The Beliefs Of Melissa Lynus By Melissa Dionysus

Melissa Lykins

From birth, Dionysus showed his mysterious and dual personality. Zeus was attracted to his mother, Semele, a princess of Thebes, and visited her in human guise and she became pregnant. She was tricked by Hera into asking him to reveal himself in his divine glory, whereupon she was instantly burned in the thundering fires. From her smoldering body a vine grew to shield the fetus, a bull-horned child crowned with serpents. Zeus removed him and placed him into his own thigh, from where Dionysus was later born; hence he is called twice-born. To protect the new infant from Hera's jealousy, Hermes carried him to Ino, Semele's sister, as a foster mother, and she started to raise him as a girl. Ino and her husband were driven mad and killed their own children. Then the divine child was changed into a young goat, and taken by Hermes to be raised by the nymphs of Mount Nysa. He was tutored by Silenus, often shown as a drunken satyr (Powell, 243). From these beginnings we can begin to detect some of the recurring images in the Dionysian religion: the vine, whether grape or ivy; the polymorphic, shape-shifting nature of the god; the madness and violence he brings with him; the wildness of nature, and the mountain nymphs and satyrs.

The evidence of Dionysian imagery and its interpretation seems to lead with considerable frequency away from any conception of religious insight and toward the realm of the ordinary. In his book, Carpenter rejects attempts to see Dionysian images as ‘sacred’ and, finding ‘nothing inherently admirable’ about Dionysus, states that depictions of the Dionysian ‘carry...no demands for religious awe’ (Carpenter, 120). But keep in mind that the artists were painting for various customers and were motiva...

... middle of paper ...

...d when attempting to draw conclusions about religion. In focusing on Dionysus’ early role as the god of wine, the common view was that drama, too, had its origins in Dionysian religious festivals. It must also be considered that Dionysus was far from a newcomer to Greece. He is mentioned in Homer and inscriptions of his name have been found in Linear B script dating from Mycenaean times. Would he have survived all that time as a ‘minor’ deity, only to explode onto the scene with such compelling power in the fifth century? He was a fairly well-developed deity all along, and if archaic vase paintings do not convey this to the same extent that later artwork and textual evidence do, it is perhaps that vase-paintings were only a fragment of the total picture, vessels constructed for their own unknown purposes, and not intended as teaching tools for religious education.