From Semele’s enhallowed sod
Awaken’d? Yea the Death that came
Ablaze from heaven of old—the same
Hot splendour of the shaft of God.’
And again on Cithaeron[1045] there is not only the mysterious voice and
the awful silence, but the manifestation of the pillar of fire:
‘So spake he and there came
’Twixt earth and sky a pillar of high flame:
And silence took the air, and no leaf stirred
In all the forest dell. Thou hadst not heard
In that vast silence any wild thing’s cry.’
The Epiphany by fire is of course common to many theologies; we have the
Burning Bush and the Pentecostal tongues, but it is interesting to find
that, in far-away Thrace, the favour of Dionysos was made manifest by a
great light. The evidence comes from Aristotle[1046]. He says: ‘There is
in the same place (i.e. in Krastonia near the district of the Bisaltae) a
large and beautiful sanctuary of Dionysos, in which it is reported that
at the time of the festival and the sacrifice, if the god intends to send
a good season, _a great blaze of fire appears_, and this is seen by all
those whose business is in the temenos; but if the god intends a barren
season, the light does not make its appearance, but there is darkness
on the place as on other nights.’ It would be vain to ask what natural
fact, whether of summer lightning or burning bush, caused the belief;
the essential point is the primitive Epiphany by fire, an Epiphany not
vengeful but beneficent.
* * * * *
Dionysos is then the son of an ancient Thracian Earth-goddess, Semele,
and she is Keraunia, thunder-smitten, in some sense the bride, it would
seem, of our old sky and thunder-god, a sort of Ouranos later effaced
by the splendour of the Hellenic Zeus. If some such old nature-god
existed as is probable in the far background of primitive mythology, the
affiliation of Zeus and Dionysos would be an easy matter.
In this connection it is interesting to note that not only Zeus himself
was associated with the thunder and the lightning, but also the ancient
‘Mother of the Gods.’ Pindar[1047], who all through the third Pythian has
in his mind the sore sickness of Hieron, not only bethinks him of Cheiron
the primitive Healer but also sings:
‘I would pray to the Mother to loose her ban,
The holy goddess, to whom and to Pan
Before my gate, all night long,
The maids do worship with dance and song.’
The scholiast tells us how it came that Pindar prayed to the Mother
for healing. One day while Pindar was teaching a pupil on a mountain,
possibly Cithaeron itself, ‘there was heard a great noise, and a flame
of lightning was seen descending, and Pindar saw that a stone image of
the Mother had come down at their feet, and the oracle ordained that
he should set up a shrine to the Mother.’ The story is transparent—a
thunderstorm, lightning and a fallen aerolite, the symbol of the Mother,
surely of Keraunia. And the Mother, the scholiast further tells us,
‘had power to purify from madness.’ She had power to loose as well as
to bind. In this she was like her son Dionysos. The magical power for
purification of aerolites and indeed of almost any strange black stone is
attested by many instances[1048]. Orestes[1049] was purified at Trozen
from his madness, mother-sent, by a sacred stone. Most curious of all,
Porphyry[1050] tells us that Pythagoras when he was in Crete met one of
the Idaean Dactyls, worshippers of the Mother, and was by him purified
with a thunderbolt.
With a mother thunder-smitten, it was not hard for Dionysos to become
adopted child of the Hellenic Zeus, God of the Thunderbolt. Theologians
were ready with the myth of the double birth. Semele fell into partial
discredit, obscured by the splendour of the Father. Matriarchy pales
before the new order of patriarchy, and from henceforth the name
Dionysos[1051], ‘son of Zeus,’ is supreme.
DIONYSOS SON OF ZEUS.
[Illustration: FIG. 131.]
The fatherhood of Zeus is charmingly set forth by the lovely little
vase-fragment in fig. 131 from a red-figured cylix[1052], found in the
excavations on the Acropolis and now in the National Museum at Athens.
Zeus with his sceptre holds the infant Dithyramb and displays him proudly
to the other Olympians. Semele is ignored, perhaps half forgotten.
Dionysos in the new order is ‘all for the father.’
The all-important question is forced upon us—why did Zeus adopt him?
Dionysos is the child of the Earth-goddess, but why was this particular
earth-child adopted? Why did his worship spread everywhere with
irresistible might, overshadowing at the end even the cult of his adopted
father? Kore too is daughter of Earth, she too in awkward fashion was
half affiliated to Zeus, yet he never takes her in his arms and her cult
though wide-spread has no militant missionary aspect.
Zeus holds the infant Dionysos in his arms, and Dionysos holds in his
the secret of his strength, the vine with its great bunch of grapes. But
for that bunch of grapes Zeus would never have troubled to adopt him. To
the popular mind Dionysos was always Lord of the Vine, as Athene was Lady
of the Olive. It is by the guerdon of the grape that his Bacchants appeal
to Dirce[1053]:
‘By his own joy I vow,
By the grape upon the bough.’
It is by his great gift of Wine to sorrowful man that his kingdom is
established upon earth[1054]:
‘A god of Heaven is He,
And born in majesty,
Yet hath he mirth in the joy of the Earth
And he loveth constantly
Her who brings increase,
The Feeder of children, Peace.
No grudge hath He of the great,
No scorn of the mean estate,
But to all that liveth, his Wine he giveth,
Griefless, immaculate.
Only on them that spurn
Joy may his anger burn.’
It is the usual mythological inversion, he of the earth is translated to
heaven that thence he may descend.
Dionysos as god of the grape is so familiar that the idea needs no
emphasis. It is more important to note that the vine as the origin of his
worship presents certain difficulties.
It has clearly been seen that Dionysos was a Northerner, a Thracian. Wine
is not the characteristic drink of the North. Is it likely that wine, a
drink characteristic to this day of the South, is the primitive essence
of the worship of a god coming into Greece from the North?
The answer to this difficulty is an interesting one. The main
distinguishing factor of the religion of Dionysos is always the cult of
an intoxicant, but wine is not the only intoxicant, nor in the North the
most primitive. Evidence is not wanting that the cult of the vine-god was
superimposed on, affiliated to, in part developed out of, a cult that had
for its essence the worship of an early and northern intoxicant, cereal
not vinous.
To this conclusion I have been led by the consideration of the cultus
titles of the god.
BROMIOS. BRAITES. SABAZIOS.
Dionysos is a god of many names; he is Bacchos, Baccheus, Iacchos,
Bassareus, Bromios, Euios, Sabazios, Zagreus, Thyoneus, Lenaios,
Eleuthereus, and the list by no means exhausts his titles. A large
number of these names are like Lenaios, ‘He of the Wine-Press,’ only
descriptive titles; they never emerge to the dignity of proper names.
Some, like Iacchos and probably Bacchos itself, though they ultimately
became proper names, were originally only cries. Iacchos was a song even
down to the time of Aristophanes[1055], and was probably, to begin with,
a ritual shout or cry kept up long after its meaning was forgotten. Such
cries from their vagueness, their aptness for repetition, are peculiarly
exciting to the religious emotions. How many people attach any precise
significance to the thrice repeated, stately and moving words that form
the proœmium to our own Easter Hymn?
‘Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia.’
They are a homage beyond articulate speech. Then, as now, these excited
cries became sacred titles of the worshippers who used them: ‘Evian
women’ (εὔιοι γυναῖκες) were the ancient and more reverent counterpart of
our ‘Hallelujah lasses.’
The various titles of the god are of course of considerable use in
determining his nature, for they all express some phase of emotion in the
worshipper, and it is of these phases that a god is compounded. Certain
names seem to cling to certain places. Sabazios is Thracian, Zagreus
Cretan, Bromios largely Theban, Iacchos Athenian. Some of the epithets
have unquestionably shifted their meaning in the course of time. The
Greeks were adepts at false etymology, and an excellent instance of this
is a title of the first importance for our argument, _Bromios_.
* * * * *
The title Bromios has to our modern ears a poetical, somewhat mystical
ring[1056]. It never occurs in Homer, nor in Sophocles. Pindar and
Aeschylus both use it, Euripides often. The poets, by their usage,
clearly show that they connect the title with the verb βρέμω, which
means ‘to make a confused sound.’ Pindar in a dithyrambic fragment[1057]
says:
‘We hymn thee Bromios and Him of the loud cry.’
The address it may be noted is to the Cadmean Dionysos.
Sometimes the association is definitely with thunder (βροντή). Thus in
the second Olympian[1058] we have:
‘High in Olympus lives for evermore
She of the delicate hair,
Semele fair,
Who died by the thunder’s roar.’
Here the title Bromios can scarcely have been remote from Pindar’s mind,
though he does not care to press the allusion. In the _Bacchae_ there
seems no consciousness of etymology. The titles Dionysos and Bromios come
haphazard, but throughout the play Dionysos is in some degree a god of
thunder as well as thunder-born, a god of mysterious voices, of strange,
confused, orgiastic music, music which we know he brought with him from
the North.
Strabo[1059] has preserved for us two fragments from the lost _Edonians_
of Aeschylus which deal with this music of orgy and madness. Aeschylus,
he says, speaks in the _Edonians_ of the goddess Kotys and the
instruments of her worship, and immediately introduces the worshippers of
Dionysos, thus:
‘One on the fair-turned pipe fulfils
His song, with the warble of fingered trills
The soul to frenzy awakening.
From another the brazen cymbals ring.
The shawm blares out, but beneath is the moan
Of the bull-voiced mimes, unseen, unknown,
And in deep diapason the shuddering sound
Of drums, like thunder, beneath the ground.’
Of the ‘bull-voiced mimes’ we should have been glad to know more details,
but the fragment, obscure as it is, leaves at least the impression of
weird exciting ceremonial, and most of all of mysterious music.
All this must have helped to make of Bromios the god of sounds and
voices; yet it is probable, indeed almost certain, that the title had
another origin, simpler, less poetical. We owe the clue to this primitive
meaning to the Emperor Julian.
* * * * *
Julian in his northern campaign saw and no doubt tasted with compunction
a wine, made not from the grape but from barley. After the fashion of his
age he wrote an epigram[1060] to this new, or rather very old, Dionysos.
From the number of instructive puns it contains this epigram is almost
untranslateable, but as its evidence is for our purpose of paramount
importance it may be roughly Englished as follows:
_To wine made of barley_[1061].
‘Who and whence art thou, Dionyse? Now, by the Bacchus true
Whom well I know, the son of Zeus, say—‘Who and what are you?’
_He_ smells of nectar like a god, _you_ smack of goats and spelt,
For lack of grapes from ears of grain your countryman the Celt
Made you. Your name’s Demetrios, but never Dionyse,
Bromos, Oat-born, not Bromios, Fire-born from out the skies.’
The emperor makes three very fair puns, as follows: βρόμος oats, βρόμιος
of the thunder; πυρογενῆ wheat-born, πυριγενῆ fire-born; τράγος goat
and τράγος an inferior kind of wheat, spelt. The gist of the third pun
will be considered more fully at a later stage of the argument. For the
present it is sufficient to note that all three have the same substantial
content, there is a Dionysos who is not of heaven but of earth. Julian
propounds as an elegant jest the simple but illuminating mythological
truth that the title Bromios points to a god born not of the lightning
and thunder but of an intoxicant made from the cereal βρόμος. Bromios is
Demetrios, son of Demeter the Corn-Mother, before he becomes god of the
grape and son by adoption of Olympian Zeus.
Julian is not precise in his discrimination between the various edible
grasses. His epigram is headed, ‘To wine made of barley (κριθῆς)’; the
god, he says, smacks of _spelt_ (τράγος), he is _wheat_-born (πυρογενῆ)
and he is of _oats_ (βρόμος). It matters to Julian nothing, nor is it
to our argument of first importance, of _what_ particular cereal this
new-old Dionysos is made. The point is that it is of some cereal, not
of the grape. The god is thus seen to be son of Semele, Earth-goddess
in her agricultural aspect as Demeter, Corn-Mother. We shall later (p.
518) see that he was worshipped with service of the winnowing-fan, and
we shall further see that, when he-of-the-cereal-intoxicant became
he-of-the-wine-of-grapes, the instrument that had been a winnowing-fan
became a grape-basket.
* * * * *
The possibility of this simple origin of Bromios grows when we consider
another epithet of the god. In the Paean to Dionysos recently discovered
at Delphi[1062] there occurs the title hitherto unexplained—Braites. The
hymn opens thus with a string of cultus epithets:
‘Come, O Dithyrambos, Bacchos, come,
Euios, Thyrsos-Lord, Braites, come,
Bromios, come, and coming with thee bring
Holy hours of thine own holy spring.’
Nowhere else does the title Braites occur; but the hymn, as an actual
ritual composition, inscribed and set up at Delphi, is an important
source. Braites has been explained as the Breaker or Striker, but this
is scarcely a happy epithet for the Spring-god. In the light of Bromios
it may be suggested that the epithet is connected with the late Latin
word _braisum_, which means ‘grain prepared for the making of the beer
_braisum_[1063].’ Braites would then like Bromios be an epithet derived
from a cereal intoxicant.
* * * * *
An examination of the title Sabazios leads to results more certain and
satisfactory. The name Sabazios has a more foreign sound than Dionysos,
even than Bromios. Sabazios was never admitted even to the outskirts of
Olympus. In the time of Demosthenes[1064] his rites were regarded by the
orthodox as foreign, outrageous, disreputable. One of the counts in the
unmannerly attack of Demosthenes on Aeschines is that Aeschines had been
instructed by his mother in mysteries and rites that were certainly those
of Sabazios, that having performed various degrading ceremonials he ‘led
those admirable thiasoi about the streets, they being crowned with fennel
and poplar, and gesticulated with great red snakes, waving them over his
head and shouting Euoi Saboi.’ The Saboi were the worshippers of Sabazios
as the Bacchae of Bacchos. Of course Demosthenes is grossly unjust. The
ceremonies of Sabazios could be closely paralleled by the perfectly
orthodox ritual of Dionysos, but they passed under another name, were
not completely canonical, and above all things were still realized as
foreign. That pious men of good repute might quietly worship Sabazios is
clear from the account of the ‘Superstitious Man’ in Theophrastos[1065].
Against his moral character nothing can be urged, but that he was a
little over-zealous, and ‘whenever he chanced to see a red snake he would
invoke Sabazios.’
Down to Christian days the snake was an important feature in the cult
of Sabazios. Clement and Arnobius[1066] both state that one of the
‘tokens’ of the mysteries of Sabazios was ‘the god (gliding) through the
bosom.’ The snake was of course associated also with Dionysos—he may have
inherited it from the earlier god—but his more characteristic vehicle was
the bull. Sabazios seems always to have been regarded as more primitive
and savage than Dionysos. Diodorus[1067], puzzled by the many forms of
Dionysos, says: ‘Some people fable that there was another Dionysos very
much earlier in date than this one, for they allege that there was a
Dionysos born of Zeus and Persephone, the one called by some Sabazios,
whose birth and sacrifices and rites they instance as celebrated by night
and in secret on account of shameless ceremonies attending them.’ These
last words probably refer to the mystic marriage of the god with the
initiated (p. 535).
The symbolism of the snake has already (p. 326) been discussed. A god
whose vehicle was the snake would find easy affiliation in Greece, where
every dead hero was a snake.
Sabazios is left unsung by tragic poets, but the realism of comedy
reflects the popular craze for semi-barbarian worship. The temper of
Demosthenes was not, if Strabo[1068] be right, characteristically
Athenian. ‘As in other matters,’ Strabo says, ‘the Athenians were always
hospitable to foreign customs, so with the gods. They adopted many sacred
customs from abroad and were ridiculed in comedies for doing so, and this
especially as regards Phrygian and Thracian rites. Plato mentions the
Bendidean, and Demosthenes the Phrygian, rites in his accusation against
Aeschines and his mother on the count that Aeschines joined his mother in
her rites and went about in a thiasos and cried aloud Euoi Saboi and Hyes
Attes, for these cries are of Sabazios and the Mother.’
It is then to comedy, to Aristophanes, that we owe most of our references
to Sabazios, hints of his real character and his inner kinship with
Dionysos. In an untranslateable pun in the _Birds_[1069] he tells us that
Sabazios is a Phrygian, and from the _Lysistrata_[1070] we learn that his
worship was orgiastic and much affected by women. The ‘deputation man’
exclaims:
‘Has the wantonness of women then blazed up,
Their tabourings, Sabazios all about,
Their clamour for Adonis on the roofs?’
But most instructive of all is the mention of Sabazios in the opening of
the _Wasps_[1071]. The two slaves Sosias and Xanthias are watching over
their master Bdelycleon. They know he is a dangerous monster and they
ought to keep awake.
‘_Xan._ I know, but I _do_ want a little peace.
_Sos._ Well, chance it then. Some sweet and drowsy thing
Is falling drop by drop upon my eyes.
_Xan._ What? Are you clean mad or a Korybant?
_Sos._ No, a sleep holds me from Sabazios.
_Xan._ And I too herd the same Sabazios.
Just now a very Mede of a nodding sleep
Came down and made an onset on my eyes.’
Sabazios is here clearly not so much the god of ecstasy and orgy as of
compelling irresistible sleep. And why? A late historian gives the simple
answer.
Ammianus Marcellinus[1072] tells us that, when the Emperor Valens was
besieging Chalcedon, the besieged by way of insult shouted to him
‘Sabaiarius.’ He adds in explanation ‘_sabaia_ is a drink of the poor
in Illyria made of barley or corn turned into a liquor.’ ‘Sabaiarius’
is then ‘Beer-man,’ beer-drinker or brewer. S. Jerome, himself a
Dalmatian, says in his commentary on Isaiah[1073] that ‘there is a sort
of drink made from grain and water, and in the provinces of Dalmatia and
Pannonia it is called, in the local barbarian speech, _sabaium_.’ To the
wine-drinker the beer-drinker seemed a low fellow. Wine was in itself a
rarer, finer beverage, probably at first more expensive. Even to-day in
some parts of beer-drinking Germany to drink beer at the solemn midday
dinner is almost a vulgarity. Sabazios, god of the cheap cereal drink,
brings rather sleep than inspiration.
The testimony of Sabazios is now added to that of Bromios and Braites.
Separately the conjectured etymology of each epithet might fall far short
of conviction, but the cumulative force of the three together offers
evidence that seems conclusive.
A fourth link in the chain still remains. The emperor Julian’s third pun
τράγος, goat, and τράγος, spelt, has yet to be considered:
‘_He_ smells of nectar like a god, _you_ smack of goats and spelt.’
The word τράγος is usually rendered ‘goat,’ and the meaning ‘spelt’
ignored. There is of course a reference to the time-honoured jest about
the animal, but that the primary reference is to grain, not the goat, is
clear from the words that immediately follow:
‘For lack of grapes from ears of grain your countryman the Celt
Made you.’
In translating I have therefore used both the meanings; the formal pun is
untranslateable.
It is an odd fact that the ancients seem to have called certain _wild_
forms of fruits and cereals by names connecting them with the goat[1074].
The reason is not clear, but the fact is well-established. The Latins
called the wild fig _caprificus_; Pausanias expressly tells us that the
Messenians gave to the wild fig-tree the name τράγος, goat. Vines, when
they ran wild to foliage rather than fruit, were said τραγᾶν. I would
conjecture that the inferior sort of spelt called τράγος, goat, owes its
name to this unexplained linguistic habit. It is even possible that the
beard with which spelt is furnished may have helped out the confusion.
Tragedy I believe to be not the ‘goat-song,’ but the ‘harvest-song’ of
the cereal τράγος, the form of spelt known as ‘the goat.’ When the god
of the cereal, Bromios-Braites-Sabazios, became the god of the vine, the
fusion and confusion of τραγῳδία, the spelt-song, with τρυγῳδία, the song
of the winelees[1075], was easy and indeed inevitable. The τραγῳδοί, the
‘beanfeast-singers,’ became τρυγῳδοί or ‘must-singers.’
The difficulties in the way of the canonical etymology of _tragedy_
are acknowledged to be great[1076]. In discussing the Satyrs it has
already been shown that the primitive followers of Dionysos are
mythologically conceived of not as _goat_-men, but as _horse_-men. The
primitive ‘_goat_-song,’ we are asked to believe, was sung by a chorus
of _horse_-men. The case in fact stands thus. We are confronted on
the one hand by the undoubted fact that on countless vase-paintings
of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. the attendants of Dionysos are
_horse_-men, while _goat_-men attend the Earth-goddess (p. 277); on the
other hand we have the _supposed_ fact that tragedy is the _goat_-song.
But this supposed fact is merely an etymological assumption. If another
etymology be found for _tragedy_, the whole discrepancy disappears.
Such an etymology is, I think, offered by τράγος ‘spelt,’ with the
further advantage that it contains in itself a hint of how the goat
misunderstanding arose.
* * * * *
A fragment of Aeschylus cited, but I think erroneously, as evidence of a
goat chorus remains to be examined. In a lost tragedy[1077] a Satyr on
the stage sees for the first time fire just given to mortals, and he runs
to kiss her as though she were a beautiful maiden. Prometheus warns him:
if you do this
‘You’ll be a goat mourning his beard.’
The passage is used as evidence for the goat form and dress of the
Satyric chorus. Surely such an inference is needless; the point of the
jest is the morals and manners of the Satyr. To reconstruct a goat-chorus
out of a casual joke is labour in vain.
* * * * *
We have then found four several titles, Bromios, Braites, Sabazios and
tragedy, for which the supposition of a cereal drink affords a simple,
satisfactory explanation. It remains to show that, though the words
_bromos_, _braisum_, _sabaia_ and _tragos_ have become to us dim and
almost forgotten in the lapse of time, a cereal drink such as they imply
was widely in use in ancient days, and that among Northern nations.
* * * * *
The history of fermented drink in Europe seems to have been briefly
this. Never, so far back as we can look into mythology, was miserable man
without some rudimentary means of intoxication. Before he had advanced
to agriculture he had a drink made of naturally fermented honey, the
drink we now know as mead, which the Greeks called μέθυ or μέθη. The
epithet ‘sweet’ which they constantly apply to wine surprises us, but as
a characteristic of ‘mead’ it is natural enough. This mead made of honey
appears in ancient legends. When Zeus would intoxicate Kronos he gave him
not wine, Porphyry[1078] says, for wine was not, but a honey-drink to
darken his senses. Night says to Zeus:
‘When prostrate ’neath the lofty oaks you see him
Lie drunken with the work of murmuring bees,
Then bind him,’
and again Plato[1079] tells how when Poros falls asleep in the garden
of Zeus he is drunk not with wine but with nectar, for wine was not
yet. Nectar, the ancient drink of the gods, is mead made of honey; and
men know this, for they offer to the primitive earth-god libations of
honey (μελίσπονδα). The gods like their worshippers knew the joys of
intoxication before the coming of the grape-Dionysos. Plutarch[1080]
says mead (μέθυ) was used as a libation before the appearance of the
vine, and ‘even now those of the barbarians who do not drink wine drink
honey-drink’ (μελίτειον). The _nephalia_ are but intoxicants more
primitive than wine.
Next in order came the drinks made of cereals fermented, the various
forms of beer and crude malt spirit. These gave to the Thracian Dionysos
his names Bromios, Braites, Sabazios, but they never seem to have found
a real home in Greece. Mention of them occurs in classical writers, but
they are always named as barbarian curiosities, as drinks in use in
Thrace, Armenia, Egypt, but never like mead even in primitive times the
national drink of Hellas. Isis in Egypt is addressed as not only Our Lady
of Bread but also Our Lady of Beer[1081], but Bromios when he comes to
Greece forgets the oats from which he sprang.
The first beer was probably a very rude product, like the drink mentioned
by Xenophon[1082] as still in use among the Armenians of his day; the
grain was pounded and allowed to ferment with the grains still floating
about in the drinking-cups. The Lithuanians in the Middle Ages are said
to have made their beer over-night and drunk it next morning[1083].
Beer of this primitive kind was best sucked up through a pipe.
Archilochus[1084] alludes to the practice:
‘As through a reed Phrygian and Thracian men
Suck up their brew.’
The name given to the drink, βρῦτον, means simply something brewed or
fermented. Aeschylus[1085] in his _Lykurgos_ makes some one, probably
Lykurgos the Thracian, drink βρῦτον:
‘Thereat he drank the _bruton_ and waxed strong
And boasted thus within the hero’s halls.’
Athenaeus, in the passage in which he quotes Archilochus, cites quite
a number of authorities about the making of these rude cereal drinks.
According to Hellanicus in his _Origins_, _bruton_ could be made also
of roots. ‘Some people,’ he says, ‘drink _bruton_ made of roots as the
Thracian drink is made of barley.’ Hecataeus in his _Journey round
Europe_ notes that the Paeonians drank _bruton_ made from barley and an
admixture of millet and endive.
Another name for this drink made from grain was _zythos_. Diodorus[1086]
draws a lamentable picture of the straits to which the peoples of Gaul
were put because ‘from the excessive cold and intemperate character of
the climate, the land could not bring forth either wine or oil. Bereft
of these products the Gauls make of barley the drink that is called
_zythos_; they likewise wash out their honeycombs with water and use the
rinsings. They had only imported wine, but to this they were excessively
addicted (κάτοινοι), they drank it intemperately and either fell asleep
dead drunk or became stark mad.’ Here we have the living historical
prototype of the Centaurs, the uncivilized men who cannot support the
taste of wine, the lamentable story of _imported_ intoxicants told in all
ages all the world over.
The number of primitive beers—_cervisia_, _korma_, _sabaia_, _zythos_—is
countless and it would be unprofitable to discuss them in detail. All
have this in common, and it is sufficient for our purpose, that they
are spirituous drinks made of fermented grain, they appear with the
introduction of agriculture, they tend to supersede mead, and are in turn
superseded by wine. To put it mythologically the worship of Bromios,
Braites and Sabazios pales before the Epiphany of Dionysos. Sabazios is
almost wholly left behind, a foreigner never naturalized[1087]. Bromios
is transformed beyond recognition; to the old name is given a new
meaning, a new etymology.
It is important to note that had there been only Sabazios, had Bromios
never emerged from himself, both would probably have remained in
Thracian obscurity. The Thracians never conquered Greece; there was,
therefore, no historical reason why their god should impose himself.
His dominance is unquestionably due to the introduction and rapid
spread of the vine. Popular tradition enshrined as it usually does a
real truth—the characteristic gift (χάρις) of Dionysos by which he won
all hearts was wine, wine made not of barley but of the juice of the
grape. A new, incoming plant attaches itself to the local divinity,
whoever and whatever he be. The olive attached itself to Athene who was
there before its coming, and by the olive the prestige of Athene was
sensibly increased; but the olive, great glory though it was and though
a Sophocles sang its praises, had never the divine omnipotence of the
vine. Olive oil over all the countries of Southern Europe supplanted the
other primitive grease, butter[1088]. Butter is hard to keep fresh in
hot countries, as every traveller finds to his cost in Italy and Greece
to-day. But the supersession of butter by oil was a quiet, unnoticed
advance, not a triumphant progress like the Coming of the Vine.
* * * * *
We are now at last in a position to say what was the characteristic
essence of the worship of Dionysos. The fact however repugnant must
be fairly faced. This essence was intoxication. But by the very nature
of primitive thought this essence was almost instantly transformed
into something more, something deeper and higher than mere physical
intoxication. It was intoxication thought of as possession. The savage
tastes of some intoxicant for the first time, a great delight takes him,
he feels literally a new strange life within him. How has it come about?
The answer to him is simple. He is possessed by a god (ἔνθεος), not
figuratively but literally and actually: there is a divine thing within
him that is more than himself, he is mad, but with a divine madness.
All intense sorrow or joy is to him obsession, possession. When in the
_Hippolytus_[1089] the chorus see Phaedra distraught with passion,
instinctively they ask:
‘Is this some spirit, O child of man,
Doth Hecate hold thee perchance or Pan,
Doth She of the Mountains work her ban
Or the dread Corybantes bind thee?’
They utter not poetical imagery but a real belief.
To what beautiful imaginations, to what high spiritual vision this
Bacchic cult of intoxication led will best be considered when we come
to speak of Orpheus. For the present some other primitive elements in
Dionysiac worship remain to be considered, elements essential to the
understanding of his cult.
DIONYSOS THE TREE-GOD (DENDRITES).
Intoxication is of the essence of the god Dionysos, it is the element
that marks him out from other gods, it is the secret of his missionary
impulse; but to suppose that it exhausts his content would be a grave
misunderstanding. There go to his making not only this distinctive
element of intoxication but certain other primitive factors common to the
gods of other peoples.
Thinking people even in antiquity, when the study of comparative
mythology scarcely existed, were struck by analogies between Dionysos
and other divinities. Plutarch, who thought much, if somewhat vaguely,
on religious matters, was very sensible of this. In the enlightened and
instructive parallel that he draws[1090] between Osiris and Dionysos,
he sees that Dionysos like the gods of many other peoples is a god who
in some sense embodies the life of nature that comes and goes with the
seasons, dies and rises again with the fruits of the earth. In a passage
full of insight he draws attention to the analogies of the diverse cults
he had observed. ‘The Phrygians think that the god is asleep in the
winter, and is awake in summer, and at the one season they celebrate with
Bacchic rites his goings to bed and at the other his risings up. And the
Paphlagonians allege that in the winter he is bound down and imprisoned
and in the spring he is stirred up and let loose.’ The passage and
others that will later be quoted are as it were a forecast of the whole
comparative method.
The truth that Dionysos, like many another god, was a god of the impulse
of life in nature was not only apprehended by the philosopher, it was
also evidenced in cultus. This is seen very clearly in two popular phases
of the worship of Dionysos, his worship as a tree-god and his worship as
a bull.
The vine is a tree; but Dionysos is Dendrites, Tree-god, and a plant-god
in a far wider sense. He is god of the fig-tree, Sykites; he is Kissos,
god of the ivy; he is Anthios, god of all blossoming things; he is
Phytalmios, god of growth. In this respect he differs scarcely at all
from certain aspects of Poseidon, or from the young male god of Attica
and the Peloponnese, Hermes. Probably this aspect of the god, at once
milder and wider, was always acceptable in Southern Greece and made his
affiliation with the indigenous Hermes an easy matter. This affiliation
is clearly shown by the fact that in art Hermes and Dionysos appear, as
they were worshipped in cultus, as herms; the symbol of both as gods
of fertility is naturally the phallos. The young Dionysos, a maturer
Liknites, is not distinguishable from Hermes.
[Illustration: FIG. 132.]
On the beautiful cylix by Hieron[1091] reproduced in fig. 132, perhaps
the most exquisite thing that ancient ceramography has left us, this
affiliation is clearly shown. In the centre design Dionysos is all
vine-god. He holds a great vine-branch in his left hand, in his right
his own sceptre the thyrsos; his worshipper is a horse-Satyr piping on
the double flutes. But on the exterior of the cup, a scene of cultus
rather than mythology, he is of wider import, he is Dendrites. The god
round whom the lovely Maenads dance in circle is a rude pillar or plank
draped with a splendid ritual garment. It is a primitive herm decorated
with great bunches of grapes, but also with ivy sprigs and honeycombs
and a necklace of dried figs, such as the Greek peasant now-a-days takes
with him for food on a journey. He is god of all growing things, of every
tree and plant and natural product, and only later exclusively of the
vine. He takes to himself ivy and pine and honeycomb. The honey-drink he
supersedes, yet honey is sacred to him. Only the olive he never takes,
for Athene had it already. Ivy especially was sacred to him; his Maenads
chewed ivy leaves[1092] for inspiration, as the Delphic prophetess chewed
the bay. Pliny[1093] says: ‘Even to this day ivy is used to decorate the
thyrsos of the god and the helmets and shields used by the peoples of
Thrace in their rites,’ and this ritual ivy is remembered by Dionysos
when he comes to Thebes[1094]:
‘I cry to Thebes to waken, set her hands
To clasp my wand, mine ivied javelin,
And round her shoulders hang my wild fawn-skin.’
[Illustration: FIG. 133.]
Very primitive in form but wholly of the vine-god is the xoanon on a
krater in the Campana collection of the Louvre[1095] (fig. 133). The
image of the god is a column treated as a herm, and reminds us that
Dionysos was called by the name Perikonios, He-about-the-pillar. The two
representations in figs. 133 and 132 are characteristically different.
The rude Satyrs have but one way of worshipping their god, they fall upon
the wine-cup; the Maenads, worshipping the god of life, bend in ritual
ecstasy to touch the earth, mother of life; the wine-jar in Hieron’s vase
is present as a symbol, but the Maenads revel aloof.
The worship of the tree-god was probably indigenous in Thrace long before
the coming of the vine. We have evidence that it lingered on there down
to Roman times. An inscription on a cippus recently discovered in a
mosque at Eski Djoumi[1096] and now in the museum at Saloniki affords
curious evidence. The cippus marked the grave of a priestess of Dionysos.
Her name is lost, but the word priestess (ἱερεία) is followed by two
characteristically Bacchic epithets, θύσα and εὐεία. She is priestess of
the thiasos of the ‘Carriers of the Evergreen Oak’ (πρινοφόροι), and she
leaves to her guild certain property in vineyards. If they do not fulfil
the conditions of the bequest, including the offering of a wreath of
roses, the property is to go to another thiasos, that of the ‘Carriers of
the Oak’ (Δροιοφόροι), and on the same conditions.
* * * * *
The tree-god was too simple for the philosopher. He wanted to abstract
Dionysos, rid him of not only his anthropomorphic but his zoomorphic
and phytomorphic shapes. Still he used the tree-god as a stepping-stone
to his ‘principle of moisture.’ Plutarch[1097] says the Greeks regard
Dionysos as not merely lord and originator of wine, but of the whole
principle of moisture. Of this, he adds, Pindar is in himself sufficient
witness when he says:
‘Of all the trees that are
He hath his flock, and feedeth root by root,
The Joy-god Dionysos, the pure star
That shines amid the gathering of the fruit.’
Plutarch is fond of this beautiful little bit of Pindar. He quotes it
again in his _Symposiacs_[1098]. A friend who is a farmer objects that
Plutarch has shut out his calling from the worship of the Muses, whereas
he had hoped that at least Thalia, goddess of increase, might be his to
worship. Plutarch says the charge is not a just one, for farmers have
Dendrites, He-of-the-Trees, and Anesidora, She-who-sends-up-gifts; and
then he quotes his favourite passage. Pindar is of course no evidence for
a Principle of Moisture. Neither poets nor primitive people use any such
philosophical jargon; but all the world over primitive man did and still
does welcome the coming and lament the going of the something or someone
who makes the trees and plants to grow and beasts and man to bring forth.
Later, though they are little the wiser as to what that something is,
they will call it the ‘Principle of Moisture,’ or if they are poets Love
or Life.
The ‘Principle of Moisture’ was in fashion among theologists long before
Plutarch. In the _Bacchae_ of Euripides the new wine of the religion
of Dionysos has to be poured into some very old bottles. Teiresias in
a typically orthodox fashion, characteristic of the timid and kindly
priest all the world over, tries to water it down with weak rationalism.
Dionysos, he urges, is not new at all, he is very old, as old and
respectable as Demeter herself; she is the Principle of Dryness, he of
Moisture, nothing could be more safe and satisfactory. He thus instructs
honest Pentheus[1099]:
‘Two spirits there be,
Young prince, that in man’s world are first of worth.
Demeter one is named. She is the Earth—
Call her what name thou wilt!—who feeds man’s frame
With sustenance of things dry. And that which came
Her work to perfect, second, is the Power
From Semele born. He found the liquid shower
Hid in the grape[1100].’
This is the rationalism not of the poet Euripides, but of the priest
Teiresias. This is clear, for the poet in the next line breaks clean away
from the tiresome Dryness and Moisture and is gone to the magic of sleep
and the blood of the God outpoured.
Plutarch quotes Pindar as authority for the Principle of Moisture, and
undoubtedly the sap of trees and plants sacred to Dionysos may have
helped out the abstraction. But, had Plutarch known it, the notion is
associated not so much with Dendrites, the Tree-God, as with a figure
perhaps still more primitive, Dionysos the Bull.
DIONYSOS THE BULL-GOD.
Dionysos Dendrites is easy to realize; he is but a step back from the
familiar, canonical Vine-god. The Bull-god Dionysos is harder to accept
because we have lost the primitive habit of thinking from which he
sprang. The Greeks themselves suffered the like inconvenience. They
rapidly advanced to so complete an anthropomorphism that in Periclean
Athens the dogma of the Bull-incarnation was, we cannot doubt, a
stumbling-block, a faith as far as possible put out of sight.
The particular animal in which a god is incarnate depends of course on
the circumstances of the worshippers. If he is in a land lion-haunted
his god will be apt to take shape as a lion; later the lion will be
his attendant, his servitor. Lions attend the Mountain-Mother of Asia
Minor, guard her as has been seen (p. 265) in heraldic fashion, draw her
chariot, watch her throne[1101]. In like manner Dionysos, son of Semele,
who is but one form of the same Earth-Mother, has a chariot drawn by
lions (fig. 123), and sometimes, though not so frequently as his Mother,
an attendant lion.
In the vase-painting in fig. 134 from an amphora in the British
Museum[1102] Dionysos, with kantharos and great spreading vine, stands
between two great prophylactic eyes. A little lion looks up at him,
dog-like, adoring his master. On the reverse Hephaistos with his mallet
carries the vine in token of the power of the god. The lion in this
picture is losing his reality, because the lion has ceased to be a
dominant terror in Greece. The god of a civilized, agricultural people
must reincarnate himself in other animal shapes, in the Snake, in the
Kid, most of all in the Bull. The Bull-god may have been too savage
for Periclean Athens, but Euripides must have found him in full force
in Macedonia. To a people of goat-herds like the Arcadians the goat
is the impersonation of life and generation; to a people of cow-herds
the bull is the more potent and splendid vehicle. In the _Bacchae_
there are Snake-Epiphanies, Lion-Epiphanies, but first and foremost
Bull-Epiphanies. At the mystery of the Birth[1103]
‘A Horned God was found
And a God with serpents crowned.’
[Illustration: FIG. 134.]
In the supreme Orphic mystery, to be discussed later (p. 483), the
worshipper before he became ‘Bacchos’ ate the raw flesh of a bull, and,
probably in connection with this sacrament, the Bull form of the god
crystallized into a mystery dogma. When Pentheus has imprisoned the
‘Bacchos’ he finds in the manger not the beautiful stranger but a raging
bull; the hallucination was doubtless bred of ancient faith and ritual.
Again when in the _Bacchae_[1104] Dionysos leads him forth enchanted to
his doom on Cithaeron, Pentheus in his madness sees before him strange
sights:
‘Yea and mine eye
Is bright! Yon sun shines twofold in the sky,
Thebes twofold and the Wall of Seven Gates,
And is it a Wild Bull this, that walks and waits
Before me? There are horns upon thy brow!
What art thou, man or beast? For surely now
The Bull is on thee!’
and last when at the moment of their uttermost peril the Bacchants invoke
their Lord to vengeance, the ancient incarnations loom in upon their
maddened minds[1105]:
‘Appear, appear, whatso thy shape or name,
O Mountain Bull, Snake of the Hundred Heads,
Lion of the Burning Flame!
O God, Beast, Mystery, come!’
All this madness is based not only on a definite faith, but that faith
is the utterance of a definite ritual. In discussing the name Bromios
we have seen (p. 415) that in the ritual of Dionysos in Thrace there
were ‘bull-voiced mimes’ who bellowed to the god. The scholiast[1106]
on Lycophron’s _Alexandra_ says that the ‘women who worshipped Dionysos
Laphystios wore horns themselves, in imitation of the god, for he is
imagined to be bull-headed and is so represented in art.’ Plutarch[1107]
gives more particulars. ‘Many of the Greeks represent Dionysos in their
images in the form of a bull, and the women of Elis in their prayers
invoke the god to come to them with his bull-foot, and among the Argives
there is a Dionysos with the title Bull-born. And they summon him by
their trumpets out of the water, casting into the depths lambs to the
Door-keeper; they hide their trumpets in their thyrsoi, as Socrates has
told in his treatise on the Hosioi.’ A bull-god is summoned and _he
emerges from water_.
It will later (p. 496) be seen to what strange theological uses the
Orphics put their bull and lion and snake-shaped Epiphanies; for the
present it must be noted how near akin these were to the shapes that the
Southern Greeks gave to their own indigenous gods. Zeus and Athene and
even Poseidon had, by the fifth century B.C., become pure human shapes,
but the ministrants of Poseidon at Cyzicus were down to the time of
Athenaeus known as Bulls[1108], and lower divinities like rivers still
kept their bull shape, witness the pathetic story of Deianeira and
Acheloüs[1109]:
‘A river was my lover, him I mean
Great Acheloüs, and in threefold form
Wooed me, and wooed again; a visible bull
Sometimes, and sometimes a coiled gleaming snake,
And sometimes partly man, a monstrous shape
Bull-fronted, and adown his shaggy beard
Fountains of clear spring water glistening flowed.’
In those old divine days a wooer might woo in a hundred shapes, and a
maiden in like fashion might fly his wooing. It is again Sophocles[1110]
who tells us of the marriage of Pentheus:
‘The wedlock of his wedding was untold,
His wrestling with the maiden manifold.’
[Illustration: FIG. 135.]
The red-figured vase-painting in fig. 135 looks almost like an
illustration of the _Trachiniae_[1111]. Here is the monster; but he is
man-fronted, his body that of a bull, and from his mouth flows the water
of his own stream Acheloüs. Herakles is about to break off his mighty
horn, the seat of his strength; Deianeira stands by unmoved. With odd
insistence on his meaning the vase-painter draws in a horn parallel
with the stream to show that the stream is itself a cornucopia of growth
and riches. The vase-painting is many years earlier than the play of
Sophocles.
[Illustration: FIG. 136.]
I know of no instance where an actual bull-Dionysos is represented on a
vase-painting, but in the design in fig. 136 from an amphora[1112] in
the Würzburg Museum his close connection is indicated by the fact that
he rides on a bull. From the kantharos in his hand he pours his gift of
wine. This representation is of special interest because on the reverse
of the same vase Poseidon holding his trident is represented riding on a
white bull. This looks as though the vase-painter had in his mind some
analogy between the two divinities of moisture and growth.
With the bull-Poseidon and the bull river-god at hand, the assimilation
of the bull-shaped Dionysos would be an easy task, the more as he was god
of sap and generation and life, as well as of wine. Water and wine were
blended in theology as in daily life, and the Greeks of the South lent
the element of water.
Dionysos then by his tree-shape and his bull-shape is clearly shown to
be not merely a spirit of intoxication, but rather a primitive nature
god laid hold of, informed by a spirit of intoxication. Demeter and Kore
are nature-goddesses, they have their uprisings and down-goings, but to
the end they remain sedate and orderly. Dionysos is as it were the male
correlative of Kore, but informed, transfigured by this new element of
intoxication and orgy.
This double nature of the god finds expression in one of his titles,
the cultus epithet of Dithyrambos, and it is only by keeping his double
aspect clearly in mind that this difficult epithet can at all be
understood.
DITHYRAMBOS AND THE DITHYRAMB.
The title Dithyrambos given to Dionysos and the Dithyramb, the song sung
in his honour, must be considered together, in fact this title like
‘Iacchos’ seems to have arisen out of the song.
The epithet Dithyrambos was always regarded by the Greeks themselves
as indicating and describing the manner of the birth of the god.
Disregarding the quantity of the vowel _i_ in _Di_ they believed it to
be derived from Δῐ and θύρα, double door, and took it to mean ‘he who
entered life by a double door,’ the womb of his mother and the thigh of
his father. This was to them the cardinal ‘mystery’ of the birth. So much
is clear from the birth-song of the chorus in the _Bacchae_[1113]:
‘Acheloüs’ roaming daughter,
Holy Dirce, virgin water,
Bathed he not of old in thee
The Babe of God, the Mystery?
When from out the fire immortal
To himself his God did take him,
To his own flesh, and bespake him:
“Enter now life’s second portal,
Motherless mystery; lo I break
Mine own body for thy sake,
Thou of the Two-fold Door, and seal thee
Mine, O Bromios”—thus he spake—
“And to this thy land reveal thee.”’
Dithyrambos was ‘he of the miraculous birth,’ Liknites conceived
mystically. The mistaken etymology need not make us distrust the
substantial truth of the tradition.
As Dithyrambos is the Babe mystically born, so the Dithyramb was
uniformly regarded as the Song of the Birth. Plato states this, though
somewhat tentatively, in the _Laws_[1114]. When discussing various kinds
of music he says: ‘Another form of song, the Birth of Dionysos called, I
think, the dithyramb.’
It has already been seen that Dionysos as the principle of life and
generation was figured as a bull, it is therefore no surprise to learn
from Pindar[1115] that the Dithyramb ‘drives’ the bull:
‘Whence did appear the Charites who sing
To Dionyse their king
The dithyramb, the chant of Bull-driving?’
The Charites here halt half-way between ritual and poetry. They are half
abstract rhythmical graces, half the Charites of an actual cult. The song
of invocation to the Bull sung by the women of Elis has been already
noted. It is the earliest Dithyramb preserved, and happily in his _Greek
Questions_ Plutarch[1116] has left us a somewhat detailed account. He
asks, ‘Why do the women of Elis summon Dionysos in their hymns to be
present with them with his bull-foot?’ He goes on to give the exact words
of the little ritual hymn:
Hero, Dionysos, come
To thy temple-home
Here at Elis, worshipful
We implore thee
With thy Charites adore Thee,
Rushing with thy bull-foot, come!
Noble Bull, noble Bull.’
The fact that ‘Hero’ precedes ‘Dionysos’ in the invocation makes it
tempting to conjecture that we have here a superposition of cults, that
the women of Elis long before the coming of Dionysos worshipped a local
hero in the form of a bull and that Dionysos affiliated his cult; but
another possibility is perhaps more probable, that Hero is in the hymn
purely adjectival. It has already been shown that the word meant to begin
with only ‘strong’ and then ‘strong one.’
The mention of the Charites is important. They are the givers of increase
(p. 298), who naturally attend the coming of the life-god; they seem here
analogous to the nurses of Dionysos, the sober form of his Maenads. They
attend alike his coming and his birth.
In the Delphic Paean (p. 417), where the birth of Dionysos in the spring
is celebrated, the title Dithyrambos[1117] is first and foremost, before
Bacchos, Euios, Braites and Bromios:
‘Come, O Dithyrambos, Bacchos, come,
Euios, Thyrsos-Lord, Braites, come,
Bromios, come, and coming with thee bring
Holy hours of thine own holy spring.
_Evoe, Bacchos, hail, Paean, hail_,
Whom in sacred Thebes the mother fair,
She, Thyone, once to Zeus did bear.
All the stars danced for joy. Mirth
Of mortals hailed thee, Bacchos, at thy birth.’
The new-born god is Dithyrambos, and he is born at the resurrection of
earth in the spring-time.
The epithet Paean, belonging to Apollo, is here given to Dionysos. At the
great festival of the finishing of the temple all is to be harmony and
peace; theology attempts an edifying but impossible syncretism. Nothing
in mythology is more certain than that the Paean and the Dithyramb were
to begin with poles asunder, and it is by the contrast between them that
we best understand not only the gist of the Dithyramb itself but the
significance of the whole religion of Dionysos.
* * * * *
The contrast between Apollo and Dionysos, Paean and Dithyramb, has been
sharply and instructively drawn by Plutarch, himself a priest at Delphi.
The comparison instituted by Plutarch between the rites of Osiris and
those of Dionysos has been already noted (p. 402). In the discourse
about Isis and Osiris[1118], it will be remembered, Plutarch says ‘the
affair about the Titans and the Night of Accomplishment accords with what
are called in the rites of Osiris “Tearings to pieces,” Resurrections,
Regenerations. The same,’ he adds, ‘is true about rites of burying. The
Egyptians show in many places burial chests of Osiris, and the Delphians
also hold that the remains of Dionysos are deposited with them near to
the place of the oracle, and the Consecrated Ones (ὅσιοι) perform a
secret sacrifice in the sanctuary of Apollo what time the Thyiades awaken
Liknites.’ In a word, at Delphi there were rites closely analogous to
those of Osiris and concerned with the tearing to pieces, the death and
burial of the god Dionysos, and his resurrection and re-birth as a child.
In another discourse (_On the Ei at Delphi_) Plutarch[1119] tells us
that these ceremonials were concerned with the god as Dithyrambos, that
the characteristic of the Dithyramb was that it sang of these mutations,
these re-births, and that it was thereby marked off sharply from the
Paean of Apollo. The passage is so instructive both as to the real nature
of Dionysos and as reflecting the attitude of an educated Greek towards
his religion that it must be quoted in full. Plutarch has been discussing
and contrasting Dionysos and Apollo apropos of the worship of Dionysos
at Delphi, a worship every detail of which he must certainly have known.
Dionysos, he says, has just as much to do with Delphi as Apollo himself,
a statement rather startling to modern ears. Then he begins to work out
the contrast between the two gods after the philosophic fashion of his
day. Apollo is the principle of simplicity, unity and purity, Dionysos of
manifold change and metamorphosis. This is the esoteric doctrine known to
experts, cloaked from the vulgar. Among these experts (σοφώτεροι) were
probably, as will be seen later (p. 463), Orphic theologians. He goes on
to tell how these esoteric doctrines were expressed in popular ritual.
He of course inverts the natural order of development. He believes that
the doctrine known only to the few gave rise to a ritual intended to
express it in popular terms for the vulgar; whereas of course in reality
the ritual existed first and was then by the experts made to bear a
mystical meaning. Bearing this proviso in mind Plutarch’s account is full
of interest. ‘These manifold changes that Dionysos suffers into winds
and water and earth and stars and the births of plants and animals they
enigmatically term “rending asunder” and “tearing limb from limb”; and
they call the god Dionysos and Zagreus and Nyktelios and Isodaites, and
tell of certain Destructions and Disappearances and Resurrections and
New-Births which are fables and riddles, appertaining to the aforesaid
metamorphoses. And to him (i.e. Dionysos) they sing _dithyrambic_
measures full of sufferings and metamorphosis, which metamorphosis has
in it an element of wandering and distraction. For “it is fitting,” as
Aeschylus says, that “the dithyramb of diverse utterance should accompany
Dionysos as his counterpart, but the ordered Paean and the sober Muse
should attend Apollo.” And artists in sculpture represent Apollo as ever
young and ageless, but Dionysos they represent as having many forms and
shapes. In a word, they attribute to the one uniformity and order and an
earnest simplicity, but to the other a certain incongruousness owing to
a blend made up of sportiveness and excess and earnestness and madness.
They invoke him thus:
“Euios, thou Dionysos, who by the flame of thy rite
Dost women to madness incite.”’
Plutarch goes on to tell of the division of the ritual year at Delphi
between Apollo and Dionysos. Apollo as incoming conqueror has taken the
larger and the fairer portion.
‘And since the time of the revolutions in these changes is not equal, but
the one which they call Satiety is longer, and the other which they call
Craving is shorter, they observe in this matter a due proportion. For the
remainder of the year they use the Paean in their sacrificial ceremonies,
but at the approach of winter they wake up the Dithyramb and make the
Paean cease. For three months they invoke the one god (Dionysos) in place
of the other (Apollo), as they hold that in respect to its duration the
setting in order of the world is to its conflagration as three to one.’
Plutarch’s use of technical terms, e.g. conflagration (ἐκπύρωσις),
betrays that he is importing into his religious discussion philosophic
speculations, and especially those of Heraclitus. Into these it is
unnecessary to follow him; the important points that emerge for the
present argument are that the Dithyramb was a ritual song sung in the
winter season, probably at festivals connected with the winter solstice,
of an orgiastic character and dealing with the god as an impersonation of
natural forces, dealing with his sufferings, his death and resurrection,
and as such contrasted with the sober simple Paean. In a word the
Dithyramb, and with it the title Dithyrambos, resume the two factors that
we have detected in the religion of Dionysos, the old spirit of life and
generation, and the new spirit of intoxication.
It remains to enquire if any light can be thrown on the difficult
etymology[1120] of the word.
* * * * *
The popular etymology, that saw in Dithyrambos the
god-of-the-double-door, is of course impossible. Dithyrambos, all
philologists agree, cannot etymologically be separated from its cognate
_thriambos_, which gave to the Latins their word _triumphus_. The word
_thriambos_ looks as if it were formed on the analogy of _iambos_. It
may be that Suidas[1121] among his many confused conjectures as to the
meaning of the word throws out accidentally the right clue. He says
‘they call the madness of poets _thriasis_.’ May not _thriambos_ mean
the mad inspired orgiastic measure? The first syllable with its long _i_
may possibly be referred to the root Δι already discussed under Diasia
(p. 23). At a time when in etymology the length of syllables was wholly
disregarded the Δι in Διός might help out the confusion, and last some
brilliant theologian intent on edification thought of the double doors.
Mythology has left us dim hints as to the functions of certain ancient
maiden prophetesses at Delphi called Thriae. May they not have been the
Mad Maidens who sang the mad song, the _thriambos_?
Of the Thriae we are told by Philochoros[1122] that they were nymphs of
Parnassos, nurses of Apollo. Save for this mention we never hear that
Apollo had any nurses, he was wholly the son of his father. Is it not
more probable that they were nurses of Dionysos?
The account of these mysterious Thriae given in the Homeric Hymn[1123] to
Hermes is strange and suggestive. Hermes is made to tell how his first
gift of prophecy came not from Zeus, but from three maiden prophetesses:
‘For there are sisters born, called Thriae, maiden things,
Three are they and they joy them in glory of swift wings.
Upon their heads is sprinkled fine flour of barley white,
They dwell aloof in dwellings beneath Parnassos’ height.
They taught me love of soothsaying, while I my herds did feed,
Being yet a boy. Of me and mine my father took no heed.
And thence they flitted, now this way, now that, upon the wing,
And of all things that were to be they uttered soothsaying.
What time they fed on honey fresh, food of the gods divine,
Then holy madness made their hearts to speak the truth incline,
But if from food of honeycomb they needs must keep aloof
Confused they buzz among themselves and speak no word of sooth.’
The Thriae are nurses like the Maenads, they rave in holy madness
(θυΐουσιν) like the Thyiades, but their inspiration is not from Bacchos,
the wine-god, not even from Bromios or Sabazios or Braites, the
beer-gods; it is from a source, from an intoxicant yet more primitive,
from honey. They are in a word ‘Melissae,’ honey-priestesses, inspired
by a honey intoxicant; they are bees, their heads white with pollen;
they hum and buzz, swarming confusedly. The honey service of ancient
ritual has already been noted (p. 91), and the fact that not only the
priestesses of Artemis at Ephesus were ‘Bees,’ but also those of Demeter,
and, still more significant, the Delphic priestess herself was a Bee.
The oracle of the Bessi (p. 370) was delivered by a priestess, and the
analogy with Delphi is noted by Herodotus; may not the priestess of the
Bessi have also been a Bee? The Delphic priestess in historical times
chewed a laurel leaf, but when she was a Bee surely she must have sought
her inspiration in the honeycomb.
* * * * *
With all these divine associations about the bee, a creature wondrous
enough in nature, it is not surprising that she was figured by art as a
goddess and half human. In fig. 137 we have such a representation[1124],
a woman with high curled wings and a bee body from the waist downwards.
The design is from a gold embossed plaque found at Camiros.
[Illustration: FIG. 137.]
When Euripides would tell of the dread power of Aphrodite haunting with
her doom all living things, Aphrodite who was heir to all the sacred
traditions of the Earth-Mother, the image of the holy bee comes to his
mind charged with mysterious associations half lost to us. He makes the
chorus of maidens in the _Hippolytus_ sing[1125]:
‘O mouth of Dirce, O god-built wall
That Dirce’s wells run under;
Ye know the Cyprian’s fleet foot-fall,
Ye saw the heavens round her flare
When she lulled to her sleep that Mother fair
Of Twy-born Bacchus and crowned her there
The Bride of the bladed thunder,
For her breath is on all that hath life, and she floats in the air
Bee-like, death-like, a wonder.’
The _thriambos_[1126] was then, if this conjecture be correct, the song
of the Thriae or honey-priestesses, a song from the beginning like
the analogous Dithyramb confused, inspired, impassioned. The title
Dithyrambos through its etymology and by its traditional use belonged
to Dionysos, conceived of in his twofold aspect as the nature-god born
anew each year, the god of plants and animals as well as of human life,
and also as the spirit of intoxication. It remains to ask what was the
significance of such a god to the Greeks who received him as an immigrant
from the North. How far did they adopt and how far modify both elements
in this strange and complex new worship?
First, what significance had Dionysos to the Greeks as a nature-god, in
his animal and vegetable forms as bull and tree?
* * * * *
Long before the coming of Dionysos the Greeks had nature-gods: they had
Demeter goddess of the corn, they had Poseidon Phytalmios god of the
growth of plants, they had the Charites givers of all increase. But it
should be distinctly noted that all these and many another nature-god had
passed into a state of complete anthropomorphism. They represent human
rather than merely physical relations, they have cut themselves as far as
possible loose from plant and animal nature. Demeter is far more mother
than corn. Hermes is the young man in his human splendour, and spite of
his Herm-form and phallic worship has well nigh forgotten that he was
once a spirit of generation in flocks and plants. Athene, like her mother
the earth, had once for her vehicle a snake (p. 306), but she has waxed
in glory till she comes to be a motherless splendour born of the brain
of Zeus, an incarnate city of Athens. These magnificent Olympians have
shed for ever the slough of animal shapes. Dionysos came to Greece at an
earlier stage of his development when he was still half bull half tree,
and this earlier stage was tolerated, even welcomed, by a people who had
themselves outgrown it.
It is not hard to see how this came to be. Man when he worships a bull
or a tree has not, even to himself, consciously emerged as human.
He is still to his own thinking brother of plants and animals. As
he advances he gains but also loses, and must sometimes retrace his
steps. The Greeks of the sixth century B.C. may well have been a little
weary of their anthropomorphic Olympians, tired of their own magnified
reflection in the mirror of mythology, whether this image were distorted
or halo-crowned. They had taken for their motto ‘Know Thyself,’ but at
the fountain of self-knowledge no human soul has ever yet quenched its
thirst. With Dionysos, god of trees and plants as well as human life,
there came a ‘return to nature,’ a breaking of bonds and limitations
and crystallizations, a desire for the life rather of the emotions than
of the reason, a recrudescence it may be of animal passions. Nowhere
is this return to nature more clearly seen than in the _Bacchae_[1127]
of Euripides. The Bacchants leave their human homes, their human work
and ordered life, their looms and distaffs, and are back with the wild
things upon the mountains. In token of this their hair flows loose, they
clothe themselves with the skin of beasts, they are girt with snakes,
and crowned with ivy and wild briony, and leaving their human babes they
suckle the young of wolves and deer[1128]:
‘And one a young fawn held, and one a wild
Wolf-cub, and fed them with white milk and smiled
In love, young mothers with a mother’s breast,
And babes at home forgotten.’
Euripides, it may be, utters his own longing to be free from the tangle
and stress of things human, but it is into the mouths of the chorus of
Maenads that he puts the lovely song[1129]:
‘Will they ever come to me, ever again,
The long, long dances,
On through the dark till the dim stars wane?
Shall I feel the dew on my throat and the stream
Of wind in my hair? Shall our white feet gleam
In the dim expanses?
O feet of a Fawn to the greenwood fled,
Alone in the grass, and the loveliness;
Leap of the Hunted, no more in dread,
Beyond the snares and the deadly press.
Yet a voice still in the distance sounds,
A voice and a fear and a haste of hounds,
O wildly labouring, fiercely fleet,
Onward yet by river and glen—
Is it joy or terror ye storm-swift feet?—
To the dear lone lands untroubled of men,
Where no voice sounds, and amid the shadowy green
The little things of the woodland live unseen.’
Nor is it only that the Maenads escape from their humanity to worship
on the mountain, they find there others, a strange congregation, that
worship with them[1130]:
‘There
Through the appointed hour, they made their prayer
And worship of the Wand, with one accord
Of heart, and cry “Iacchos, Bromios, Lord,
God of God born!” And all the mountain felt
And worshipped with them; and the wild things knelt,
And ramped and gloried, and the wilderness
Was filled with moving voices and dim stress.’
This notion of a return to nature[1131] is an element in the worship of
Dionysos so simple, so moving and in a sense so modern that we realize
it without effort. It is harder to attain to anything like historical
sympathy with the second element—that of intoxication.
* * * * *
It is not easy to deal with the worship of Dionysos without rousing in
our own minds an instinctive protest. Intoxication to us now-a-days means
not inspiration but excess and consequent degradation; its associations
are with crime, with the slums, with hereditary disease, with every form
of abuse that abases man, not to the level of the beasts but far beneath
them.
In trying to understand how the Greeks felt towards Dionysos we must bear
in mind one undoubted fact. The Greeks were not as a nation drunkards.
Serious excess in drink is rare among southern nations, and the Greeks
were no exception to the general rule. When they came in contact with
northern nations like the Thracians, who drank deep and seriously, they
were surprised and disgusted.
Of this we have ample evidence, much of it drawn from the discussion
in the _Deipnosophistae_ of Athenaeus[1132] on Wine and Wine-cups.
The general tone of the discourse, while it is strongly in favour of
drinking, is averse to drunkenness. ‘The men of old time were not wont
to get drunk.’ The reason given is characteristically Greek; they
disliked the unbridled license that ensued. It was well said by the
inventors of proverbs, ‘Wine has no rudder.’ Plato[1133] in the sixth
book of the _Laws_ said it was unfitting for a man to drink to the
point of drunkenness, except on the occasions of festivals of that god
who was the giver of wine. An occasional and strictly defined license
under the sanction of religion is widely different from a general habit
of intemperance. In the first book of the _Laws_[1134], in speaking of
various foreign nations Northern and Oriental, e.g. Celts, Iberians,
Thracians, Lydians and Persians, he says ‘nations of that sort make a
practice of drunkenness.’
The Greek habit of drinking was marked off from that of the Thracians
by two customs, they drank their wine in small cups and they mixed it
freely with water. One of the guests in Athenaeus remarks[1135] that
it is worth while enquiring whether the men of old times drank out of
large cups. ‘For,’ he adds, ‘Dicaearchus the Messenian, the disciple of
Aristotle, in his discourse on Alcaeus says they used small cups and
drank their wine mixed with much water.’ He goes on to cite a treatise
‘On Drunkenness’ by Chamaeleon of Heracleia, in which Chamaeleon stated
not only that the custom of using large cups was a recent one but that
it was imported from the barbarians. Imported indeed but never really
naturalized, for he goes on to say, ‘They being devoid of culture rush
eagerly to excess in wine and provide for themselves all manner of
superfluous delicacies.’ It is clear that in respect of wine and food as
of everything else the Greek was in the main true to his motto ‘Nothing
too much.’ Drunkenness was an offence in his eyes against taste as well
as morals.
Large drinking cups were a northern barbarian characteristic[1136];
they were made originally of the huge horns of the large breed of
cattle common in the North, they were set in silver and gold, and later
sometimes actually made of precious metals and called _rhyta_. Chamaeleon
goes on to say, ‘in the various regions of Greece neither in works of art
nor in poems shall we find any trace of a large cup being made save in
such as deal with heroes.’ That to the dead hero was allowed even by the
Orphics the guerdon of ‘eternal drunkenness’ will be seen later (Chap.
XI.), but the living hero only drank of large cups of unmixed wine out
of ceremonial courtesy to the Northerner. Xenophon in the seventh book
of the _Anabasis_ describes in detail the drinking festival given by the
Thracian Seuthes. When the Greek general and his men came to Seuthes they
embraced first and then _according to the Thracian custom_ horns of wine
were presented to them. In like manner the Macedonian Philip pledged his
friends in a horn of wine. It was from silver horns that the Centaurs
drank (p. 386). A flatterer and a demagogue might drink deep for his own
base purposes. Of the arch-demagogue Alcibiades Plutarch[1137] says:
‘At Athens he scoffed and kept horses, at Sparta he went close-shaved
and wore a short cloak and washed in cold water, in Thrace he fought
and drank.’ War and drink, Ares and Dionysos, have been in all ages
the chosen divinities of the Northerner. Diodorus[1138] in speaking of
ceremonial wine-drinking makes a characteristically Greek statement:
‘They say that those who drink at banquets when unmixed wine is provided
invoke the Good Genius, but when after the meal wine is given mixed with
water they call on the name of Zeus the Saviour; for they hold that wine
drunk unmixed produces forms of madness, but that when it is mixed with
the rain of Zeus the joy of it and the delight remain, and the injurious
element that causes madness and license is corrected.’ The Good, or
perhaps we ought to call him ‘Wealthy,’ Spirit is the very essence of
the old wine-god of Thrace and Boeotia; the blending with the rain of
Zeus is the taking of it over to the mildness and temperance of the Greek
character.
* * * * *
Excess was rare among the southern Greeks, and, even when they exceeded,
because they were a people of artists they euphemized. No one but a Greek
could have conceived the lovely little vase-painting from an oinochoë in
the Boston Museum of Fine Arts[1139] in fig. 138. A beautiful maiden is
the centre of the scene. She is a worshipper of Dionysos. In her left
hand is a tall thyrsos and she holds the cup of Dionysos, the kantharos,
in her right. It is empty, and she seems to ask the Satyr who stands
before her to refill it from his oinochoë. But he will not, she has had
too much already. Over her beautiful head, slightly inclined as if in
weariness, is inscribed—and who but a Greek would have dared to write
it?—her name ‘Kraipale.’ Behind her comes a kindly sober friend bearing
in her hand a hot drink, smoking still, to cure her sickness.
[Illustration: FIG. 138.]
Perhaps because the extreme of drunkenness, its after degradation and
squalid ugliness, was rare among the Greeks, they were better able to
realize that in its milder forms it lent lovely motives for art. Wine
by the release it brings from self-consciousness unslacks the limbs
and gives to pose and gesture the new beauty of abandonment. Degas has
dared to seize and fix for ever the beauty he saw in that tragedy of
degradation—a woman of the people besotted by absinthe. The peeping
moralist that lurks in most of us intrudes to utter truth beside the mark
and say that she is wicked. To the Greek artist there was no such extreme
issue between art and morality. To him, whether poet or vase-painter,
to drink and fall asleep was if not a common at least a beautiful
experience, one he painted on many a vase and sang in many a song. A
festival without the grace and glory of wine would to him have been shorn
of well nigh all its goodliness. On this it is needless to insist. To him
peace and wine and sleep are playfellows loving and lovely[1140]:
‘Eyelids closed and lulled heart deep
In gentle, unforbidden sleep,
Street by street the city brims
With lovers’ feasts and burns with lovers’ hymns.’
Another point remains to be noted. Not only did the Greeks mix their
Thracian wine with water, tempering the madness of the god, but they saw
in Dionysos the god of spiritual as well as physical intoxication. It
cannot be forgotten that the drama sprang from the religion of Dionysos;
his nurses are not only Maenads, they are Muses; from him and him only
comes the beauty and magic of their song:
‘Hail Child of Semele, only by thee
Can any singing sweet and gracious be.’
The contrast between sheer Thracian madness and the Athenian notion
of inspiration is very clearly seen in the two figures of Dionysos
as represented on the two vase-paintings in fig. 139 and fig. 140,
vase-paintings roughly contemporaneous, the first in the style of
Hieron, the second in that of Brygos. In fig. 139 from a red-figured
stamnos[1141] in the British Museum we have the Thracian Dionysos drunk
with wine, a brutal though still splendid savage; he dances in ecstasy
brandishing the fawn he has rent asunder in his madness. In the second
picture[1142] (fig. 140), a masterpiece of decorative composition, we
have Dionysos as the Athenian cared to know him. The strange mad Satyrs
are twisted and contorted to make exquisite patterns, they clash their
frenzied crotala and wave great vine branches. But in the midst of the
revel the god himself stands erect. He holds no kantharos, only a great
lyre. His head is thrown back in ecstasy; he is drunken, but with music,
not with wine.
[Illustration: FIG. 139.]
[Illustration: FIG. 140.]
Again, with the Maenad worshippers there is the same transformation.
The delicate red-figured kotylos[1143] in fig. 141 from the National
Museum in Athens is like a little twofold text on the double aspect of
the worship of Dionysos. On the obverse is a Maenad about to execute her
old savage ritual of tearing a kid asunder. In a moment she will raise
her bent head and chant[1144]:
‘O glad, glad on the Mountains
To swoon in the race outworn,
When the holy fawn-skin clings
And all else sweeps away,
To the joy of the quick red fountains,
The blood of the hill-goat torn,
The glory of wild-beast ravenings
Where the hill-top catches the day,
To the Phrygian, Lydian mountains
’Tis Bromios leads the way.’
[Illustration: FIG. 141.]
On the reverse for counterpart is a sister Maenad. She dances in gentle
ecstasy, playing on her great timbrel. She is all for the service of the
Muses, and she might sing[1145]:
‘But a better land is there
Where Olympus cleaves the air,
The high still dell, where the Muses dwell,
Fairest of all things fair.
O there is Grace, and there is the Heart’s Desire,
And peace to adore thee, thou Spirit of guiding Fire.’
* * * * *
There are some to whom by natural temperament the religion of
Bromios, son of Semele, is and must always be a dead letter, if not a
stumbling-block. Food is to such a troublesome necessity, wine a danger
or a disgust. They dread all stimulus that comes from without, they
would fain break the ties that link them with animals and plants. They
do not feel in themselves and are at a loss to imagine for others the
sacramental mystery of life and nutrition that is accomplished in us day
by day, how in the faintness of fasting the whole nature of man, spirit
as well as body, dies down, he cannot think, he cannot work, he cannot
love, how in the breaking of bread, and still more in the drinking of
wine, life spiritual as well as physical is renewed, thought is re-born,
his equanimity, his magnanimity are restored, reason and morality rule
again. But to this sacramentalism of life most of us bear constant, if
partly unconscious, witness. We will not eat with the man we hate, it is
felt a sacrilege leaving a sickness in body and soul. The first breaking
of bread and drinking of wine together is the seal of a new friendship;
the last eaten in silence at parting is more than many words. The
sacramental feast of bread and wine is spread for the newly married, for
the newly dead.
Those to whom wine brings no inspiration, no moments of sudden
illumination, of wider and deeper insight, of larger human charity
and understanding, find it hard to realize what to others of other
temperament is so natural, so elemental, so beautiful—the constant shift
from physical to spiritual that is of the essence of the religion of
Dionysos. But there are those also, and they are saintly souls, who know
it all to the full, know the exhilaration of wine, know what it is to
be drunken with the physical beauty of a flower or a sunset, with the
sensuous imagery of words, with the strong wine of a new idea, with
the magic of another’s personality, yet having known, turn away with
steadfast eyes, disallowing the madness not only of Bromios but of the
Muses and of Aphrodite. Such have their inward ecstasy of the ascetic,
but they revel with another Lord, and he is Orpheus.