The Dark Side of Dionysus

In a manner of speaking, all deities are morally gray, although that’s not really the best term to use. People are morally gray, sometimes good and sometimes evil, with a lot of in-between. Gods are amoral. Morality just kind of stops working when you try to apply it to gods, because it’s framed by the context of human life and society. Once you move outside of that context, and start talking about beings that embody forces of nature and see the universe on a much more vast scale than we can conceive of, what harms tiny humans for brief moments in the span of infinity starts not to matter. Do you feel bad every time you kill an enemy character in a video game (that’s not Undertale)? Especially if you know the character will just respawn as soon as you reach a save point? This doesn’t mean that gods are evil or that they don’t care about humans at all, only that our typical ideas of what constitutes good and evil don’t neatly apply to them. I think that gods are generally benevolent in their interactions with their worshippers, but all of them have dark sides that we have to somehow contend with. The darker aspects of the deity cannot be separated from it, because they’re an inherent part of the god’s nature. No god demonstrates this better than Dionysus.

Dionysus tends to throw people for a loop as soon as they learn anything about him beyond the basics. He’s best known as the god of wine and parties, and most people know him as a laid-back, fun-loving god who gets drunk all the time. That’s not an inaccurate impression, but it’s also not complete. Dionysus has a pronounced dark side, and can be extremely scary. “Morally gray” doesn’t really cut it. Dionysus is a god of madness and death, who drives people insane and punishes his enemies by having them torn limb-from-limb. Some people, when they learn about Dionysus’ dark side, immediately balk. I’ve gotten asked why I would worship this savage, bloody god.

Firstly, it’s important to understand that, as I said before, forces of nature are not really good or evil. On the most basic level, Dionysus is a personification of alcohol, so, his dual nature reflects that of alcohol. Alcohol loosens your inhibitions, which can liberate you from the confines of social norms and your own insecurities, helping you to have more fun and connect with other people. Or, if you have too much of it, it can drive you violently insane. The nature of the wine itself does not change, only your relationship to it. Ancient Greek wine had a higher alcohol content than modern wine, so Ancient Greeks diluted their wine with water, so that it would have about the same alcohol content. They believed that “unmixed” wine was poisonous. Unmixed wine was only fit as an offering to gods, especially chthonic gods. There’s a story about Dionysus’ introduction of wine to Attica — he first gives it to a man named Ikarios, who shares it with some local shepherds. The shepherds go mad, and, believing that Ikarios has poisoned them, they kill him. Distraught over the death of her father, Ikarios’ daughter Erigone hangs herself. Dionysus punishes the Athenians by having their daughters kill themselves in the same manner, until they atone for Ikarios’ murder and honor Erigone. The story demonstrates both the dangers of wine and the spiritual and social importance of it. Wine has to be drunk carefully and moderately, but it can’t be rejected entirely.

There’s a whole genre of similar myths in which Dionysus arrives at a city-state, and is rejected by the local authorities or populace. The kings of each city outlaw Dionysus’ worship and persecute his followers, and Dionysus reacts by inflicting horrible punishments upon them. He drives King Lykourgos violently insane, causing him to murder his own family. He turns a group of princesses who refuse to worship him into bats. The most famous myth of this type is that of Pentheus, told in The Bacchae by Euripides. In this play, Pentheus, the King of Thebes, rejects Dionysus’ worship and is punished by being dismembered by his own mother, who has been driven insane by the god. It’s a unique play in that it’s the only (surviving) Greek tragedy to feature a god as a major character. You could interpret either Dionysus or Pentheus as the protagonist or the antagonist, and get something different out of the play.

My personal interpretation is that Pentheus death, while brutal, is something of a natural consequence. Pentheus is extremely controlling, and feels threatened by the presence of Dionysus’ cult in his city, to the point of denying Dionysus’ divinity. Dionysus’ presence, and the social subversion that he induces just by being there, is an uncomfortable reminder that Pentheus cannot control everything. At that point, Pentheus has two options — he can accept Dionysus’ and his cult, have a party for a couple days, and be honored as kin to an Olympian god. Or, he can continue to repress and persecute Dionysus’ cult. The chaos and change is going to come either way. If Pentheus goes with the flow of it and allows it to do its work, then he’ll benefit from it, but if he tries to resist it, then he will be rent by it. Dismemberment is also a (particularly violent) metaphor for ego-death — the first, necessary step towards spiritual advancement. In order to spiritually evolve, you can’t be too attached to your sense of control and normalcy. You have to be able to surrender to the tide of the universe, and to allow your sense of yourself to dissolve. If you let your ego control you, then — like Pentheus — you will be more susceptible to hubris, arrogance, and close-mindedness. The results of that are not pretty.

Taken in a less extreme context, Dionysus’ chaos can be expressed in the appropriate contexts, like parties, public festivals, theater, and art. If you let loose every once in a while, in the right contexts and with the right people, then you can express the socially unacceptable parts of yourself in a way that is safe, fun, and constructive rather than destructive. That is why worship of Dionysus is so important. If you don’t release the pressure valve of society every once in a while — during Carnival or Halloween or your local pub — then it’ll eventually burst, and cause a lot of damage that it wouldn’t have caused if you had just engaged with it.

The more cultivated a person is, the more intelligent, the more repressed, then the more he needs some method of channeling the primitive impulses he’s worked so hard to subdue. Otherwise those powerful old forces will mass and strengthen until they are violent enough to break free, more violent for the delay, often strong enough to sweep the will away entirely. […] But how glorious to release them in a single burst! To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal! These are powerful mysteries. The bellowing of bulls. Springs of honey bubbling from the ground. If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn.

— Donna Tartt, The Secret History

Chaos exists. It is a natural part of existence, and it’s not going to go away. You cannot ignore it, destroy it, or conquer it. The only thing you can do is work with it, to allow it to flow naturally and cause change.

By cameronpossibly

I was not expecting Dionysus to be my patron deity. I’m not much of a party person, I don’t drink very often. When I learned about all of that, though, it was like everything just clicked into place. I’m still more uptight than I’d like to be; I don’t always practice what I preach regarding hedonism, though I would like to. Worshipping Dionysus has helped me to let my hair down a bit. But he didn’t come to teach me about embracing my dark side. I was doing that well enough on my own. Dionysus came to help me improve my mental health, and get more joy out of life. I love him so, so much, and I feel so grateful to have the relationship with him that I do.

I often use automatic writing to talk to gods (writing a question, and then writing whatever comes to mind as the answer). I don’t even need that to talk to Dionysus, though. I usually just have to call him to mind for him to show up. He’s more casual than most gods, and talking with him often feels like chatting with a friend at a bar. He’ll let you call him cutesy or even vulgar nicknames. But when I talk to him, often our conversations end up becoming extremely profound. We talk about philosophy and sacred mysteries and my own psychological crap that I need to work through. I’m usually driven to tears of sheer overwhelm. Though he may act like your drunk hippie friend, Dionysus is still a god, ancient and powerful and as sublime as the universe.