He is also known as Bacchus (Greek: Βάκχος) and the frenzy he induces is bakkheia. His thyrsus, sometimes wound with ivy and dripping with honey, is both a beneficial wand and a weapon used to destroy those who oppose His cult and the freedom He represents. As Eleutherios ("the Liberator"), His wine, music and ecstatic dance free His followers from self-conscious fear and care, and subvert the oppressive restraints of the powerful. Those who partake of His mysteries are possessed and empowered by the God Himself.
Dionysos is generally depicted as the son of Zeus and the mortal Semele, although in the Orphic tradition, He is identified as the son of Zeus and Persephone. In the Eleusinian Mysteries He is identified with Iacchus, the son (or, alternately, husband) of Demeter.
He is a God of epiphany, "the God that comes", and His "foreignness" as an arriving outsider-God may be inherent and essential to his cults. He is a major, popular figure of Greek religion, becoming increasingly important over time, and included in some lists of the twelve Olympians, as the last of their number, and the only God born from a mortal mother. His festivals were the driving force behind the development of Greek theatre.
Wine played an important role in Greek culture, and the cult of Dionysos was the main religious focus for its unrestrained consumption. His worship became firmly established in the 7th century BCE. He may have been worshiped as early as c. 1500–1100 BCE by Mycenaean Greeks; traces of Dionysian-type cult have also been found in ancient Minoan Crete.
The cult of Dionysos is also a "cult of the souls"; His maenads feed the dead through blood-offerings, and He acts as a divine communicant between the living and the dead. He is sometimes categorised as a dying-and-rising God.
The earliest cult images of Dionysos show a mature male, bearded and robed. He holds a fennel staff, known as thyrsus, tipped with a pine-cone. Later images show Him as a beardless, sensuous, naked or half-naked androgynous youth: the literature describes him as womanly or "man-womanish". In its fully developed form, His central cult imagery shows His triumphant, disorderly arrival or return, as if from some place beyond the borders of the known and civilized. His procession (thiasus) is made up of wild female followers (maenads) and bearded satyrs with erect penises; some are armed with the thyrsus, some dance or play music. The God Himself is drawn in a chariot, usually by exotic beasts such as lions or tigers, and is sometimes attended by a bearded, drunken Silenus. This procession is presumed to be the cult model for the followers of His Dionysian Mysteries. Dionysos is represented by city religions as the protector of those who do not belong to conventional society and He thus symbolizes the chaotic, dangerous and unexpected, everything which escapes human reason and which can only be attributed to the unforeseeable action of the Gods.
The bull, serpent, tiger, ivy, and wine are characteristic of Dionysian iconography. Dionysos is also strongly associated with satyrs, centaurs, and sileni. He is often shown riding a leopard, wearing a leopard skin, or in a chariot drawn by panthers, and may also be recognized by the thyrsus He carries. Besides the grapevine and its wild barren alter-ego, the toxic ivy plant, both sacred to Him, the fig is also His symbol.
The cult of Dionysοs is closely associated with trees, specifically the fig tree, and some of his bynames exhibit this, such as Endendros "He in the tree" or Dendritēs, "He of the tree".
In some sources, the minor Underworld God Zagreus (Greek: Ζαγρεύς) was often conflated with the Orphic “first Dionysοs”, the son of Zeus and Persephone, who was dismembered by the Titans and reborn. Dionysοs is the patron God of the Orphic tradition, which they connected to death and immortality, and He symbolized the one who guides the process of reincarnation. The earliest mentions of Zagreus in literature describe Him as a partner of Gaia and call him the highest God.
Dionysοs is variably known with the following epithets:
Bassareus: a Thracian name for Dionysos, which derives from bassaris or "fox-skin". This was worn by His cultists in their mysteries.
Bromios : the Roaring One. This is closely linked to the howling of the wind, and is also related to the central death/resurrection element of Dionysos'story. It is also connected with the God's transformations into a lion and a bull, and the boisterousness of those who drink alcohol. Also, this epithet brings to mind the roar of thunder- a reference to Zeus 'The Thunderer', Dionysos'father.
Chthonios : The Subterranean
Iacchus: a possible epithet of Dionysos, associated with the Eleusinian Mysteries. In Eleusis, He is known as a son of Zeus and Demeter. The name "Iacchus" may come from the Ίακχος (Iakchos), a hymn sung in honor of Dionysοs.
In the Orphic tradition, Dionysοs is, in part, a God associated with the Underworld. As a result, the Orphics considered Him the Son of Persephone and Zeus, and believed that He had been dismembered by the Titans and then reborn. The dismemberment of Dionysοs (the sparagmos) is often considered to be the most important tradition of Orphism.
Many modern sources identify this "Orphic Dionysοs" with the God Zagreus, though this name does not seem to have been used by any of the ancient Orphics, who simply called him Dionysοs. As pieced together from various ancient sources, the reconstructed story, usually given by modern scholars, goes as follows. Zeus had intercourse with Persephone in the form of a serpent, producing Dionysοs. The infant was taken to Mount Ida, where, like the infant Zeus, He was guarded by the dancing Curetes. Zeus intended Dionysοs to be his successor as ruler of the cosmos, but a jealous Hera incited the Titans to kill the child. It is said that He was mocked by the Titans who gave him a thyrsus (a fennel stalk) in place of his rightful scepter. Distracting the infant Dionysοs with various toys, including a mirror, the Titans seized Dionysοs and tore or cut Him to pieces. The pieces were then boiled, roasted, and partially eaten by the Titans. But Athena managed to save Dionysοs' heart, by which Zeus was able to contrive his rebirth from Semele.
The oldest sources, including Hesiod's Theogony and the Homeric Hymns (both written c. the 6th century BCΕ), state that Dionysοs was born to Zeus, the king of the Gods, and the mortal woman Semele, the daughter of Cadmus, king and founder of Thebes. In these accounts, Zeus' wife, Hera, discovered his affair while Semele was pregnant. Appearing as an old crone (or, in some versions, a nurse), Hera befriended Semele, who confided in Her that Zeus was the father of the baby in Her womb. Hera pretended not to believe Her, and planted seeds of doubt in Semele's mind. Curious, Semele demanded of Zeus that He reveal himself in all His glory as proof of His Divine nature. Though Zeus begged her not to ask this, she persisted, and He agreed. He came to her wreathed in bolts of lightning; mortals, however, could not look upon an undisguised God without dying, and she perished in the ensuing blaze. However, Zeus rescued the unborn Dionysοs, and He sewed the infant into His thigh. Dionysοs emerged fully-grown a few months later. In this version, Dionysοs is borne by two "mothers" (Semele and Zeus) before his birth, hence the epithet dimētōr ("of two mothers") associated with his being "twice-born".
Other versions claim that Zeus recreated him in Semele's womb or that he impregnated Semele by giving her the heart of the dismembered Dionysos to eat.
In some traditions reported by the historian Diodorus Siculus, this "second Dionysοs" was the son of Zeus and Demeter, the Goddess of agriculture, rather than Persephone. According to Diodorus, when the Titans boiled Dionysos following his death, Demeter gathered together His remains, allowing His second birth. Diodorus noted the symbolism this story held for its adherents. Dionysos, God of the vine, was born from the Gods of the rain and the earth. He was torn apart and boiled by the sons of Gaia, or "earth born", symbolizing the harvesting and wine-making process. Just as the remains of the bare vines are returned to the earth to restore its fruitfulness, the remains of the young Dionysos were returned to Demeter allowing Him to be born again.
According to the story, Zeus gave the infant Dionysos to the care of Hermes. One version of the story is that Hermes took the boy to King Athamas and his wife Ino, Dionysos' aunt. Hermes bade the couple to raise the boy as a girl, to hide him from Hera's wrath. Another version is that Dionysos was taken to the rain-Nymphs of Nysa, who nourished his infancy and childhood, and for their care Zeus rewarded them by placing them as the Hyades among the stars . Other versions have Zeus giving him to Rhea, or to Persephone to raise in the Underworld, away from Hera.
When Dionysos grew up, He discovered the culture of the vine and the mode of extracting its precious juice, being the first to do so; but Hera struck Him with madness, and drove Him forth, a wanderer through various parts of the earth. In Phrygia, Goddess Rhea cured Him and taught Him her religious rites, and He set out on a progress through Asia, teaching the people the cultivation of the vine. The most famous part of his wanderings is his expedition to India, which is said to have lasted several years. According to a story, when Alexander the Great reached a city called Nysa near the Indus river, the locals said that their city was founded by Dionysos in the distant past and their city was dedicated to the God Dionysos. These travels took something of the form of military conquests; according to Diodorus Siculus, He conquered the whole world except for Britain and Ethiopia. Returning in triumph (He is considered the founder of the triumphal procession) He started to introduce his worship into Greece, but was opposed by some princes who dreaded its introduction on account of the disorders and madness it brought with it (e.g. Pentheus or Lycurgus).
The God, and still more often His followers, were commonly depicted in the painted pottery of Ancient Greece, much of which was vessels for wine. But, apart from some reliefs of maenads, Dionysian subjects rarely appeared in large sculpture before the Hellenistic period, when they became common. In these, the treatment of the God Himself ranged from severe archaising or Neo Attic types, such as the Dionysos Sardanapalus, to types showing Him as an indolent and androgynous young man, often nude.
The Dionysian world by the Hellenistic period is a hedonistic but safe pastoral, into which other semi-divine creatures of the countryside such as centaurs, nymphs, and the God Pan and Hermaphrodite have been co-opted. A Nymph, by this stage, "means simply an ideal female of the Dionysian outdoors, a non-wild bacchant". Hellenistic sculpture also includes for the first time large genre subjects of children and peasant, many of whom carry Dionysian attributes such as ivy wreaths.
Dionysos appealed to the Hellenistic monarchies for a number of reasons, apart from merely being a God of pleasure: He is a human who became divine, He came from, and had conquered, the East, exemplified a lifestyle of display and magnificence with His mortal followers, and was often regarded as an ancestor.
SOURCE: Wikipedia
