Runboard.com
Слава Україні!
Community logo


runboard.com       Sign up (learn about it) | Sign in (lost password?)

Page:  1  2 

 
Tim Callahan Profile
Live feed
Blog
Friends
Miscellaneous info

Administrator

Registered: 09-2008
Posts: 387
Karma: 15 (+16/-1)
Reply | Quote
Origins of Dionysos


Morwen, or anyone else, perhaps you could give me your take on where Dionysos came from. Looking into number of points of reference, I find arguments that he was an indigenous Greek deity, or that his origins lay in Crete (C. Kerenyi), Thrace (Hastings Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics) or Asia (according to Euripides "The Bacchae").

According to Greek myth, he is an outsider with a mortal mother and a late-comer to the inner circle of Olymbian deities. He is also a god whose worship proceded independently of the Greek pantheon and is one of the earliest of the dying and rising gods (though much younger in that regard than Osiris.

I am particularly interested in him as a god of ecstasy, since I am beginning to write a book on the subject of ecstatic religion. One theory that I find intriguing is that of the late Robert Graves, that the wine at his revels was merely used to wash down the real ecstasy-generating substance, namely the Ammanita muscaria mushroom, which is full of a number of hallucinogenic alkaloids. ONe problem with using Graves is that he was by turns brilliant and absolutely fallacious. You have to take what he says with a grain of salt and sometimes a half-shakerfull Anyone have any thought on this?

Tim
2/23/2009, 4:41 pm Link to this post Send Email to Tim Callahan   Send PM to Tim Callahan
 
Morwen Oronor Profile
Live feed
Blog
Friends
Miscellaneous info

Registered user

Registered: 01-2008
Location: South Africa
Posts: 317
Karma: 8 (+9/-1)
Reply | Quote
Re: Origins of Dionysos


This is the mushroom still used today for hallucenogenic purposes and it is available for purchase on the internet, even though it is illegal:
Psilocybe Cubensis, if you google that you'll find numbers of websites where it is sold.
Africans often dry these and smoke them rather than take the chance of eating them. It's one of the problem drugs we have where I live because they grow naturally here, I have photos of them having grown in my own garden.
Dionysus was the offspring of Zeus and Semele, a mortal woman. `he was the god of wine and religious ecstasy.
Again if you google his name, you should find numerous websites about him.
2/23/2009, 11:24 pm Link to this post Send PM to Morwen Oronor Blog
 
IceMonkey Profile
Live feed
Blog
Friends
Miscellaneous info

Registered user

Registered: 02-2009
Posts: 33
Karma: 0 (+0/-0)
Reply | Quote
Re: Origins of Dionysos


quote:

Tim Callahan wrote:

Morwen, or anyone else, perhaps you could give me your take on where Dionysos came from. Looking into number of points of reference, I find arguments that he was an indigenous Greek deity, or that his origins lay in Crete (C. Kerenyi), Thrace (Hastings Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics) or Asia (according to Euripides "The Bacchae").

According to Greek myth, he is an outsider with a mortal mother and a late-comer to the inner circle of Olymbian deities. He is also a god whose worship proceded independently of the Greek pantheon and is one of the earliest of the dying and rising gods (though much younger in that regard than Osiris.

I am particularly interested in him as a god of ecstasy, since I am beginning to write a book on the subject of ecstatic religion. One theory that I find intriguing is that of the late Robert Graves, that the wine at his revels was merely used to wash down the real ecstasy-generating substance, namely the Ammanita muscaria mushroom, which is full of a number of hallucinogenic alkaloids. ONe problem with using Graves is that he was by turns brilliant and absolutely fallacious. You have to take what he says with a grain of salt and sometimes a half-shakerfull Anyone have any thought on this?

Tim




Isn't this what John Allegro was writing about in his book The Cross & the Mushroom?

---
Finally, this nightmare has a plot
2/24/2009, 11:54 am Link to this post Send Email to IceMonkey   Send PM to IceMonkey
 
Tim Callahan Profile
Live feed
Blog
Friends
Miscellaneous info

Administrator

Registered: 09-2008
Posts: 387
Karma: 15 (+16/-1)
Reply | Quote
Re: Origins of Dionysos


Well, no, Ice Monkey, it's not.

Several years ago, I was able to pick up a used hardcover copy of John Allegro's "The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross" for one dollar - and, let me tell you, it was worth evey penny!

Allegro's thesis was about the same mushroom, but a different dying and rising god - namely Jesus. Ignoring other disciplines, Allegro asserted, using philology and supposed Sumerian origins of key words, that just about everything in both the Old and New Testament, every name and every incident, was a code for a secret mushroom cult.

I first heard about this idea when I was attending the Chouinard Art School in the sixties. The subject of Jesus came up and this one very hippie-ish guy said, "Oh yeah, Jesus, wasn't he that guy who told everyone to go naked and eat mushrooms?"

Suffice it to say that, while there are evidences of ecstatic religion in both the Old and New Teastaments, the harsh legalistic quality of the Old Testament teachings isn't what you would expect from a hippy-dippy mushroom cult.

Tim
2/24/2009, 1:01 pm Link to this post Send Email to Tim Callahan   Send PM to Tim Callahan
 
Morwen Oronor Profile
Live feed
Blog
Friends
Miscellaneous info

Registered user

Registered: 01-2008
Location: South Africa
Posts: 317
Karma: 8 (+9/-1)
Reply | Quote
Re: Origins of Dionysos


There was a lot of speculation in the 1960s about the characters in the Bible smoking mushrooms.
I'm sure that they imbibed drugs of all sorts - if the Greeks were doing it you can be sure other people were as well. I'm sure they didn't smoke anything though. But on the other other, the people in the East were using incense, so why wouldn't the rest of them.
Any opinions on this.
 emoticon
2/24/2009, 1:12 pm Link to this post Send PM to Morwen Oronor Blog
 
Tom Knight Profile
Live feed
Blog
Friends
Miscellaneous info

Registered user

Registered: 06-2009
Posts: 13
Karma: 0 (+0/-0)
Reply | Quote
Re: Origins of Dionysos


The name Dionysus is already attested in Linear B texts, so that the supposition of some early twentieth-century scholarship that he was a late interloper among the Olympians cannot stand. His roots reach back into the Hellenic Bronze Age at the very least. The Dio- element in the name represents an Indo-European stem, the same as appears in forms of the name Zeus (genitive Dios, etc.). The Greeks were themselves puzzled by the -nys- element of the name, and its provenance has never been satisfactorily explained.

This fact in conjunction with the connection of Dionysus to the Attic festival of the Anthesteria, and the observance of this festival among the Ionian peoples indicates that the worship of Dionysus as the god of wine was already well established in the late Mycenaean Bronze age, since the Ionian migrations date from about 1100 BCE. From this fact, and from the fact that Attica at this time served as a gathering point for refugees from other Mycenaean centers around the Peloponnese, we may infer that the worship of Dionysus in connection with viticulture was already well established throughout the Mycenaean world. We know that the Mycenaeans made wine on a commercial scale, so the worship of a god of wine is consistent with what we know of Mycenaean Greece. And though commercially viable forms of viticulture were introduced to Bronze Age Greece through connections with the Minoans, who in turn had been influenced by the Egyptians, the evidence for a Cretan origin of the god is scant. The connection established in the traditions of the Anthesteria between Dionysus and Ariadne hints at an Ionian appropriation of some Minoan elements in the celebration of the Anthesteria, but this itself does not establish Cretan origins for Dionysus.

7/12/2009, 10:31 pm Link to this post Send Email to Tom Knight   Send PM to Tom Knight
 
Tom Knight Profile
Live feed
Blog
Friends
Miscellaneous info

Registered user

Registered: 06-2009
Posts: 13
Karma: 0 (+0/-0)
Reply | Quote
Re: Origins of Dionysos (Continued)


The claim of Cretan origins for Dionysus rests on the myth of Zagreus, whom the Orphics equated to the Chthonic Dionysus. The myth of Zagreus derives from rituals of child initiation and resembles Cretan stories about the birth of Zeus; it has nothing to do with viticulture. The infant child was entrusted to “Titans” in a cave; the child eludes the Titans by transforming himself into various animal shapes; when he manifests himself in the form of a bull, the Titans tear him apart and devour him, except for the heart. A drop of the child’s blood propagates the pomegranate tree, sacred to Persephone. Zeus strikes the Titans with his thunderbolt, and from their ashes humans are created, while from the still-beating heart Persephone or Rhea recreates the infant anew as Dionysus. This last bit of detail is an add-on clearly intended to assimilate Zagreus to Dionysus, and not the other way round.

A Thracian or Phrygian origin for Dionysus is sometimes asserted by virtue of the alleged equivalency of Dionysus and Sabazios. The latter is the Thracian and Phrygian version of the Indo-European sky god, whom the Greeks call Zeus and the Romans Jupiter (The element -zi- in Sabazios = Di- in Zeus, gen. Dios and Iu- from *diu- in Iuppiter, the element -piter deriving from pater, “father”). In Hellenistic times Sabazios was syncretized with both Zeus and Dionysus, and in some varieties of Hellenistic Judaism Dionysus as Sabazios Hypsistos was assimilated to Yahweh. And though the Thracian/Phrygian deity is associated with wine, he is primarily a horseman deity in the classical period. A character in Aristophanes’ Wasps chides another character for having drunk “Sabazios”, but this by metonymy refers simply to wine unmixed with water, and not to something more potent, as is sometimes alleged. The classical Greeks considered Dionysus civilized and Sabazios barbarian, just as they considered drinking wine neat to be uncouth. The Iliad (book 6), in one of the few Homeric references to Dionysus, alludes to the madness of the Thracian king Lycurgus, but this is clearly the Greek Dionysus associated with viticulture: Lycurgus tries to suppress the worship of Dionysus because the followers of the god all act insanely. Dionysus leaps into the sea and takes temporary refuge in the bosom of Thetis, but he returns to inflict madness upon Lycurgus, who mistakes his son Dryas (“tree”) for a vine-branch, which he proceeds to “prune” – lopping off his son’s limbs with an axe. (This is parallel to a story about the introduction of viticulture into Attica, leading to the death of the Athenian hero Icarius – which serves as the foundation myth for the Anthesteria festival.)



Last edited by Tom Knight, 7/13/2009, 9:04 pm
7/12/2009, 10:32 pm Link to this post Send Email to Tom Knight   Send PM to Tom Knight
 
Tom Knight Profile
Live feed
Blog
Friends
Miscellaneous info

Registered user

Registered: 06-2009
Posts: 13
Karma: 0 (+0/-0)
Reply | Quote
Re: Origins of Dionysos (Continued, part 3)


The story of a Theban birth – made famous by Euripides’ Bacchae – refer to the process by which the popular cults of Dionysus were “domesticated” and incorporated within the festal calendar of the Greek polity. Since Thebes is the only Mycenaean settlement credited with a foundation myth, it is not surprising to find the very ancient cult of Dionysus also having its official cultic foundation myth associated with the founding of that city. Here too the god worshipped it the god of wine.

That the classical Dionysus is represented as young and exotic does not serve as a clue as to historical origins but are facts that refer to his divine nature: he brings what is new and strange. The minimum we can say about the social context within which Dionysus has his origins is that it lies in collective celebrations relating to the harvesting of grapes and making of wine, and the breaking out of the new wine once it has fermented. These are the ritual contexts of communal celebration from which the classical conception of Dionysus emerges. That these were festivals involving the entire community is clear from the retinue of maenads, silenoi and satyrs, who represent the collective nature of the context within which the god operates. The Ionian Anthesteria involved the entire community, although they also had their secretive elements. This fact then excludes Dionysus from the currents in Greek culture that derive from a Neolithic tradition of shamanism, which enjoined a solitary sort of sacrament: the figure of Tiresias rather relates to this tradition (cf. E.R Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational for shamanic elements in Greek culture). It also precludes Dionysus from having origins in closed initiatory circles, as is true of Zagreus. To be sure, Dionysus is also associated with the Eleusinian Mysteries, an initiatory rite – as the poets say, where there is Demeter, there is Dionysus also – but these rites belong primarily to the two goddesses in their chthonic aspects. The “altered state of consciousness” alleged to be associated with the Eleusinian rites may in part be induced – in addition to the influence of fasting and heightened expectations – by the kykeon, a drink of fermented barley porridge and pennyroyal. (Some have suggested that hallucinogenic effect may be explained by barley tainted with ergot; others have suggested, without support of literary or archaeological evidence, the use of a variety of mushroom.)

7/12/2009, 10:33 pm Link to this post Send Email to Tom Knight   Send PM to Tom Knight
 
Tom Knight Profile
Live feed
Blog
Friends
Miscellaneous info

Registered user

Registered: 06-2009
Posts: 13
Karma: 0 (+0/-0)
Reply | Quote
Re: Origins of Dionysos (Continued, part 4)


It must be emphasized that the excitation associated with Dionysus relates to a cyclical conception of time, and is not an end unto itself. Dionysus is Eleutherios – in Latin Liber – the Liberator, but what he liberates one from are the routines, the roles and masks of the human established order of things, which must be restored and re-imposed once the god has had his day. This is done periodically, with the moving cycles of time. The routine limits, roles and boundaries of mundane human experience are periodically dissolved only to be reinstated. How else does one appreciate – actually experience – the reality of a limit unless one transgresses it periodically? The restoration of order after the momentary “madness” induced by Dionysus affirms the very permanence of the order that was momentarily overthrown by Dionysus. The media for attaining the desired state of ecstasis – literally, standing outside of one’s self – were varied – intoxication by wine, trance induced by rhythmic sounds, psychological dissociation induced by mummery, sexual excitation – symbolized by the enormous ithyphalluses that featured so prominently in the processions of the god. All worked toward the lowering of psychological boundaries, which in turn invited the epiphany – manifestation – of the god. But among these inducement there is no evidence for the use of magic mushrooms – pace Robert Graves and pace Terence McKenna. The opium poppy is an attribute of Persephone and may have figured in Orphic adaptations of Bacchic ritual – but there is no evidence of it. Nor is there any sound literary or archaeological evidence for the systematic use of psychotropic mushrooms by the ancient Greeks apart from the dubious instances that I have already referred to. One finds bald-face assertions that Plato, Sophocles and the rest – all who were initiates in the Eleusinian Mysteries – had partaken of magic mushrooms simply on the flimsy grounds that a few modern scholars have cautiously mooted the suggestion that Eleusinian kykeon may have contained some variety of mushroom.

The classical conception of Dionysus already had its firm outlines set in the Mycenaean Bronze Age from the fourteenth century BCE onward. Where the various elements that led to the emergence of that conception ultimately come from is hard to say. There was probably a strong cross-fertilization among several cultural influences: an overlay of a dominant patriarchal Helladic warrior class, a large substrate of a pre-Helladic, “Pelasgian” matriarchal agrarian cultures, long-standing connections with Minoan, Aegean and “Eastern” cultures. But in addressing this question of origins, first it must be recognized that the conception of deity arises from within human experience and is shaped by the social contexts within which it emerges. The classical conception of Dionysus is an expression arising from out of the social and religious life of the Greeks from the tenth to the fourth centuries, and to understand him one must understand those societies. (A good place to start would be Walter Burkert’s Greek Religion.) It is also to be noted that the conception of deity takes shape, changes and evolves over time, according to the human social interactions that feed into a particular apperception of the deity. The syncretic conception of Dionysus that emerges during the Hellenistic Age bears but a broad resemblance to the Dionysus of Euripides and Aristophanes.




Last edited by Tom Knight, 7/12/2009, 10:35 pm
7/12/2009, 10:34 pm Link to this post Send Email to Tom Knight   Send PM to Tom Knight
 
Tim Callahan Profile
Live feed
Blog
Friends
Miscellaneous info

Administrator

Registered: 09-2008
Posts: 387
Karma: 15 (+16/-1)
Reply | Quote
Re: Origins of Dionysos


Tom,

Thank you very much for all this wonderful material. As you can see it did post on the forum after all. However, thanks for following up with the PM.

You clearly know a great deal about the origins and development of the cult of Dionysos. I would greatly appreciate it if you could tell me your source for the material on Dionysos in linear B texts. I will also definitely delve into "The Greeks and the Irrational" by E. R. Dodds and "Greek Religion" by Walter Burkert.

A also found the aspects of syncretism, whereby Dionysos was merged with Zagreus, to be quite fascinating. The story of the child going through transformations before being caught and killed has parallels in Celtic and Norse myth. The child Gwion (sp.?)is hunted down and swallowed by the witch Cerridwen in Welsh myth, to be eventually reborn as Taliesen. In Norse myth, Loki goes through a series of transformations in his unsuccessful attempt to elude the vengeful Aesir.

The transformations also put one in mind of sea gods and goddesses in Greek myth, who must be held while they go through transformations in their effort to escape, finally giving up an granting the hero's request. Proteus / Nereus is thus seized and held both by Heracles and Menelaus, who force him to divulge information, and Peleus captures his daughter Thetis and forces her to marry him. The latter form of this motif resurfaces in a Russian fairlytale about Prince Nikita and the fairy maid, altough he takes her clothes, including her bird cloak, while she is bathing .

I agree with you that the trance state can be invoked by a number of mechanisms, including fasting, exhuastive dancing and audio-driving. There's really no need to invoke either the Ammanita muscaria or any other mushroom as a causative factor, Robert Graves and Terence McKenna notwithstanding. I've found Graves to be a rich, yet somewhat unreliable source of material, I often have to take what he wrote with a grain of salt, and sometimes a half shakerful! He was, unfortunately, in the habit of inventing material, which he seems to have convinced himself was real.

7/13/2009, 12:03 pm Link to this post Send Email to Tim Callahan   Send PM to Tim Callahan
 


Add a reply

Page:  1  2 





You are not logged in (login)