another reason for Dionysus’s absence from our lives.
Just as we use neckties symbolically to separate our minds from our bodies, we also tend to allocate one set of psychological experiences to men and the other to women. To men we give the head—logic and discrimination, the finding of facts; to women we give the body—emotion, intuition. This is the realm of Dionysus. Perhaps for this reason Dionysus has always been especially beloved by women.
The Maenads
It is ironic that modern women often feel estranged from the ecstatic experience. The original Dionysian worshipers were the Maenads. These wild women of the mountains were the last devotees of the Great Goddess, the ancient matrifocal religion that the new patriarchal order was beginning to replace. They took their god, Dionysus, off into the woods to do their night revelry, the women’s mysteries into which Rhea had initiated him. The women’s mysteries were always held at night and were so secret, and the secret so well kept, that today we do not really know exactly what went on.
According to Monica Sjoo and Barbara Mor,
Anthropologist Jacquetta Hawkes … believes that the ecstatic mystery religion of Dionysus, the “tender-faced and curly haired” son of the Cretan Great Mother, was originally the cult of the Great Goddess herself, and her wild orgiastic women.…
[The Maenads possessed] the magical power to make the earth blossom. Rites were performed on the mountaintops, and at the touch of these wild women’s wands … streams of wine and water, milk and honey, broke free and flowed from the rocks in their … fury, at the dark of the moon, they would tear any man in pieces who happened to cross their path or enter their sacred precincts. Dionysus himself … was torn apart ritually and eaten as a sacrament …
Some stories have it that the Maenads were so intoxicated with the joy and ecstasy and abandon of their god Dionysus that finally they tore him to pieces and sent him to the underworld, the realm of Hades, where he was fermented as the grape is fermented and he came forth as the wine, his present form.
The Life Force
To worship Dionysus is to worship the life force. The pirates who tried to bind Dionysus—tried in effect to bind the ecstatic principle of organic growth—found they could not do it. Grapevines grew in wild profusion, ivy twined madly, and wine streamed down the deck of the ship. The vibrant energy of the earth inevitably triumphs over human efforts to suppress it, just as a tree’s growing roots will eventually burst through a concrete sidewalk that has been laid over them.
As the Greek society and psyche began to move from the emotional, feeling-level female values to the rational masculine world, the old goddesses became less influential. When Hestia stepped down from Olympus to give Dionysus her seat, it signaled a new era. For the Greeks Hestia was the original carrier of the ecstatic principle. Sacrifice to her was an integral part of daily life in ancient Greece. Her household duties of cooking and firing the hearth were invested with the ecstatic experience and the women who carried out these activities in daily life were carrying on the ecstatic principle.
The ancient matrifocal cultures valued the mother above all. Strange through it may seem, for many thousands of years the role of the father in procreation was not understood. It is natural, then, that our ancestors so greatly respected the qualities of the mother—home, birth, growth, nurturing, caring, empathy—and prized them as life sustaining. They nurtured these psychological qualities in themselves, and the sensuous Dionysus was a new twist to a long tradition.
Our society emphasizes the tangible “masculine” values—aggression, power, winning, success, facts, intellectual abilities, concrete proof. The less tangible “feminine” values carry little weight. As a result many women today feel that there is no place for the Dionysian experience in their lives. But they must remember that it was Hestia who was the original ecstatic, and that there is the very essence of ecstatic life of the most ordinary of so-called feminine activities. A woman who cooks for her family sustains their lives. A woman who cleans the home and keeps it safe makes an environment that encourages growth. And in the ultimate female function of giving birth to another human being, a woman ensures the continuance of humankind.
With the exception of giving birth, of course, there is no reason why men cannot and should not also share in the nurturing process and enjoy the sensuous life. And there is no reason why women cannot lead lives of strength and wisdom. This is what it means to touch Dionysus, to feel a part of the ecstatic, creative, and eternal force of life. When we no longer relegate one set of values to men and another to women, when we can be equally male and female, we will touch Dionysus, the divine androgyne.