object:1.43 - Dionysus
book class:The Golden Bough
author class:James George Frazer
subject class:Occultism
class:chapter
XLIII. Dionysus
IN THE PRECEDING chapters we saw that in antiquity the civilised
nations of Western Asia and Egypt pictured to themselves the changes
of the seasons, and particularly the annual growth and decay of
vegetation, as episodes in the life of gods, whose mournful death
and happy resurrection they celebrated with dramatic rites of
alternate lamentation and rejoicing. But if the celebration was in
form dramatic, it was in substance magical; that is to say, it was
intended, on the principles of sympathetic magic, to ensure the
vernal regeneration of plants and the multiplication of animals,
which had seemed to be menaced by the inroads of winter. In the
ancient world, however, such ideas and such rites were by no means
confined to the Oriental peoples of Babylon and Syria, of Phrygia
and Egypt; they were not a product peculiar to the religious
mysticism of the dreamy East, but were shared by the races of
livelier fancy and more mercurial temperament who inhabited the
shores and islands of the Aegean. We need not, with some enquirers
in ancient and modern times, suppose that these Western peoples
borrowed from the older civilisation of the Orient the conception of
the Dying and Reviving God, together with the solemn ritual, in
which that conception was dramatically set forth before the eyes of
the worshippers. More probably the resemblance which may be traced
in this respect between the religions of the East and West is no
more than what we commonly, though incorrectly, call a fortuitous
coincidence, the effect of similar causes acting alike on the
similar constitution of the human mind in different countries and
under different skies. The Greek had no need to journey into far
countries to learn the vicissitudes of the seasons, to mark the
fleeting beauty of the damask rose, the transient glory of the
golden corn, the passing splendour of the purple grapes. Year by
year in his own beautiful land he beheld, with natural regret, the
bright pomp of summer fading into the gloom and stagnation of
winter, and year by year he hailed with natural delight the outburst
of fresh life in spring. Accustomed to personify the forces of
nature, to tinge her cold abstractions with the warm hues of
imagination, to clothe her naked realities with the gorgeous drapery
of a mythic fancy, he fashioned for himself a train of gods and
goddesses, of spirits and elves, out of the shifting panorama of the
seasons, and followed the annual fluctuations of their fortunes with
alternate emotions of cheerfulness and dejection, of gladness and
sorrow, which found their natural expression in alternate rites of
rejoicing and lamentation, of revelry and mourning. A consideration
of some of the Greek divinities who thus died and rose again from
the dead may furnish us with a series of companion pictures to set
side by side with the sad figures of Adonis, Attis, and Osiris. We
begin with Dionysus.
The god Dionysus or Bacchus is best known to us as a personification
of the vine and of the exhilaration produced by the juice of the
grape. His ecstatic worship, characterised by wild dances, thrilling
music, and tipsy excess, appears to have originated among the rude
tribes of Thrace, who were notoriously addicted to drunkenness. Its
mystic doctrines and extravagant rites were essentially foreign to
the clear intelligence and sober temperament of the Greek race. Yet
appealing as it did to that love of mystery and that proneness to
revert to savagery which seem to be innate in most men, the religion
spread like wildfire through Greece until the god whom Homer hardly
deigned to notice had become the most popular figure of the
pantheon. The resemblance which his story and his ceremonies present
to those of Osiris have led some enquirers both in ancient and
modern times to hold that Dionysus was merely a disguised Osiris,
imported directly from Egypt into Greece. But the great
preponderance of evidence points to his Thracian origin, and the
similarity of the two worships is sufficiently explained by the
similarity of the ideas and customs on which they were founded.
While the vine with its clusters was the most characteristic
manifestation of Dionysus, he was also a god of trees in general.
Thus we are told that almost all the Greeks sacrificed to "Dionysus
of the tree." In Boeotia one of his titles was "Dionysus in the
tree." His image was often merely an upright post, without arms, but
draped in a mantle, with a bearded mask to represent the head, and
with leafy boughs projecting from the head or body to show the
nature of the deity. On a vase his rude effigy is depicted appearing
out of a low tree or bush. At Magnesia on the Maeander an image of
Dionysus is said to have been found in a plane-tree, which had been
broken by the wind. He was the patron of cultivated trees: prayers
were offered to him that he would make the trees grow; and he was
especially honoured by husbandmen, chiefly fruit-growers, who set up
an image of him, in the shape of a natural tree-stump, in their
orchards. He was said to have discovered all tree-fruits, amongst
which apples and figs are particularly mentioned; and he was
referred to as "well-fruited," "he of the green fruit," and "making
the fruit to grow." One of his titles was "teeming" or "bursting"
(as of sap or blossoms); and there was a Flowery Dionysus in Attica
and at Patrae in Achaia. The Athenians sacrificed to him for the
prosperity of the fruits of the land. Amongst the trees particularly
sacred to him, in addition to the vine, was the pine-tree. The
Delphic oracle commanded the Corinthians to worship a particular
pine-tree "equally with the god," so they made two images of
Dionysus out of it, with red faces and gilt bodies. In art a wand,
tipped with a pine-cone, is commonly carried by the god or his
worshippers. Again, the ivy and the fig-tree were especially
associated with him. In the Attic township of Acharnae there was a
Dionysus Ivy; at Lacedaemon there was a Fig Dionysus; and in Naxos,
where figs were called _meilicha,_ there was a Dionysus Meilichios,
the face of whose image was made of fig-wood.
Further, there are indications, few but significant, that Dionysus
was conceived as a deity of agriculture and the corn. He is spoken
of as himself doing the work of a husbandman: he is reported to have
been the first to yoke oxen to the plough, which before had been
dragged by hand alone; and some people found in this tradition the
clue to the bovine shape in which, as we shall see, the god was
often supposed to present himself to his worshippers. Thus guiding
the ploughshare and scattering the seed as he went, Dionysus is said
to have eased the labour of the husbandman. Further, we are told
that in the land of the Bisaltae, a Thracian tribe, there was a
great and fair sanctuary of Dionysus, where at his festival a bright
light shone forth at night as a token of an abundant harvest
vouchsafed by the diety; but if the crops were to fail that year,
the mystic light was not seen, darkness brooded over the sanctuary
as at other times. Moreover, among the emblems of Dionysus was the
winnowing-fan, that is the large open shovel-shaped basket, which
down to modern times has been used by farmers to separate the grain
from the chaff by tossing the corn in the air. This simple
agricultural instrument figured in the mystic rites of Dionysus;
indeed the god is traditionally said to have been placed at birth in
a winnowing-fan as in a cradle: in art he is represented as an
infant so cradled; and from these traditions and representations he
derived the epithet of _Liknites,_ that is, "He of the
Winnowing-fan."
Like other gods of vegetation Dionysus was believed to have died a
violent death, but to have been brought to life again; and his
sufferings, death, and resurrection were enacted in his sacred
rites. His tragic story is thus told by the poet Nonnus. Zeus in the
form of a serpent visited Persephone, and she bore him Zagreus, that
is, Dionysus, a horned infant. Scarcely was he born, when the babe
mounted the throne of his father Zeus and mimicked the great god by
brandishing the lightning in his tiny hand. But he did not occupy
the throne long; for the treacherous Titans, their faces whitened
with chalk, attacked him with knives while he was looking at himself
in a mirror. For a time he evaded their assaults by turning himself
into various shapes, assuming the likeness successively of Zeus and
Cronus, of a young man, of a lion, a horse, and a serpent. Finally,
in the form of a bull, he was cut to pieces by the murderous knives
of his enemies. His Cretan myth, as related by Firmicus Maternus,
ran thus. He was said to have been the bastard son of Jupiter, a
Cretan king. Going abroad, Jupiter transferred the throne and
sceptre to the youthful Dionysus, but, knowing that his wife Juno
cherished a jealous dislike of the child, he entrusted Dionysus to
the care of guards upon whose fidelity he believed he could rely.
Juno, however, bribed the guards, and amusing the child with rattles
and a cunningly-wrought looking glass lured him into an ambush,
where her satellites, the Titans, rushed upon him, cut him limb from
limb, boiled his body with various herbs, and ate it. But his sister
Minerva, who had shared in the deed, kept his heart and gave it to
Jupiter on his return, revealing to him the whole history of the
crime. In his rage, Jupiter put the Titans to death by torture, and,
to soothe his grief for the loss of his son, made an image in which
he enclosed the child's heart, and then built a temple in his
honour. In this version a Euhemeristic turn has been given to the
myth by representing Jupiter and Juno (Zeus and Hera) as a king and
queen of Crete. The guards referred to are the mythical Curetes who
danced a war-dance round the infant Dionysus, as they are said to
have done round the infant Zeus. Very noteworthy is the legend,
recorded both by Nonnus and Firmicus, that in his infancy Dionysus
occupied for a short time the throne of his father Zeus. So Proclus
tells us that "Dionysus was the last king of the gods appointed by
Zeus. For his father set him on the kingly throne, and placed in his
hand the sceptre, and made him king of all the gods of the world."
Such traditions point to a custom of temporarily investing the
king's son with the royal dignity as a preliminary to sacrificing
him instead of his father. Pomegranates were supposed to have sprung
from the blood of Dionysus, as anemones from the blood of Adonis and
violets from the blood of Attis: hence women refrained from eating
seeds of pomegranates at the festival of the Thesmophoria. According
to some, the severed limbs of Dionysus were pieced together, at the
command of Zeus, by Apollo, who buried them on Parnassus. The grave
of Dionysus was shown in the Delphic temple beside a golden statue
of Apollo. However, according to another account, the grave of
Dionysus was at Thebes, where he is said to have been torn in
pieces. Thus far the resurrection of the slain god is not mentioned,
but in other versions of the myth it is variously related. According
to one version, which represented Dionysus as a son of Zeus and
Demeter, his mother pieced together his mangled limbs and made him
young again. In others it is simply said that shortly after his
burial he rose from the dead and ascended up to heaven; or that Zeus
raised him up as he lay mortally wounded; or that Zeus swallowed the
heart of Dionysus and then begat him afresh by Semele, who in the
common legend figures as mother of Dionysus. Or, again, the heart
was pounded up and given in a potion to Semele, who thereby
conceived him.
Turning from the myth to the ritual, we find that the Cretans
celebrated a biennial festival at which the passion of Dionysus was
represented in every detail. All that he had done or suffered in his
last moments was enacted before the eyes of his worshippers, who
tore a live bull to pieces with their teeth and roamed the woods
with frantic shouts. In front of them was carried a casket supposed
to contain the sacred heart of Dionysus, and to the wild music of
flutes and cymbals they mimicked the rattles by which the infant god
had been lured to his doom. Where the resurrection formed part of
the myth, it also was acted at the rites, and it even appears that a
general doctrine of resurrection, or at least of immortality, was
inculcated on the worshippers; for Plutarch, writing to console his
wife on the death of their infant daughter, comforts her with the
thought of the immortality of the soul as taught by tradition and
revealed in the mysteries of Dionysus. A different form of the myth
of the death and resurrection of Dionysus is that he descended into
Hades to bring up his mother Semele from the dead. The local Argive
tradition was that he went down through the Alcyonian lake; and his
return from the lower world, in other words his resurrection, was
annually celebrated on the spot by the Argives, who summoned him
from the water by trumpet blasts, while they threw a lamb into the
lake as an offering to the warder of the dead. Whether this was a
spring festival does not appear, but the Lydians certainly
celebrated the advent of Dionysus in spring; the god was supposed to
bring the season with him. Deities of vegetation, who are believed
to pass a certain portion of each year underground, naturally come
to be regarded as gods of the lower world or of the dead. Both
Dionysus and Osiris were so conceived.
A feature in the mythical character of Dionysus, which at first
sight appears inconsistent with his nature as a deity of vegetation,
is that he was often conceived and represented in animal shape,
especially in the form, or at least with the horns, of a bull. Thus
he is spoken of as "cow-born," "bull," "bull-shaped," "bull-faced,"
"bull-browed," "bull-horned," "horn-bearing," "two-horned,"
"horned." He was believed to appear, at least occasionally, as a
bull. His images were often, as at Cyzicus, made in bull shape, or
with bull horns; and he was painted with horns. Types of the horned
Dionysus are found amongst the surviving monuments of antiquity. On
one statuette he appears clad in a bull's hide, the head, horns, and
hoofs hanging down behind. Again, he is represented as a child with
clusters of grapes round his brow, and a calf's head, with sprouting
horns, attached to the back of his head. On a red-figured vase the
god is portrayed as a calf-headed child seated on a woman's lap. The
people of Cynaetha held a festival of Dionysus in winter, when men,
who had greased their bodies with oil for the occasion, used to pick
out a bull from the herd and carry it to the sanctuary of the god.
Dionysus was supposed to inspire their choice of the particular
bull, which probably represented the deity himself; for at his
festivals he was believed to appear in bull form. The women of Elis
hailed him as a bull, and prayed him to come with his bull's foot.
They sang, "Come hither, Dionysus, to thy holy temple by the sea;
come with the Graces to thy temple, rushing with thy bull's foot, O
goodly bull, O goodly bull!" The Bacchanals of Thrace wore horns in
imitation of their god. According to the myth, it was in the shape
of a bull that he was torn to pieces by the Titans; and the Cretans,
when they acted the sufferings and death of Dionysus, tore a live
bull to pieces with their teeth. Indeed, the rending and devouring
of live bulls and calves appear to have been a regular feature of
the Dionysiac rites. When we consider the practice of portraying the
god as a bull or with some of the features of the animal, the belief
that he appeared in bull form to his worshippers at the sacred
rites, and the legend that in bull form he had been torn in pieces,
we cannot doubt that in rending and devouring a live bull at his
festival the worshippers of Dionysus believed themselves to be
killing the god, eating his flesh, and drinking his blood.
Another animal whose form Dionysus assumed was the goat. One of his
names was "Kid." At Athens and at Hermion he was worshipped under
the title of "the one of the Black Goatskin," and a legend ran that
on a certain occasion he had appeared clad in the skin from which he
took the title. In the wine-growing district of Phlius, where in
autumn the plain is still thickly mantled with the red and golden
foliage of the fading vines, there stood of old a bronze image of a
goat, which the husbandmen plastered with gold-leaf as a means of
protecting their vines against blight. The image probably
represented the vine-god himself. To save him from the wrath of
Hera, his father Zeus changed the youthful Dionysus into a kid; and
when the gods fled to Egypt to escape the fury of Typhon, Dionysus
was turned into a goat. Hence when his worshippers rent in pieces a
live goat and devoured it raw, they must have believed that they
were eating the body and blood of the god. The custom of tearing in
pieces the bodies of animals and of men and then devouring them raw
has been practised as a religious rite by savages in modern times.
We need not therefore dismiss as a fable the testimony of antiquity
to the observance of similar rites among the frenzied worshippers of
Bacchus.
The custom of killing a god in animal form, which we shall examine
more in detail further on, belongs to a very early stage of human
culture, and is apt in later times to be misunderstood. The advance
of thought tends to strip the old animal and plant gods of their
bestial and vegetable husk, and to leave their human attributes
(which are always the kernel of the conception) as the final and
sole residuum. In other words, animal and plant gods tend to become
purely anthropomorphic. When they have become wholly or nearly so,
the animals and plants which were at first the deities themselves,
still retain a vague and ill-understood connexion with the
anthropomorphic gods who have developed out of them. The origin of
the relationship between the deity and the animal or plant having
been forgotten, various stories are invented to explain it. These
explanations may follow one of two lines according as they are based
on the habitual or on the exceptional treatment of the sacred animal
or plant. The sacred animal was habitually spared, and only
exceptionally slain; and accordingly the myth might be devised to
explain either why it was spared or why it was killed. Devised for
the former purpose, the myth would tell of some service rendered to
the deity by the animal; devised for the latter purpose, the myth
would tell of some injury inflicted by the animal on the god. The
reason given for sacrificing goats to Dionysus exemplifies a myth of
the latter sort. They were sacrificed to him, it was said, because
they injured the vine. Now the goat, as we have seen, was originally
an embodiment of the god himself. But when the god had divested
himself of his animal character and had become essentially
anthropomorphic, the killing of the goat in his worship came to be
regarded no longer as a slaying of the deity himself, but as a
sacrifice offered to him; and since some reason had to be assigned
why the goat in particular should be sacrificed, it was alleged that
this was a punishment inflicted on the goat for injuring the vine,
the object of the god's especial care. Thus we have the strange
spectacle of a god sacrificed to himself on the ground that he is
his own enemy. And as the deity is supposed to partake of the victim
offered to him, it follows that, when the victim is the god's old
self, the god eats of his own flesh. Hence the goat-god Dionysus is
represented as eating raw goat's blood; and the bull-god Dionysus is
called "eater of bulls." On the analogy of these instances we may
conjecture that wherever a deity is described as the eater of a
particular animal, the animal in question was originally nothing but
the deity himself. Later on we shall find that some savages
propitiate dead bears and whales by offering them portions of their
own bodies.
All this, however, does not explain why a deity of vegetation should
appear in animal form. But the consideration of that point had
better be deferred till we have discussed the character and
attributes of Demeter. Meantime it remains to mention that in some
places, instead of an animal, a human being was torn in pieces at
the rites of Dionysus. This was the practice in Chios and Tenedos;
and at Potniae in Boeotia the tradition ran that it had been
formerly the custom to sacrifice to the goat-smiting Dionysus a
child, for whom a goat was afterwards substituted. At Orchomenus, as
we have seen, the human victim was taken from the women of an old
royal family. As the slain bull or goat represented the slain god,
so, we may suppose, the human victim also represented him.
The legends of the deaths of Pentheus and Lycurgus, two kings who
are said to have been torn to pieces, the one by Bacchanals, the
other by horses, for their opposition to the rites of Dionysus, may
be, as I have already suggested, distorted reminiscences of a custom
of sacrificing divine kings in the character of Dionysus and of
dispersing the fragments of their broken bodies over the fields for
the purpose of fertilising them. It is probably no mere coincidence
that Dionysus himself is said to have been torn in pieces at Thebes,
the very place where according to legend the same fate befell king
Pentheus at the hands of the frenzied votaries of the vine-god.
However, a tradition of human sacrifice may sometimes have been a
mere misinterpretation of a sacrificial ritual in which an animal
victim was treated as a human being. For example, at Tenedos the
new-born calf sacrificed to Dionysus was shod in buskins, and the
mother cow was tended like a woman in child-bed. At Rome a shegoat
was sacrificed to Vedijovis as if it were a human victim. Yet on the
other hand it is equally possible, and perhaps more probable, that
these curious rites were themselves mitigations of an older and
ruder custom of sacrificing human beings, and that the later
pretence of treating the sacrificial victims as if they were human
beings was merely part of a pious and merciful fraud, which palmed
off on the deity less precious victims than living men and women.
This interpretation is supported by many undoubted cases in which
animals have been substituted for human victims.
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