Dionysus by Carravagio

Then from the ground below, comes a hideous half human shriek. He recognizes the voice of his own mother. Her distorted voice is joined by a chours of other females. They scream at him frantically, they want to kill him. He is terrified.

This scene was written about 2,400 years ago. It is about to explode into one of the most grotesque and horrific climaxes in the history of drama. Yet this is a story hallowed by centuries of ritual and tradition. It is the basis for the springtime cults all over ancient Greece. This is the story of Dionysus.

Once every two years, in historical times, the women of Greece would leave their homes, go into the mountains, and dance in the snow on a mid-winter night. There was no drinking for this was winter. At the end of the ceremony an animal, a bull or goat, was torn apart. The women ate the bleeding flesh, sharing communion with the raw power of Dionysus.

Ancient Athens tamed these violent ceremonies. There were three Athenian festivals associated with Dionysus: The Rural Dionysia in December, in which a cake and phallic symbol were consecrated to the god. Later, toward middle January, the Lenaea, with plays and processions; finally in mid-March, the most lavish of all_ the Greater Dionysia, a city-wide festival with displays of wealth and power and the preformance of tragedy and comedy that made the theater of Dionysis at Athens famous.

If the actions of the ritual became civilized and cultivated, the spirit of the myth did not. In spring, wine bottled the previous year was opened. It spread a message of disorder and madness. Generations of children were fathered on the nights of Dionysian chaos.

If Dionysis is resisted, either collectively or individually, he comes with superhuman power to rend one apart. The first to go is the head. (the intellect) To be seized by the whilrwind of Dionysus's power is to have "lost one's head"__and Dionysus carries it off in frightful triumph.

adapted from an article by

Kenneth Cavander

~The Rites of Spring