Hey everyone, Welcome to Mythology Explained. In today’s video, we’re going to discuss Dionysus.
Let’s get into it.
Known as Bacchus to the Romans, Dionysus was the god of wine.
Both the Ivy, a plant symbol of eternal life, and the grapevine were sacred to him. He kept
a raucous and motley entourage that included Satyrs, Silens, and Maenads. In art, he most
commonly featured on alcohol paraphernalia, such as wine cups and pitchers. Dressed in fawn skin,
wine cup in hand, he was depicted with long hair, a beard, and with ivy wreathed about him.
Dionysus was closely tied to Demeter, the goddess of grain, the harvest, and agriculture,
and he was also viewed as a god that brought earth’s bounty to bloom,
providing sustenance for humanity. He was the god of wine, but originally and more fundamentally,
he was the god of liquid life, especially the sort in plant life that allowed nature to flourish.
Plant growth was his province, which is why he was called Anthios (“Bloom-Producing”),
Karpios (“Bringer of Fruit”), and Dendrites (“Tree God”). That the liquids made from plants - such
as honey and wine - became subsumed into his sphere of influence was a natural progression.
Dionysus became such a popular god,
in part, because his favor was bestowed in egalitarian fashion. The classifications that
culminated into the hierarchy that structured society were irrelevant to him. Free, slave,
young, old, common, royal, man, woman, human, beast: all were equal in his eyes.
In particular, women, who were stifled in many ways men weren’t, were drawn to the
cult of Dionysus. They were often confined to the home and didn’t enjoy the same freedom men did,
so worshiping Dionysus was a respite from the tedium and drudgery that mounted day after day.
Connection to Dionysus was achieved through ecstatic dancing and the drinking of wine.
In this rapturous state, people went into the wilderness where they let the wild
abandon of their rituals overcome them. Small animals were often captured and consumed raw,
their blood symbolic of Dionysus. The practice of these rituals continued longer in rural
areas, but in urban areas, such as the metropolis of Athens,
the worship of Dionysus was subsumed into the purview of the theatre, which staged
performances in his honor. In this way, Dionysus also became the patron god of the theatrical arts.
Dionysus was the son of Zeus and of Semele, a Theban princess. Hera, of course, didn’t like
her husband slipping into other women’s beds, so she planted a seed of doubt in Semele’s mind,
causing the princess to question whether her lover was actually who he said he was.
The next time Zeus came to her, she asked a favor of him. In response, Zeus swore that
he would do anything for her that she asked. Now bound by oath - what’s more, an unbreakable oath
sworn by the river Styx - he couldn’t refuse Semele, no matter how self-destructive her
request, which was for Zeus to appear before her unveiled, revealing his divine form to her.
The true potency of his divinity - a potency no mere mortal could withstand - was shown,
and Semele was incinerated on the spot. She was pregnant with Zeus’ son,
and miraculously, the fetus wasn’t destroyed with the mother. Gingerly, Zeus took the fetus
and sewed it into his own thigh, and later, Dionysus was born. In one version, it was the
Nysaean Nymphs who raised him, but in another, he was raised by Ino, his mother’s sister.
When fully grown, Dionysus wandered the world, visiting far-off, exotic places.
Everywhere he went he taught people the mysteries of his worship - an esoteric branch,
to begin with, for his divinity was new to the world - and he taught them the ways of
the vine - how to grow it, cultivate its sacred fruit, and ferment its juices;
for it was his wine that fueled the cavorting congregations that assembled in his honor,
performing all manner of ecstatic rituals, and it was his wine that people poured from their
cups to honor the gods - the countless libations that saturated the earth.
One day, a group of pirates saw Dionysus walking along the shore. He was beautiful to
behold and had a regal bearing, so the pirates judged that he must have been of royal blood,
and that there must be some king out there willing to pay an exorbitant ransom for his safe return.
They were right in assuming Dionysus to be a king’s son, though, had they known the king was,
in fact, the king of all creation, I’m sure they would have hurried along and left Dionysus alone.
They came ashore, seized Dionysus and brought him back to their ship
as their captive - or so they thought. The ropes they used to tie him wouldn’t hold,
falling limply to the ground, and the pirates, dumbfounded, stared in disbelief.
The helmsman understood the situation, especially the peril of it, but the rest of the crew
dismissed his fear as the fancy of a coward. A strong wind began to blow, and the ship’s sails
became pregnant with it; but to the astonishment of the crew, the ship didn’t move. Instead,
wine streamed all around, and the ship was completely ensnared in a tangle of vines,
like the tentacles of some massive monster out of the deep. Then Dionysus transformed himself into a
lion, and the crew, fear-stricken, abandoned ship, jumping overboard; but they didn’t escape because,
once in the water, they were all transmogrified into dolphins. Only the helmsman was spared.
Dionysus was the youngest of the Olympians - that is, in a narrative sense only - so
the places he visited for the first time didn’t know him or pay him worship. Because of this,
he was often met with obstinate resistance, particularly in the form of kings persecuting him.
There are two main instances of this sort of treatment.
The first involves King Lycurgus, ruler of the Edonians, the second Pentheus, king of Thebes.
Lycurgus refused to acknowledge Dionysus as a deity. In response, Dionysus departed Lycurgus’
lands and temporarily took up residence in the depths of the sea, but he returned, overpowered
the king, and punished him for his brazen offence. The punishment Dionysus dispensed was mild,
imprisoning the king in a cave until his mind accepted the divine nature
of the god he slighted, but the rest of the gods were not so magnanimous. Zeus afflicted
Lycurgus with blindness, and the king died soon after. As you’ll see, though, Lycurgus’ demise
will seem the epitome of mercifulness when compared to what befell Pentheus.
That Dionysus was his cousin wasn’t known to Pentheus. What the king of Thebes did know,
however, was that Dionysus and his flamboyant and cavorting entourage
were an affront to his kingdom. He ordered them fettered and imprisoned, but even as he did so,
words of warning rose up behind him. Solemnly delivered,
an old blind prophet said this: “The man you reject is a new god.
He is Semele’s child, whom Zeus rescued. He, with divine Demeter, is greatest upon earth for men.”
No one was unmoved by the words, Pentheus included,
but when he turned to answer, he saw that the old blind prophet was dressed and bedecked in
the same wild and rustic style as all the other people in Dionysus’ train.
Dionysus and his followers were all sent to jail, but no restraints could bind them nor bars
hold them. All his followers escaped and left. Dionysus also escaped, but instead of leaving,
he went to Pentheus to make the king see reason and welcome the worship of a new god in his lands.
This happened many times, but Pentheus was obdurate, so each time Dionysus escaped, he
became angrier and more unreasonable. Eventually, Dionysus gave up and left Pentheus to his doom,
which was one of the most horrific in all of Greek mythology.
Rather than let Dionysus leave peacefully, Pentheus pursued him and his followers into
the wilderness. Here, Dionysus unleashed the power within the fell and frightful side of himself. He
made all the women who followed him mad. In their state, they thought Pentheus was some wild thing
of the forest, and they fell upon him with all the fury and frenzy of a pack of wolves. Pentheus
was torn to pieces, and after he was reduced to eviscerated entrails, strewn limbs, and splatters
of blood, Dionysus restored the minds of the women he had stricken with madness. Making this ending
especially macabre is that both Pentheus’ mother and sister were among the women who attacked him.
Ostensibly, Dionysus’ nature was self-contradicting:
at one turn a beacon of joy and happiness, the next an agent of death and destruction.
While this was true - he did comprise a dichotomy of pleasure and pain - this coupling of opposites
stemmed from his sphere of influence, which was wine. The Greeks knew that alcohol was a
double-edged sword, capable of both amplifying the good and exacerbating the bad. Because of
this duality, there was also a duality to the ecstasy that Dionysus infected people with, which
could manifest as euphoric hysteria or as vicious madness. In this way, Dionysus could be beneficent
or maleficent, just as those whose minds are taken by drink could be humorous or hostile.
To wrap this video up, we’re going to spend a little time discussing Dionysus’ wife.
Ariadne was the daughter of Minos, king of Crete, whose wife Pasiphae was cursed by Poseidon to
love and lust after the Cretan Bull. She had Daedalus, one of the greatest minds and most
ingenious inventors in Greek mythology, construct a hollow wooden cow. Pasiphae climbed into the cow
so that the bull could mount her, and months later, the minotaur was born, a hybrid
monstrosity: half-human, half-bull. Theseus then came to Crete, posing as a youth to be sacrificed
so that he could enter the labyrinth and kill the minotaur with his bare hands. Ariadne was taken
with Theseus the moment she saw him, and because of the love she now bore him, she gave him a ball
of string, allowing the young hero to retrace his steps and escape the labyrinth after his task was
complete. Theseus then took Ariadne with him, but she never arrived in Athens with him. She was left
on the island of Naxos, and the reasons for this vary, depending on the version.
Here is where Dionysus comes in. He came upon Ariadne, forlorn, alone in desolation. He rescued
her and fell in love with her. When she died, he set the crown he gave her amongst the stars
In a fashion, Dionysus also rescued his own mother despite the fact that she died before he was born.
He braved the underworld, defied death, and took his mother with him,
but not back to the mortal world, no; he bore her to the lofty heights of Mount Olympus,
where she was accepted, being the mother of a god.
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