DIONYSUS dī ə nī’ səs (Διονύσος). Dionysus was the god of an ecstatic and emotional cult, which appears to have reached Greece from Thrace. The cult satisfied that strange and somewhat terrifying urge in human nature that found expression in the “dancing madness,” which periodically invaded Europe from the 14th to the 17th cent. and even appropriated to its mass excitement perverted forms of Christianity. The “Shakers,” the Jewish Hasidim, the Moslem dervishes, and the Siberian shamans were and are other examples of such psychological maladies.

Mythology made Dionysus the son of Zeus and Semele, snatched unborn from his mother’s womb when Semele was incinerated before the burning glory of Zeus that she had insisted on seeing. The babe was born in due time from his divine father’s thigh in which he was sewn. Myths clustered around the young god’s name, the most famous of which forms the theme of Euripides’ last and strangest tragedy, the Bacchae, a drama which, rightly viewed, is a moving and horrifying study of the worship of Dionysus as Euripides encountered it in its northern homeland in his final years.

The Dionysiac myths are of little account. They are accretions around a form of primitive worship of vast antiquity, which came to Greece from ancient times and found new forms and adaptations as society grew more sophisticated and civilized. The drama, tragedy, and comedy, but esp. the former, had their primitive roots in the worship of Dionysus, and the Attic Dionysiac festivals produced their final splendid fruit in the magnificent theater of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.

Beneath the mass of myth and the final shape of the ritual, it is possible to see the worship of a vegetation spirit and the fertility cult so frequently associated with such deities in primitive religion. Dionysus’ cult titles confirm this. He was “the Power of the Tree,” the “Blossom-bringer,” the “Fruit-bringer,” the “Abundance of Life.” His domain was, as E. R. Dodds puts it, “Not only the liquid fire in the grape, but the sap thrusting in a young tree, the blood pounding in the veins of a young animal, all the mysterious and uncontrollable tides which ebb and flow in the life of nature.” The tidyminded Romans turned this ancient deity into the jolly Bacchus, the wine god with his reveling nymphs and satyrs, theme of Titian and Rubens, and turned “orgia” into “orgies,” not the ecstatic acts of the transforming and horrible devotion that they were in their primitive context of nature worship and religious “possessions.”

Bibliography J. E. Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903); W. F. Otto, Dionysos (1933); E. R. Dodds, The Bacchae (1944); W. K. C. Guthrie, The Greeks and their Gods (1950); E. M. Blaiklock, The Male Characters of Euripides (1952), 209ff.; C. Seltman, The Twelve Olympians and Their Guests, ch. XIII (1952).