Chapter VIII: Dionysos (2)

Plutarch was a priest in his own Chaeronea and intimately acquainted with the ritual of Delphi, and a great friend of his, Klea, was president (ἀρχηγός) of the Thyiades at Delphi[1002]. He mentions them more than once. In writing to Favorinus[1003] on ‘the First Principle of Cold’ he argues that cold has its own special and proper qualities, density, stability, rigidity, and gives as an instance the cold of a winter’s night out on Parnassos. ‘You have heard yourself at Delphi how the people who went up Parnassos to bring help to the Thyiades were overtaken by a violent gale with snow, and their coats were frozen as hard as wood, so that when they were stretched out they crumbled and fell to bits.’ The crumbling coats sound apocryphal, but the Thyiades out in the cold are quite real. You do not face a mountain snow-storm to succour the mythological ‘spirits of the spring.’

It may have been from his friend Klea that Plutarch learnt the pleasant story of the Thyiades and the women of Phocis, which he records in his treatise on the ‘Virtues of Women[1004].’ ‘When the tyrants of Phocis had taken Delphi and undertook against them what was known as the Sacred War, the women who attended Dionysos whom they call Thyiades being distraught wandered out of their way and came without knowing it to Amphissa. And being very weary and not yet having come to their right mind they flung themselves down in the agora and fell asleep anyhow where they lay. And the women of Amphissa were afraid lest, as their city had made an alliance with the Phocians and the place was full of the soldiery of the tyrants, the Thyiades might suffer some harm. And they left their houses and ran to the agora and made a ring in silence round them and stood there without disturbing them as they slept, and when they woke up they severally tended them and brought them food and finally got leave from their husbands to set them on their way in safety as far as the mountains.’ These Thyiades are the historical counterparts of the Maenads of countless vases and bas-reliefs, the same mad revelry, the same utter exhaustion and prostrate sleep. They are the same too as the Bacchant Women of Euripides[1005] on the slopes of Cithaeron:

‘There, beneath the trees
Sleeping they lay, like wild things flung at ease
In the forest, one half sinking on a bed
Of deep pine greenery, one with careless head
Amid the fallen oak-leaves.’

In the reverence shown by the women of Amphissa we see that though the Thyiades were real women they were something more than real. This brings us to another of the cultus titles enumerated by Timotheos, ‘Phoibad.’ Phoibas is the female correlative of Phoebus, a title we are apt to associate exclusively with Apollo. Apollo, Liddell and Scott say, was called Phoebus because of the purity and radiant beauty of youth. The epithet has more to do with purity than with radiant beauty; if with beauty at all it is ‘the beauty of holiness.’ Plutarch in discussing this title of Apollo makes the following interesting statement[1006]: ‘The ancients, it seems to me, called everything that was pure and sanctified _phoebic_ as the Thessalians still, I believe, say of their priests when they are living in seclusion apart on certain prescribed days that they are living phoebically.’ The meaning of this passage, which is practically untranslateable, is clear. The root of the word Phoebus meant ‘in a condition of ceremonial purity, holy in a ritual sense,’ and as such specially inspired by and under the protection of the god, under a taboo. Apollo probably took over his title of Phoebus from the old order of women divinities to whom he succeeded. Third in order of succession after Gaia and Themis[1007]:

‘Another Titaness, daughter of Earth,
Phoebe, possessed it, and for birthday gift
To Phoebus gave it, and he took her name.’

Apollo, we may be sure, did not get his birthday gift without substantial concessions. He took the name of the ancient Phoebe, daughter of earth, nay more he was forced, woman-hater as he always was, to utter his oracles through the mouth of a raving woman-priestess, a Phoibas. Herodotus in the passage already quoted (p. 370) justly observed that in the remote land of the Bessi as at Delphi oracular utterance was by the mouth of a priestess. Kassandra was another of these women-prophetesses of Gaia. She prophesied at the altar-omphalos of Thymbrae, a shrine Apollo took over as he took Delphi[1008]. Her frenzy against Apollo is more than the bitterness of maiden betrayed; it is the wrath of the prophetess of the old order discredited, despoiled by the new; she breaks her wand and rends her fillets and cries[1009]:

‘Lo now the seer the seeress hath undone.’

The priestess at Delphi, though in intent a Phoibas, was called the Pythia, but the official name of the priestess Kassandra was, we know, Phoibas[1010]:

‘The Phoibas whom the Phrygians call Kassandra,’

and the title, ‘she who is ceremonially pure,’ lends a bitter irony to Hecuba’s words of shame.

The word Phoibades is never, so far as I know, actually applied to definite Bacchantes, though I believe its use at Delphi to be due to Dionysiac influence, but another epithet _Potniades_ points the same way. In the _Bacchae_[1011], when the messenger returns from Cithaeron, he says to Pentheus:

‘I have seen the wild white women there, O king,
Whose fleet limbs darted arrow-like but now
From Thebes away, and come to tell thee how
They work strange deeds.’

The ‘wild white women’ are in a hieratic state of holy madness, hence their miraculous magnetic powers. Photius[1012] has a curious note on the verb with which ‘Potniades’ is connected. He says its normal use was to express a state in which a woman ‘suffered something and entreated a goddess’ and ‘if any one used the word of a man he was inaccurate.’ By ‘suffering something’ he can only mean that she was possessed by the goddess (ἔνθεος or κάτοχος), and he may have the Maenads and kindred worshippers in his mind. Madness could be caused by the Mother of the gods or by Dionysos, in fact by any orgiastic divinity.

* * * * *

It may possibly be objected that Maenads are not the same as either Thyiades or Phoibades. My point is that they _are_. The substantial basis of the conception is the actual women-worshippers of the god; out of these were later created his mythical attendants. Such is the natural order of mythological genesis. Diodorus[1013] like most modern mythologists inverts this natural sequence, and his inversion is instructive. In describing the triumphal return of Dionysos from India he says: ‘And the Boeotians and the other Greeks and the Thracians in memory of the Indian expedition instituted the biennial sacrifices to Dionysos and they hold that at these intervals the god makes his epiphanies to mortals. Hence in many towns of Greece every alternate year Bacchanalian assemblies of women come together and it is customary for maidens to carry the thyrsos and to revel together to the honour and glory of the god, and the married women worship the god in organized bands and they revel, and in every way celebrate the presence of Dionysos _in imitation of the Maenads_ who from of old, it was said, constantly attended the god.’ Diodorus is an excellent instance of mistaken mythologizing. Mythology invents a reason for a fact, does not base a fact on a fancy.

It is not denied for a moment that the Maenads _became_ mythical. When Sophocles sings[1014]:

‘Footless, sacred, shadowy thicket, where a myriad berries grow,
Where no heat of the sun may enter, neither wind of the winter blow,
Where the Reveller Dionysos with his nursing nymphs will go,’

we are not in this world, and his nursing nymphs are ‘goddesses’; but they are goddesses fashioned here as always in the image of man who made them.

* * * * *

The difficulty and the discrepancy of opinion as to the reality of the Maenads are due mainly to a misunderstanding about words. Maenad is to us a proper name, a fixed and crystallized personality; so is Thyiad, but in the beginning it was not so. Maenad is the Mad One, Thyiad the Rushing Distraught One or something of that kind, anyhow an adjectival epithet. Mad One, Distraught One, Pure One are simply ways of describing a woman under the influence of a god, of Dionysos. Thyiad and Phoibad obtained as cultus names, Maenad tended to go over to mythology. Perhaps naturally so; when a people becomes highly civilized madness is apt not to seem, save to poets and philosophers, the divine thing it really is, so they tend to drop the mad epithet and the colourless Thyiad becomes more and more a proper name.

Still Maenad, as a name of actual priestly women, was not wholly lost. An inscription[1015] of the date of Hadrian, found in Magnesia and now in the Tschinli Kiosk at Constantinople, gives curious evidence. This inscription recounts a little miracle-story. A plane tree was shattered by a storm, inside it was found an image of Dionysos[1016]. Seers were promptly sent to Delphi to ask what was to be done. The answer was, as might be expected, the Magnesians had neglected to build ‘fair wrought temples’ to Dionysos; they must repair their fault. To do this properly they must send to Thebes and thence obtain three Maenads of the family of Kadmean Ino[1017]. These would give to the Magnesians orgies and right customs. They went to Thebes and brought back three ‘Maenads’ whose names are given, Kosko, Baubo and Thettale; and they came and founded three thiasoi or sacred guilds in three parts of the city. The inscription is of course late; Baubo and Kosko are probably Orphic, but the main issue is clear: in the time of Hadrian at least three actual women of a particular family were called ‘Maenads.’

We are so possessed by a set of conceptions based on Periclean Athens, by ideas of law and order and reason and limit, that we are apt to dismiss as ‘mythological’ whatever does not fit into our stereotyped picture. The husbands and brothers of the women of historical days would not, we are told, have allowed their women to rave upon the mountains; it is unthinkable taken in conjunction with the strict oriental seclusion of the Periclean woman. That any woman might at any moment assume the liberty of a Maenad is certainly unlikely, but much is borne even by husbands and brothers when sanctioned by religious tradition. The men even of Macedonia, where manners were doubtless ruder, did not _like_ the practice of Bacchic orgies. Bacchus came emphatically not to bring peace. Plutarch[1018] conjectures that these Bacchic orgies had much to do with the strained relations between the father and mother of Alexander the Great. A snake had been seen lying by the side of Olympias and Philip feared she was practising enchantments, or worse, that the snake was the vehicle of a god. Another and probably the right explanation of the presence of the snake was, as Plutarch tells us, that ‘all the women of that country had been from ancient days under the dominion of Orphic rites and Dionysiac orgies, and that they were called Klodones and Mimallones because in many respects they imitated the Edonian and Thracian women round about Haemus, from whom the Greek word θρησκεύειν seems to come, a word which is applied to excessive and overdone ceremonials. Now Olympias was more zealous than all the rest and carried out these rites of possession and ecstasy in very barbarous fashion and introduced huge tame serpents into the Bacchic assemblies, and these kept creeping out of the ivy and the mystic likna and twining themselves round the thyrsoi of the women and their garlands, and _frightening the men out of their senses_.’

However much the Macedonian men disliked these orgies, they were clearly too frightened to put a stop to them. The women were possessed, magical, and dangerous to handle. Scenes such as those described by Plutarch as actually taking place in Macedonia are abundantly figured on vases. The beautiful raging Maenad in fig. 125 from the centre of a cylix with white ground at Munich[1019] is a fine example. She wears the typical Maenad garb, the fawn-skin over her regular drapery; she carries the thyrsos, she carries in fact the whole gear (σκεύη) of Dionysos. When Pentheus would counterfeit a Bacchant he is attired just so; he wears the long trailing chiton and over it the dappled fawn-skin, his hair flows loose, in his hand is the thyrsos. For snood (μίτρα) in her hair the Maenad has twined a great snake. Another Maenad[1020] is shown in fig. 126. She is characterized only by the two snakes she holds in her hand. But for her long full drapery she might be an Erinys.

The snakes emerging from the sacred cistae are illustrated by the class of coins[1021] known as cistophoroi, a specimen of which is reproduced in fig. 127. These coins, of which the type is uniform, originated, according to Dr Imhoof, in Ephesus a little before B.C. 200, and spread through all the dominions of Attalos the First. They illustrate a phase of Dionysos worship in Asia Minor closely akin to that of Macedonia.

Macedonia is not Athens, but the reforms of Epimenides allow us to divine that Athenian brothers and husbands also had their difficulties. Plutarch[1022] again is our informant. Athens was beset by superstitious fears and strange appearances. They sent to Crete for Epimenides, a man beloved of the gods and skilled in the technicalities of religion, especially as regards enthusiastic and mystic rites. He and Solon made friends and the gist of his religious reforms was this: ‘he simplified their religious rites, and made the ceremonies of mourning milder, introducing certain forms of sacrifice into their funeral solemnities and abolishing the cruel and barbarous elements to which the women were addicted. But most important of all, by lustrations and expiations and the foundings of worships he hallowed and consecrated the city and made it subserve justice and be more inclined to unity.’ The passage is certainly not as explicit as could be wished, but the words used—κατοργιάσας and καθοσιώσας—and the fact that Epimenides was an expert in _ecstatic_ rites, that they gave him the name of the new Koures, the special attention paid to the rites of women, though they are mentioned in relation to funerals, make it fairly clear that some of the barbarous excesses were connected with Bacchic orgies. This becomes more probable when we remember that many of Solon’s own enactments were directed against the excesses of women. ‘He regulated,’ Plutarch[1023] tells us, ‘the outgoings of women, their funeral lamentations and their festivals, forbidding by law all disorder and excess.’ Among these dreary regulations comes the characteristically modern touch that they are not to go out at night ‘except in a carriage and with a light before them.’ It was the going out at night that Pentheus could not bear[1024]. When he would know what were the rites of Dionysos he asks the god:

‘_P._ How is this worship held, by night or day?

_D._ Most oft by night, ’tis a majestic thing
The Darkness.

_P._ Ha, with women worshipping?
’Tis craft and rottenness.’

DIONYSOS LIKNITES.

The Maenads then are the frenzied sanctified women who are devoted to the worship of Dionysos. But they are something more; they tend the god as well as suffer his inspiration. When first we catch sight of them in Homer (p. 368) they are his ‘nurses’ (τιθῆναι). One of the lost plays of Aeschylus bore the title ‘Rearer of Dionysos’ and Sophocles[1025], here as so often inspired by Homer, makes his chorus sing:

‘There the reveller Dionysos with his nursing nymphs doth go.’

In Homer and Aeschylus and Sophocles, though Dionysos has his goddess nurses, he is himself no nursling. A child no longer, he revels with them as coevals. Mythology has half forgotten the ritual from which it sprang. Fortunately Plutarch[1026] has left us an account, inadequate but still significant, of the actual ritual of the Thyiades[1027], and from it we learn that they worshipped and tended no full-grown god, but a baby in his cradle.

Plutarch is speaking of the identity of Osiris and Dionysos, both being embodiments according to him of the ‘moist principle.’ ‘You, Klea,’ he says, ‘if any one, should know that Osiris is the same as Dionysos, you who are leader of the Thyiades at Delphi and were initiated by your father and mother into the rites of Osiris.’ After pointing out various analogies, he adds: ‘For the Egyptians, as has been said, point out tombs of Osiris in many places, and the Delphians hold that they possess the relics of Dionysos buried by the side of their oracular shrine; the Hosioi make a secret sacrifice in the sacred precinct of Apollo _when the Thyiades raise up Liknites_.’ It will later (p. 483) be seen that Dionysos was represented in ritual as slain and dismembered; from this passage it is clear that there was some sort of resurrection of the god, a new birth as a little child. Liknites can be none other than the babe in the cradle. Hesychius in commenting on the word Liknites says: ‘a title of Dionysos from the cradle in which they put children to sleep.’ In primitive agricultural days, the _liknon_, a shovel-shaped basket, served three purposes: it was a ‘fan’ with which to winnow grain, it was a basket to hold grain or fruit or sacred objects, it was a cradle for a baby. The various forms of _likna_ and the beautiful mysticism that gathered round the cradle and the winnowing fan, will be considered when Orphic ceremonial is discussed (p. 518). For the present it is enough to note that the ceremony of raising or waking Liknites marks clearly the worship of a child-god.

* * * * *

The worship by women of Liknites, of the child in the cradle, reflects a primitive stage of society, a time when the main realized function of woman was motherhood and the more civilized, less elemental, function of wedded wife was scarcely adventured. It is at once a cardinal point and a primary note in the mythology of Dionysos that he is _the son of his mother_. The religion of the Mother and the Daughter is already familiar (p. 271); it reflected, as has been seen, primarily not so much the relations of mother and daughter as the two stages of woman’s life, woman as maid, and woman as mother. If we are to have the relation of parent and child mirrored in mythology, assuredly the closest relation is not that even of mother and daughter but of mother and son. Father and son, Zeus and Apollo, reflect a still further advance in civilization.

Before leaving the Thyiades, it is important to note that they had a cult not only of Liknites, the child in the cradle, but of the mother who bore him, Semele, and this too at Delphi. Plutarch is again our authority. In his _Greek Questions_[1028], he treats of the three great enneateric festivals of Delphi, the Stepterion, Heroïs and Charila. Of the Heroïs he says: ‘Its inner meaning is for the most part mystical as is known to the Thyiades, but from the rites that are openly performed one may conjecture that it is a Return of Semele.’ Plutarch’s conjecture was undoubtedly right. The Heroïs was a resurrection festival, with rites of Return and Uprising, such as have been already (p. 276) fully discussed in relation to Demeter and Kore.

The relation of Dionysos to his father Zeus was slight and artificial. He is, as aforesaid, essentially the son of his mother, ‘child of Semele[1029].’ The meaning of the fatherhood of Zeus and the strange hieratic legend of the double birth will be discussed later: the question must first be asked ‘Who is Semele?’

DIONYSOS SON OF SEMELE.

Dionysos, we have seen, was a Thracian; if his mother can be shown to be Thracian too, each will confirm the other. The certain remains of the Phrygio-Thracian tongue are but scanty, happily however they suffice for the certain interpretation of the name Semele.

Prof. Ramsay in his Phrygian explorations[1030] has brought to light a number of inscriptions from tombs which run after this fashion:

δη διως ζεμελω.
με ζεμελω κε δεος.
δεος κε ζεμ(ελω).
με ζεμελω.

These various permutations and combinations are followed by a curse formulary as follows: ιος σεμουν κνουμανει κακουν αδδακει ετιττετικμενος ειτου, which is Phrygian for ὃς τούτῳ (τῷ) μνήματι κακὸν ἐπέθηκε ὑποκατάρατος ἔστω, ‘Cursed be he that does any damage to this tomb.’ The inscriptions which all date after the Christian era belong to a time when the well-to-do classes spoke and wrote Greek, but, in the case of a curse, it was well to couch your inscription in a tongue understanded of the people. με and δη would appear to be affirmative curse particles; με has for cognates μά, μήν and possibly μέν, as well as the Latin _me_ in _me Hercle, me Dius Fidius_. δη is cognate not only to the ordinary affirmative Greek δή but also to the _de_ of the Latin oath _e-de-pol_. The divinities sworn by remain to be considered. δη διως can scarcely be other than νὴ Δία, ‘by Zeus.’ ζεμελω at once brings Semele to mind. But who and what is Semele? Phrygian and Thracian are now admitted to belong to the Indo-European family of languages, and a conjoint consonantal characteristic of the two is that they replace the palatals _g_ and _gh_ (Greek γ and χ) by a spirant; this spirant the Greeks rendered indifferently by their nearest equivalents ζ and σ. The Phrygian ζεμελω is the Greek γῆ (earth) appearing in nasalized form as χαμαί, χθαμαλός, χθών, in Latin as _humus_, _humilis_, _homo_, in Sclavonic, to quote only a familiar and convincing instance, in Nova _Zembla_, ‘new earth.’ The Greek form γῆ looks remote but we have also its nasalized form Χαμύνη (Lit. _Zemyna_). At Elis Pausanias[1031] saw, opposite the place where the umpires stood, an altar of white marble. On that altar sat the priestess of Demeter Chamyne, to behold the Olympic games. ‘She of the Ground’ was probably at Olympia long before the coming of Zeus.

* * * * *

Semele, mother of Dionysos, is the Earth. This the vase-painter knew well. In dealing with the Earth-Mother (p. 276) a number of vase-paintings have been considered, in which Kore, the earth in her young form as maiden, has been seen represented as rising out of the actual earth she really is. To these as counterpart must now be added the curious vase-painting in fig. 128, now in the Hope collection at Deep-dene[1032]. Out of the earth-mound rises a youthful figure, a male Kore; he holds a sceptre as king and is welcomed, or rather heralded, by a little winged Nike. His worshippers await him: a Maenad with thyrsos and tray of offerings to the right, a Satyr also with thyrsos to the left. The rising figure can be none other than the child of Semele, the earth-Dionysos himself. It is rash, I think, to give the rising god any special name, to call him Iacchos or Brimos; all we can be sure that the vase-painter meant was that the god is earth-born.

The same notion comes clearly out in the second design in fig. 129 from a kalpis in the British Museum[1033]. Here the familiar type[1034] of the birth of Erichthonios from the earth is taken over and adapted to the birth of Dionysos. The vase-painter thus in instructive fashion assimilates the immigrant stranger to his own heroic mythology. Ge is rising from the earth; she presents, not Erichthonios, but another sacred child to a foster-mother, Athene. It is practically certain that the child is Dionysos, not Erichthonios, for the maiden who in such familiar fashion leans on the shoulder of Zeus in inscribed ‘Wine-bloom,’ Oinanthe. Zeus himself with his thunderbolt is a reminiscence of the thunder-smitten birth. On authentic representations of the birth of Erichthonios, Hephaistos, his putative father, is present, not Zeus. As in fig. 128 the new-born hero is welcomed by a winged Victory, who brings a taenia to crown him. It is clear that the vase-painter wants to make the new-born child as Athenian as possible, almost to substitute him for the autochthonous Erichthonios; he is welcomed and received not by Satyrs and Maenads, his own worshippers and kinsfolk, but by his new relations, Athene and Athenian Victory.

The third vase-painting in fig. 130 from a cylix in the Museum at Naples[1035] is a much earlier piece of work. It dates about the middle of the sixth century, and is free from any specifically Athenian influence. Out of the ground rise two great busts inscribed severally Διόνυσος (Dionysos) and Σεμέλη (Semele). Even without the inscriptions there could be no doubt as to Dionysos. The vase-painter in his primitive eager fashion makes assurance doubly sure. The god holds aloft with pardonable pride his characteristic high-handled wine-cup, the kantharos; behind him and Semele a great vine is growing, up one side of which a Satyr is clambering. Dionysos is not Liknites here; he is in the full bloom of his youth, not elderly though bearded, coeval with fair Semele.

* * * * *

At Thebes the legend of the birth of Dionysos took on a special form. He is not only son of Semele, of Earth[1036], but son of Semele as Keraunia, Earth the thunder-smitten.

This aspect of Semele as Keraunia is familiar in classical literature. Sophocles[1037] has ‘thou and thy mother, she of the thunder.’ To Euripides[1038] in the _Hippolytus_ Semele thunder-smitten is the stuff of which is made perhaps the most splendid poetry he ever wrote:

‘O mouth of Dirce, O god-built wall
That Dirce’s wells run under;
Ye know the Cyprian’s fleet foot-fall,
Ye saw the heavens round her flare
When she lulled to her sleep that Mother fair
Of Twy-born Bacchus and crowned her there
The Bride of the bladed thunder:
For her breath is on all that hath life, and she floats in the air
Bee-like, death-like, a wonder.’

And this splendid poetry is based, it seems, not merely on mythology but on a local cult, a cult of thunder and a place thunder-smitten. The prologue[1039] of the _Bacchae_, spoken by Dionysos, opens thus, with a description of the sanctuary of Semele:

‘Behold god’s son is come unto this land
Of Thebes, even I, Dionysos, whom the brand
Of heaven’s hot splendour lit to life, when she
Who bore me, Cadmus’ daughter Semele,
Died here. So, changed in shape from god to man,
I walk again by Dirce’s stream, and scan
Ismenus’ shore. There by the castle side
I see her place, the Tomb of the Lightning’s Bride,
The wreck of smouldering chambers and the great
Faint wreaths of fire undying, as the hate
Dies not that Hera held for Semele.
Ay Cadmus hath done well: in purity
He keeps this place apart, inviolate
His daughter’s sanctuary, and I have set
My green and clustered vines to robe it round.’

Nor again is this merely the effective scenic setting of a play. Any place that was struck by lightning was regarded as specially sacred[1040]. If the place was the tomb of a local heroine there was a double sanctity. Such a tomb there unquestionably was at Thebes. Pausanias[1041] asserts the fact though he does not state that he actually saw the tomb: ‘There are also the ruins of the house of Lycus and Semele’s monument.’ Primarily of course the sanctity of a thunder-smitten place was more of the nature of a _taboo_ than of consecration in our sense of the word. It would lend itself easily to a legend of judgment on a heroine or of a divine Epiphany. The figure of the great Earth-goddess Semele faded before the splendour of Zeus.

Possibly the cult of these thunder-smitten places may serve to answer a question asked by Plutarch[1042]—‘Who among the Boeotians are the Psoloeis (Smoky Ones) and who the Aioleiai?’ Plutarch tells a confused story of the daughters of Minyas who went mad with desire for human flesh and slew the child of one of them. The dreadful deed was commemorated by a ‘flight ceremony’ that formed part of the Agrionia, in which the priest of Dionysos pursued with a sword the women of the clan in which the men were called Psoloeis and the women Aioleiai, and if he caught one, had leave to slay her. Zoilos, a priest in the time of Plutarch, actually availed himself of the permission. Bad luck followed. Zoilos sickened and died, and the priesthood ceased to be hereditary and became elective. The story is very obscure, but Lydus[1043] in discussing thunderbolts says there are two kinds, the one is swift and rarefied (μανός) and fiery and is called ἀργής, the other is slow and smoky and is called ψολόεις. The family of the Smoky Ones _may_ have been worshippers of the smoky kind of thunderbolt.

Be this as it may, the cult and mythology of Dionysos are haunted by reminiscences of lightning and sudden fiery apparitions that are probably not merely poetical but primitive. In the _Bacchae_ not only is Dionysos fire-born and attended by the light of torches, but his Epiphany is marked by a manifest thunderstorm, a storm that takes the shape of a resurgence of the flame on Semele’s tomb. A voice is heard[1044]:

‘Unveil the Lightning’s Eye, arouse
The fire that sleeps, against this house.’

And the chorus make answer:

‘Ah saw ye, marked ye there the flame
From Semele’s enhallowed sod
Awaken’d? Yea the Death that came
Ablaze from heaven of old—the same
Hot splendour of the shaft of God.’

And again on Cithaeron[1045] there is not only the mysterious voice and the awful silence, but the manifestation of the pillar of fire:

‘So spake he and there came
’Twixt earth and sky a pillar of high flame:
And silence took the air, and no leaf stirred
In all the forest dell. Thou hadst not heard
In that vast silence any wild thing’s cry.’

The Epiphany by fire is of course common to many theologies; we have the Burning Bush and the Pentecostal tongues, but it is interesting to find that, in far-away Thrace, the favour of Dionysos was made manifest by a great light. The evidence comes from Aristotle[1046]. He says: ‘There is in the same place (i.e. in Krastonia near the district of the Bisaltae) a large and beautiful sanctuary of Dionysos, in which it is reported that at the time of the festival and the sacrifice, if the god intends to send a good season, _a great blaze of fire appears_, and this is seen by all those whose business is in the temenos; but if the god intends a barren season, the light does not make its appearance, but there is darkness on the place as on other nights.’ It would be vain to ask what natural fact, whether of summer lightning or burning bush, caused the belief; the essential point is the primitive Epiphany by fire, an Epiphany not vengeful but beneficent.

* * * * *

Dionysos is then the son of an ancient Thracian Earth-goddess, Semele, and she is Keraunia, thunder-smitten, in some sense the bride, it would seem, of our old sky and thunder-god, a sort of Ouranos later effaced by the splendour of the Hellenic Zeus. If some such old nature-god existed as is probable in the far background of primitive mythology, the affiliation of Zeus and Dionysos would be an easy matter.

In this connection it is interesting to note that not only Zeus himself was associated with the thunder and the lightning, but also the ancient ‘Mother of the Gods.’ Pindar[1047], who all through the third Pythian has in his mind the sore sickness of Hieron, not only bethinks him of Cheiron the primitive Healer but also sings:

‘I would pray to the Mother to loose her ban,
The holy goddess, to whom and to Pan
Before my gate, all night long,
The maids do worship with dance and song.’

The scholiast tells us how it came that Pindar prayed to the Mother for healing. One day while Pindar was teaching a pupil on a mountain, possibly Cithaeron itself, ‘there was heard a great noise, and a flame of lightning was seen descending, and Pindar saw that a stone image of the Mother had come down at their feet, and the oracle ordained that he should set up a shrine to the Mother.’ The story is transparent—a thunderstorm, lightning and a fallen aerolite, the symbol of the Mother, surely of Keraunia. And the Mother, the scholiast further tells us, ‘had power to purify from madness.’ She had power to loose as well as to bind. In this she was like her son Dionysos. The magical power for purification of aerolites and indeed of almost any strange black stone is attested by many instances[1048]. Orestes[1049] was purified at Trozen from his madness, mother-sent, by a sacred stone. Most curious of all, Porphyry[1050] tells us that Pythagoras when he was in Crete met one of the Idaean Dactyls, worshippers of the Mother, and was by him purified with a thunderbolt.

With a mother thunder-smitten, it was not hard for Dionysos to become adopted child of the Hellenic Zeus, God of the Thunderbolt. Theologians were ready with the myth of the double birth. Semele fell into partial discredit, obscured by the splendour of the Father. Matriarchy pales before the new order of patriarchy, and from henceforth the name Dionysos[1051], ‘son of Zeus,’ is supreme.

DIONYSOS SON OF ZEUS.

The fatherhood of Zeus is charmingly set forth by the lovely little vase-fragment in fig. 131 from a red-figured cylix[1052], found in the excavations on the Acropolis and now in the National Museum at Athens. Zeus with his sceptre holds the infant Dithyramb and displays him proudly to the other Olympians. Semele is ignored, perhaps half forgotten. Dionysos in the new order is ‘all for the father.’

The all-important question is forced upon us—why did Zeus adopt him? Dionysos is the child of the Earth-goddess, but why was this particular earth-child adopted? Why did his worship spread everywhere with irresistible might, overshadowing at the end even the cult of his adopted father? Kore too is daughter of Earth, she too in awkward fashion was half affiliated to Zeus, yet he never takes her in his arms and her cult though wide-spread has no militant missionary aspect.

Zeus holds the infant Dionysos in his arms, and Dionysos holds in his the secret of his strength, the vine with its great bunch of grapes. But for that bunch of grapes Zeus would never have troubled to adopt him. To the popular mind Dionysos was always Lord of the Vine, as Athene was Lady of the Olive. It is by the guerdon of the grape that his Bacchants appeal to Dirce[1053]:

‘By his own joy I vow,
By the grape upon the bough.’

It is by his great gift of Wine to sorrowful man that his kingdom is established upon earth[1054]:

‘A god of Heaven is He,
And born in majesty,
Yet hath he mirth in the joy of the Earth
And he loveth constantly
Her who brings increase,
The Feeder of children, Peace.

No grudge hath He of the great,
No scorn of the mean estate,
But to all that liveth, his Wine he giveth,
Griefless, immaculate.
Only on them that spurn
Joy may his anger burn.’

It is the usual mythological inversion, he of the earth is translated to heaven that thence he may descend.

Dionysos as god of the grape is so familiar that the idea needs no emphasis. It is more important to note that the vine as the origin of his worship presents certain difficulties.

It has clearly been seen that Dionysos was a Northerner, a Thracian. Wine is not the characteristic drink of the North. Is it likely that wine, a drink characteristic to this day of the South, is the primitive essence of the worship of a god coming into Greece from the North?

The answer to this difficulty is an interesting one. The main distinguishing factor of the religion of Dionysos is always the cult of an intoxicant, but wine is not the only intoxicant, nor in the North the most primitive. Evidence is not wanting that the cult of the vine-god was superimposed on, affiliated to, in part developed out of, a cult that had for its essence the worship of an early and northern intoxicant, cereal not vinous.

To this conclusion I have been led by the consideration of the cultus titles of the god.

BROMIOS. BRAITES. SABAZIOS.

Dionysos is a god of many names; he is Bacchos, Baccheus, Iacchos, Bassareus, Bromios, Euios, Sabazios, Zagreus, Thyoneus, Lenaios, Eleuthereus, and the list by no means exhausts his titles. A large number of these names are like Lenaios, ‘He of the Wine-Press,’ only descriptive titles; they never emerge to the dignity of proper names. Some, like Iacchos and probably Bacchos itself, though they ultimately became proper names, were originally only cries. Iacchos was a song even down to the time of Aristophanes[1055], and was probably, to begin with, a ritual shout or cry kept up long after its meaning was forgotten. Such cries from their vagueness, their aptness for repetition, are peculiarly exciting to the religious emotions. How many people attach any precise significance to the thrice repeated, stately and moving words that form the proœmium to our own Easter Hymn?

‘Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia.’

They are a homage beyond articulate speech. Then, as now, these excited cries became sacred titles of the worshippers who used them: ‘Evian women’ (εὔιοι γυναῖκες) were the ancient and more reverent counterpart of our ‘Hallelujah lasses.’

The various titles of the god are of course of considerable use in determining his nature, for they all express some phase of emotion in the worshipper, and it is of these phases that a god is compounded. Certain names seem to cling to certain places. Sabazios is Thracian, Zagreus Cretan, Bromios largely Theban, Iacchos Athenian. Some of the epithets have unquestionably shifted their meaning in the course of time. The Greeks were adepts at false etymology, and an excellent instance of this is a title of the first importance for our argument, _Bromios_.

* * * * *

The title Bromios has to our modern ears a poetical, somewhat mystical ring[1056]. It never occurs in Homer, nor in Sophocles. Pindar and Aeschylus both use it, Euripides often. The poets, by their usage, clearly show that they connect the title with the verb βρέμω, which means ‘to make a confused sound.’ Pindar in a dithyrambic fragment[1057] says:

‘We hymn thee Bromios and Him of the loud cry.’

The address it may be noted is to the Cadmean Dionysos.

Sometimes the association is definitely with thunder (βροντή). Thus in the second Olympian[1058] we have:

‘High in Olympus lives for evermore
She of the delicate hair,
Semele fair,
Who died by the thunder’s roar.’

Here the title Bromios can scarcely have been remote from Pindar’s mind, though he does not care to press the allusion. In the _Bacchae_ there seems no consciousness of etymology. The titles Dionysos and Bromios come haphazard, but throughout the play Dionysos is in some degree a god of thunder as well as thunder-born, a god of mysterious voices, of strange, confused, orgiastic music, music which we know he brought with him from the North.

Strabo[1059] has preserved for us two fragments from the lost _Edonians_ of Aeschylus which deal with this music of orgy and madness. Aeschylus, he says, speaks in the _Edonians_ of the goddess Kotys and the instruments of her worship, and immediately introduces the worshippers of Dionysos, thus:

‘One on the fair-turned pipe fulfils
His song, with the warble of fingered trills
The soul to frenzy awakening.
From another the brazen cymbals ring.
The shawm blares out, but beneath is the moan
Of the bull-voiced mimes, unseen, unknown,
And in deep diapason the shuddering sound
Of drums, like thunder, beneath the ground.’

Of the ‘bull-voiced mimes’ we should have been glad to know more details, but the fragment, obscure as it is, leaves at least the impression of weird exciting ceremonial, and most of all of mysterious music.

All this must have helped to make of Bromios the god of sounds and voices; yet it is probable, indeed almost certain, that the title had another origin, simpler, less poetical. We owe the clue to this primitive meaning to the Emperor Julian.

* * * * *

Julian in his northern campaign saw and no doubt tasted with compunction a wine, made not from the grape but from barley. After the fashion of his age he wrote an epigram[1060] to this new, or rather very old, Dionysos. From the number of instructive puns it contains this epigram is almost untranslateable, but as its evidence is for our purpose of paramount importance it may be roughly Englished as follows:

_To wine made of barley_[1061].

‘Who and whence art thou, Dionyse? Now, by the Bacchus true
Whom well I know, the son of Zeus, say—‘Who and what are you?’
_He_ smells of nectar like a god, _you_ smack of goats and spelt,
For lack of grapes from ears of grain your countryman the Celt
Made you. Your name’s Demetrios, but never Dionyse,
Bromos, Oat-born, not Bromios, Fire-born from out the skies.’

The emperor makes three very fair puns, as follows: βρόμος oats, βρόμιος of the thunder; πυρογενῆ wheat-born, πυριγενῆ fire-born; τράγος goat and τράγος an inferior kind of wheat, spelt. The gist of the third pun will be considered more fully at a later stage of the argument. For the present it is sufficient to note that all three have the same substantial content, there is a Dionysos who is not of heaven but of earth. Julian propounds as an elegant jest the simple but illuminating mythological truth that the title Bromios points to a god born not of the lightning and thunder but of an intoxicant made from the cereal βρόμος. Bromios is Demetrios, son of Demeter the Corn-Mother, before he becomes god of the grape and son by adoption of Olympian Zeus.

Julian is not precise in his discrimination between the various edible grasses. His epigram is headed, ‘To wine made of barley (κριθῆς)’; the god, he says, smacks of _spelt_ (τράγος), he is _wheat_-born (πυρογενῆ) and he is of _oats_ (βρόμος). It matters to Julian nothing, nor is it to our argument of first importance, of _what_ particular cereal this new-old Dionysos is made. The point is that it is of some cereal, not of the grape. The god is thus seen to be son of Semele, Earth-goddess in her agricultural aspect as Demeter, Corn-Mother. We shall later (p. 518) see that he was worshipped with service of the winnowing-fan, and we shall further see that, when he-of-the-cereal-intoxicant became he-of-the-wine-of-grapes, the instrument that had been a winnowing-fan became a grape-basket.

* * * * *

The possibility of this simple origin of Bromios grows when we consider another epithet of the god. In the Paean to Dionysos recently discovered at Delphi[1062] there occurs the title hitherto unexplained—Braites. The hymn opens thus with a string of cultus epithets:

‘Come, O Dithyrambos, Bacchos, come,
Euios, Thyrsos-Lord, Braites, come,
Bromios, come, and coming with thee bring
Holy hours of thine own holy spring.’

Nowhere else does the title Braites occur; but the hymn, as an actual ritual composition, inscribed and set up at Delphi, is an important source. Braites has been explained as the Breaker or Striker, but this is scarcely a happy epithet for the Spring-god. In the light of Bromios it may be suggested that the epithet is connected with the late Latin word _braisum_, which means ‘grain prepared for the making of the beer _braisum_[1063].’ Braites would then like Bromios be an epithet derived from a cereal intoxicant.

* * * * *

An examination of the title Sabazios leads to results more certain and satisfactory. The name Sabazios has a more foreign sound than Dionysos, even than Bromios. Sabazios was never admitted even to the outskirts of Olympus. In the time of Demosthenes[1064] his rites were regarded by the orthodox as foreign, outrageous, disreputable. One of the counts in the unmannerly attack of Demosthenes on Aeschines is that Aeschines had been instructed by his mother in mysteries and rites that were certainly those of Sabazios, that having performed various degrading ceremonials he ‘led those admirable thiasoi about the streets, they being crowned with fennel and poplar, and gesticulated with great red snakes, waving them over his head and shouting Euoi Saboi.’ The Saboi were the worshippers of Sabazios as the Bacchae of Bacchos. Of course Demosthenes is grossly unjust. The ceremonies of Sabazios could be closely paralleled by the perfectly orthodox ritual of Dionysos, but they passed under another name, were not completely canonical, and above all things were still realized as foreign. That pious men of good repute might quietly worship Sabazios is clear from the account of the ‘Superstitious Man’ in Theophrastos[1065]. Against his moral character nothing can be urged, but that he was a little over-zealous, and ‘whenever he chanced to see a red snake he would invoke Sabazios.’

Down to Christian days the snake was an important feature in the cult of Sabazios. Clement and Arnobius[1066] both state that one of the ‘tokens’ of the mysteries of Sabazios was ‘the god (gliding) through the bosom.’ The snake was of course associated also with Dionysos—he may have inherited it from the earlier god—but his more characteristic vehicle was the bull. Sabazios seems always to have been regarded as more primitive and savage than Dionysos. Diodorus[1067], puzzled by the many forms of Dionysos, says: ‘Some people fable that there was another Dionysos very much earlier in date than this one, for they allege that there was a Dionysos born of Zeus and Persephone, the one called by some Sabazios, whose birth and sacrifices and rites they instance as celebrated by night and in secret on account of shameless ceremonies attending them.’ These last words probably refer to the mystic marriage of the god with the initiated (p. 535).

The symbolism of the snake has already (p. 326) been discussed. A god whose vehicle was the snake would find easy affiliation in Greece, where every dead hero was a snake.

Sabazios is left unsung by tragic poets, but the realism of comedy reflects the popular craze for semi-barbarian worship. The temper of Demosthenes was not, if Strabo[1068] be right, characteristically Athenian. ‘As in other matters,’ Strabo says, ‘the Athenians were always hospitable to foreign customs, so with the gods. They adopted many sacred customs from abroad and were ridiculed in comedies for doing so, and this especially as regards Phrygian and Thracian rites. Plato mentions the Bendidean, and Demosthenes the Phrygian, rites in his accusation against Aeschines and his mother on the count that Aeschines joined his mother in her rites and went about in a thiasos and cried aloud Euoi Saboi and Hyes Attes, for these cries are of Sabazios and the Mother.’

It is then to comedy, to Aristophanes, that we owe most of our references to Sabazios, hints of his real character and his inner kinship with Dionysos. In an untranslateable pun in the _Birds_[1069] he tells us that Sabazios is a Phrygian, and from the _Lysistrata_[1070] we learn that his worship was orgiastic and much affected by women. The ‘deputation man’ exclaims:

‘Has the wantonness of women then blazed up,
Their tabourings, Sabazios all about,
Their clamour for Adonis on the roofs?’

But most instructive of all is the mention of Sabazios in the opening of the _Wasps_[1071]. The two slaves Sosias and Xanthias are watching over their master Bdelycleon. They know he is a dangerous monster and they ought to keep awake.

‘_Xan._ I know, but I _do_ want a little peace.

_Sos._ Well, chance it then. Some sweet and drowsy thing
Is falling drop by drop upon my eyes.

_Xan._ What? Are you clean mad or a Korybant?

_Sos._ No, a sleep holds me from Sabazios.

_Xan._ And I too herd the same Sabazios.
Just now a very Mede of a nodding sleep
Came down and made an onset on my eyes.’

Sabazios is here clearly not so much the god of ecstasy and orgy as of compelling irresistible sleep. And why? A late historian gives the simple answer.

Ammianus Marcellinus[1072] tells us that, when the Emperor Valens was besieging Chalcedon, the besieged by way of insult shouted to him ‘Sabaiarius.’ He adds in explanation ‘_sabaia_ is a drink of the poor in Illyria made of barley or corn turned into a liquor.’ ‘Sabaiarius’ is then ‘Beer-man,’ beer-drinker or brewer. S. Jerome, himself a Dalmatian, says in his commentary on Isaiah[1073] that ‘there is a sort of drink made from grain and water, and in the provinces of Dalmatia and Pannonia it is called, in the local barbarian speech, _sabaium_.’ To the wine-drinker the beer-drinker seemed a low fellow. Wine was in itself a rarer, finer beverage, probably at first more expensive. Even to-day in some parts of beer-drinking Germany to drink beer at the solemn midday dinner is almost a vulgarity. Sabazios, god of the cheap cereal drink, brings rather sleep than inspiration.

The testimony of Sabazios is now added to that of Bromios and Braites. Separately the conjectured etymology of each epithet might fall far short of conviction, but the cumulative force of the three together offers evidence that seems conclusive.

A fourth link in the chain still remains. The emperor Julian’s third pun τράγος, goat, and τράγος, spelt, has yet to be considered:

‘_He_ smells of nectar like a god, _you_ smack of goats and spelt.’

The word τράγος is usually rendered ‘goat,’ and the meaning ‘spelt’ ignored. There is of course a reference to the time-honoured jest about the animal, but that the primary reference is to grain, not the goat, is clear from the words that immediately follow:

‘For lack of grapes from ears of grain your countryman the Celt
Made you.’

In translating I have therefore used both the meanings; the formal pun is untranslateable.

It is an odd fact that the ancients seem to have called certain _wild_ forms of fruits and cereals by names connecting them with the goat[1074]. The reason is not clear, but the fact is well-established. The Latins called the wild fig _caprificus_; Pausanias expressly tells us that the Messenians gave to the wild fig-tree the name τράγος, goat. Vines, when they ran wild to foliage rather than fruit, were said τραγᾶν. I would conjecture that the inferior sort of spelt called τράγος, goat, owes its name to this unexplained linguistic habit. It is even possible that the beard with which spelt is furnished may have helped out the confusion. Tragedy I believe to be not the ‘goat-song,’ but the ‘harvest-song’ of the cereal τράγος, the form of spelt known as ‘the goat.’ When the god of the cereal, Bromios-Braites-Sabazios, became the god of the vine, the fusion and confusion of τραγῳδία, the spelt-song, with τρυγῳδία, the song of the winelees[1075], was easy and indeed inevitable. The τραγῳδοί, the ‘beanfeast-singers,’ became τρυγῳδοί or ‘must-singers.’

The difficulties in the way of the canonical etymology of _tragedy_ are acknowledged to be great[1076]. In discussing the Satyrs it has already been shown that the primitive followers of Dionysos are mythologically conceived of not as _goat_-men, but as _horse_-men. The primitive ‘_goat_-song,’ we are asked to believe, was sung by a chorus of _horse_-men. The case in fact stands thus. We are confronted on the one hand by the undoubted fact that on countless vase-paintings of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. the attendants of Dionysos are _horse_-men, while _goat_-men attend the Earth-goddess (p. 277); on the other hand we have the _supposed_ fact that tragedy is the _goat_-song. But this supposed fact is merely an etymological assumption. If another etymology be found for _tragedy_, the whole discrepancy disappears. Such an etymology is, I think, offered by τράγος ‘spelt,’ with the further advantage that it contains in itself a hint of how the goat misunderstanding arose.

* * * * *

A fragment of Aeschylus cited, but I think erroneously, as evidence of a goat chorus remains to be examined. In a lost tragedy[1077] a Satyr on the stage sees for the first time fire just given to mortals, and he runs to kiss her as though she were a beautiful maiden. Prometheus warns him: if you do this

‘You’ll be a goat mourning his beard.’

The passage is used as evidence for the goat form and dress of the Satyric chorus. Surely such an inference is needless; the point of the jest is the morals and manners of the Satyr. To reconstruct a goat-chorus out of a casual joke is labour in vain.

* * * * *

We have then found four several titles, Bromios, Braites, Sabazios and tragedy, for which the supposition of a cereal drink affords a simple, satisfactory explanation. It remains to show that, though the words _bromos_, _braisum_, _sabaia_ and _tragos_ have become to us dim and almost forgotten in the lapse of time, a cereal drink such as they imply was widely in use in ancient days, and that among Northern nations.

* * * * *