The Golden Bough (1890)/Chapter 3/Section 7

by James George Frazer

 

§ 7.—Dionysus

The Greek god Dionysus or Bacchus^[1] is best known as the god of the vine, but he was also a god of trees in general. Thus we are told that almost all the Greeks sacrificed to “Dionysus of the tree.”^[2] In Boeotia one of his titles was “Dionysus in the tree.”^[3] His image was often merely an upright post, without arms, but draped in a mantle, with a bearded mask to represent the head, and with leafy boughs projecting from the head or body to show the nature of the deity.^[4] On a vase his rude effigy is depicted appearing out of a low tree or bush.^[5] He was the patron of cultivated trees;^[6] prayers were offered to him that he would make the trees grow;^[7] and he was especially honoured by husbandmen, chiefly fruit-growers, who set up an image of him, in the shape of a natural tree-stump, in their orchards.^[8] He was said to have discovered all tree-fruits, amongst which apples and figs are particularly mentioned;^[9] and he was himself spoken of as doing a husbandman’s work.^[10] He was referred to as “well-fruited,” “he of the green fruit,” and “making the fruit to grow.”^[11] One of his titles was “teeming” or “bursting” (as of sap or blossoms);^[12] and there was a Flowery Dionysus in Attica and at Patrae in Achaea.^[13] Amongst the trees particularly sacred to him, in addition to the vine, was the pine-tree.^[14] The Delphic oracle commanded the Corinthians to worship a particular pine-tree “equally with the god,” so they made two images of Dionysus out of it, with red faces and gilt bodies.^[15] In art a wand, tipped with a pine-cone, is commonly carried by the god or his worshippers.^[16] Again, the ivy and the fig-tree were especially associated with him. In the Attic township of Acharnae there was a Dionysus Ivy;^[17] at Lacedaemon there was a Fig Dionysus; and in Naxos, where figs were called meilicha, there was a Dionysus Meilichios, the face of whose image was made of fig-wood.^[18]

Like the other gods of vegetation whom we have been considering, Dionysus was believed to have died a violent death, but to have been brought to life again; and his sufferings, death, and resurrection were enacted in his sacred rites. The Cretan myth, as related by Firmicus, ran thus. He was said to have been the bastard son of Jupiter (Zeus), a Cretan king. Going abroad, Jupiter transferred the throne and sceptre to the child Dionysus, but, knowing that his wife Juno (Hera) cherished a jealous dislike of the child, he entrusted Dionysus to the care of guards upon whose fidelity he believed he could rely. Juno, however, bribed the guards, and amusing the child with toys and a cunningly-wrought looking-glass lured him into an ambush, where her satellites, the Titans, rushed upon him, cut him limb from limb, boiled his body with various herbs and ate it. But his sister Minerva, who had shared in the deed, kept his heart and gave it to Jupiter on his return, revealing to him the whole history of the crime. In his rage, Jupiter put the Titans to death by torture, and, to soothe his grief for the loss of his son, made an image in which he enclosed the child’s heart, and then built a temple in his honour.^[19] In this version a Euhemeristic turn has been given to the myth by representing Jupiter and Juno (Zeus and Hera) as a king and queen of Crete. The guards referred to are the mythical Curetes who danced a war-dance round the infant Dionysus as they are said to have done round the infant Zeus.^[20] Pomegranates were supposed to have sprung from the blood of Dionysus,^[21] as anemones from the blood of Adonis and violets from the blood of Attis. According to some, the severed limbs of Dionysus were pieced together, at the command of Zeus, by Apollo, who buried them on Parnassus.^[22] The grave of Dionysus was shown in the Delphic temple beside a golden statue of Apollo.^[23] Thus far the resurrection of the slain god is not mentioned, but in other versions of the myth it is variously related. One version, which represented Dionysus as a son of Demeter, averred that his mother pieced together his mangled limbs and made him young again.^[24] In others it is simply said that shortly after his burial he rose from the dead and ascended up to heaven;^[25] or that Zeus raised him up as he lay mortally wounded;^[26] or that Zeus swallowed the heart of Dionysus and then begat him afresh by Semele,^[27] who in the common legend figures as mother of Dionysus. Or, again, the heart was pounded up and given in a potion to Semele, who thereby conceived him.^[28]

Turning from the myth to the ritual, we find that the Cretans celebrated a biennial^[29] festival at which the sufferings and death of Dionysus were represented in every detail.^[30] Where the resurrection formed part of the myth, it also was enacted at the rites,^[31] and it even appears that a general doctrine of resurrection, or at least of immortality, was inculcated on the worshippers; for Plutarch, writing to console his wife on the death of their infant daughter, comforts her with the thought of the immortality of the soul as taught by tradition and revealed in the mysteries of Dionysus.^[32] A different form of the myth of the death and resurrection of Dionysus is that he descended into Hades to bring up his mother Semele from the dead.^[33] The local Argive tradition was that he descended through the Alcyonian lake; and his return from the lower world, in other words his resurrection, was annually celebrated on the spot by the Argives, who summoned him from the water by trumpet blasts, while they threw a lamb into the lake as an offering to the warder of the dead.^[34] Whether this was a spring festival does not appear, but the Lydians certainly celebrated the advent of Dionysus in spring; the god was supposed to bring the season with him.^[35] Deities of vegetation, who are supposed to pass a certain portion of each year underground, naturally come to be regarded as gods of the lower world or of the dead. Both Dionysus and Osiris were so conceived.^[36]

A feature in the mythical character of Dionysus, which at first sight appears inconsistent with his nature as a deity of vegetation, is that he was often conceived and represented in animal shape, especially in the form, or at least with the horns, of a bull. Thus he is spoken of as “cow-born,” “bull,” “bull-shaped,” “bull-faced,” “bull-browed,” “bull-horned,” “horn-bearing,” “two-horned,” “horned.”^[37] He was believed to appear, at least occasionally, as a bull.^[38] His images were often, as at Cyzicus, made in bull shape,^[39] or with bull horns;^[40] and he was painted with horns.^[41] Types of the horned Dionysus are found amongst the surviving monuments of antiquity.^[42] On one statuette he appears clad in a bull’s hide, the head, horns, and hoofs hanging down behind.^[43] At his festivals Dionysus was believed to appear in bull form. The women of Elis hailed him as a bull, and prayed him to come with his bull’s-foot. They sang, “Come here, Dionysus, to thy holy temple by the sea; come with the Graces to thy temple, rushing with thy bull’s-foot, O goodly bull, O goodly bull!”^[44] According to the myth, it was in the shape of a bull that he was torn to pieces by the Titans;^[45] and the Cretans, in representing the sufferings and death of Dionysus, tore a live bull to pieces with their teeth.^[46] Indeed, the rending and devouring of live bulls and calves appear to have been a regular feature of the Dionysiac rites.^[47] The practice of representing the god in bull form or with some of the features of a bull, the belief that he appeared in bull form to his worshippers at the sacred rites, and the legend that it was in bull form that he had been torn in pieces—all these facts taken together leave no room to doubt that in rending and devouring a live bull at his festival his worshippers believed that they were killing the god, eating his flesh, and drinking his blood.

Another animal whose form Dionysus assumed was the goat. One of his names was “Kid.”^[48] To save him from the wrath of Hera, his father Zeus changed him into a kid;^[49] and when the gods fled to Egypt to escape the fury of Typhon, Dionysus was turned into a goat.^[50] Hence when his worshippers rent in pieces a Hve goat and devoured it raw,^[51] they must have beheved that they were eating the body and blood of the god.

This custom of killing a god in animal form, which we shall examine more fully presently, belongs to a very early stage in human culture, and is apt in later times to be misunderstood. The advance of thought tends to strip the old animal and plant gods of their bestial and vegetable husk, and to leave their human attributes (which are always the kernel of the conception) as the final and sole residuum. In other words, animal and plant gods tend to become purely anthropomorphic. When they have become wholly or nearly so, the animals and plants which were at first the deities themselves, still retain a vague and ill-understood connection with the anthropomorphic gods which have been developed out of them. The origin of the relationship between the deity and the animal or plant having been forgotten, various stories are invented to explain it. These explanations may follow one of two lines according as they are based on the habitual or on the exceptional treatment of the sacred animal or plant. The sacred animal was habitually spared, and only exceptionally slain; and accordingly the myth might be devised to explain either why it was spared or why it was killed. Devised for the former purpose, the myth would tell of some service rendered to the deity by the animal; devised for the latter purpose, the myth would tell of some injury inflicted by the animal on the god. The reason given for sacrificing goats to Dionysus is an example of a myth of the latter sort. They were sacrificed to him, it was said, because they injured the vine.^[52] Now the goat, as we have seen, was originally an embodiment of the god himself. But when the god had divested himself of his animal character and had become essentially anthropomorphic, the killing of the goat in his worship came to be regarded no longer as a slaying of the god himself, but as a sacrifice to him; and since some reason had to be assigned why the goat in particular should be sacrificed, it was alleged that this was a punishment inflicted on the goat for injuring the vine, the object of the god’s especial care. Thus we have the strange spectacle of a god sacrificed to himself on the ground that he is his own enemy. And as the god is supposed to partake of the victim offered to him, it follows that, when the victim is the god’s old self, the god eats of his own flesh. Hence the goat-god Dionysus is represented as eating raw goat’s blood;^[53] and the bull-god Dionysus is called “eater of bulls.”^[54] On the analogy of these instances we may conjecture that wherever a god is described as the eater of a particular animal, the animal in question was originally nothing but the god himself.^[55]

All this, however, does not explain why a deity of vegetation should appear in animal form. But the consideration of this point had better be deferred till we have discussed the character and attributes of Demeter. Meantime it remains to point out that in some places, instead of an animal, a human being was torn in pieces at the rites of Dionysus. This was the custom in Chios and Tenedos;^[56] and at Potniae in Boeotia the tradition ran that it had been formerly the custom to sacrifice to the goat-smiting Dionysus a child, for whom a goat was afterwards substituted.^[57] At Orchomenus the human victim was taken from the women of a certain family, called the Oleiae. At the annual festival the priest of Dionysus pursued these women with a drawn sword, and if he overtook one of them he had a right to slay her. This right was exercised as late as Plutarch’s time.^[58] As the slain bull or goat represented the slain god, so, we may suppose, the human victim also represented him. It is possible, however, that a tradition of human sacrifice may sometimes have been a mere misinterpretation of a sacrificial ritual in which an animal victim was treated as a human being. For example, at Tenedos the new-born calf sacrificed to Dionysus was shod in buskins, and the mother cow was tended like a woman in child-bed.^[59]

Kunst, i. No. 299 B); Apollo ὀψοφάγοσ at Elis, Athenaeus, 346 B; Artemis κατροφἀγος in Samos, Hesychius, s.v. κατροφάγος; cp. id., s.v. κριοφάγος Divine titles derived from killing animals are probably to be similarly explained, as Dionysus αἰγόβολος, Pausanias ix. 8, 2; Rhea or Hecate κυνοσφαγής, Tzetzes, Schol. in Lycophr. 77; Apollo λυκοκτόνος, Sophocles, Electra, 6; Apollo σαυροκτόνος, Pliny, Nat. Hist, xxxiv. 70.

1. On Dionysus in general see Preller, Griechische Mythologie,³ i. 544 sqq.; Fr. Lenormant, article “Bacchus” in Daremberg et Saglio, Dictionnaire des Antiquités grecques et romaines, i. 591 sqq.; Voigt and Thraemer’s article “Dionysus,” in Roscher’s Aus führliches Lexikon der griech. und röm. Mythologie, i. c. 1029 sqq.
2. Plutarch, Quaest. Conviv. v. 3, Διονύσῳ δὲ δενδρίτῃ πάντες, ὡς ἔπος εὶπεῖν, Ἕλληνες θύουσιν.
3. Hesychius, s.v. Ἔνδενδρος.
4. See the pictures of his images, taken from ancient vases, in Bötticher, Baumkultus der Hellenen, plates 42, 43, 43 A, 43 B, 44; Daremberg et Saglio, op. cit. i. 361, 626.
5. Daremberg et Saglio, op. cit. i. 626.
6. Cornutus, De natura deorum, 30.
7. Pindar, quoted by Plutarch, Isis et Osiris, 35.
8. Maximus Tyrius, Dissertat. viii. 1.
9. Athenaeus, iii. pp. 78 C, 82 D.
10. Himerius, Orat. i. 10, Διόνυσος γεωργεῖ.
11. Orphica, Hymn l. 4, liii. 8.
12. Aelian, Var. Hist. iii. 41; Hesychuis, s.v. φλέω[ς]. Cp. Plutarch, Quaest. Conviv. v. 8, 3.
13. Pausanias, i. 31, 4; id. vii. 21, 6 (2).
14. Plutarch, Quaest. Conviv. v. 3.
15. Pausanias, ii. 2, 6 (5) sq. Pausanias does not mention the kind of tree: but from Euripides, Bacchae, 1064 sqq., and Philostratus, Imag. i. 17 (18), we may infer that it was a pine; though Theocritus (xxvi. 11) speaks of it as a mastich-tree.
16. Müller-Wieseler, Denkmäler der alten Kunst, ii. pl. xxxii. sqq.; Baumeister, Denkmäler des klassischen Altertums, i. figures 489, 491, 492, 495. Cp. Lenormant in Daremberg et Saglio, i. 623; Lobeck, Aglaophamus, p. 700.
17. Pausanias, i. 31, 6 (3).
18. Athenaeus, iii. p. 78 c.
19. Firmicus Maternus, De errore profanarum religioniini, 6.
20. Clemens Alexandr., Protrept. ii. 17. Cp. Lobeck, Aglaophamus, p. 1111 sqq.
21. Clemens Alexandr., Protrept. ii. 19.
22. Clemens Alexandr. Protrept. ii. 18; Proclus on Plato’s Timaeus, iii. 200 d, quoted by Lobeck, Aglaophamus, p. 562, and by Abel, Orphica, p. 234. Others said that the mangled body was pieced together, not by Apollo but by Rhea. Cornutus, De natura deorum, 30.
23. Lobeck, Aglaophamus, p. S72 sqq. For a conjectural restoration of the temple, based on ancient authorities and an examination of the scanty remains, see an article by Professor J. H. Middleton, in Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. ix. p. 282 sqq.
24. Diodorus, iii. 62.
25. Macrobius, Comment. in Somn. Scip. i, 12, 12; Scriptores rerum mythicarum Latini tres Romae nuper reperti (commonly referred to as Mythographi Vaticani), ed. G. H. Bode (Cellis, 1834), iii. 12, 5, p. 246; Origen, c. Cels. iv. 17 1, quoted by Lobeck, Aglaophamus, p. 713.
26. Himerius, Orat. ix. 4.
27. Proclus, Hymn to Minerva, in Lobeck, Aglaophamus, p. 561 ; Orphica, ed. Abel, p. 235.
28. Hyginus, Fab. 167.
29. The festivals of Dionysus were biennial in many places. See Schömann, Griechische Alterthümer,³ ii. 500 sqq. (The terms for the festival were τριετηρίς, τριετηρικός, both terms of the series being included in the numeration, in accordance with the ancient mode of reckoning.) Probably the festivals were formerly annual and the period was afterwards lengthened, as has happened with other festivals. See W. Mannhardt, Baumkultus, pp. 172, 175, 491, 533 sq., 598. Some of the festivals of Dionysus, however, were annual.
30. Firmicus Maternus, De err. prof. relig. 6.
31. Mythogr. Vatic. ed. Bode, l.c.
32. Plutarch, Consol. ad uxor. 10. Cp. id., Isis et Osiris, 35; id., De ci Delphico, 9; id., De esu carnium, i. 7.
33. Pausanias, ii. 31, 2, and 37, 5; Apollodorus, iii. 5, 3.
34. Pausanias, ii. 37, 5 sq.; Plutarch, Isis et Osiris, 35; id., Quaest Conviv. iv. 6, 2.
35. Himerius, Orat. iii. 6, xiv. 7.
36. For Dionysus, see Lenormant in Daremberg et Saglio, i. 632. For Osiris, see Wilkinson, Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians (London, 1878), iii. 65
37. Plutarch, Isis et Osiris, 35; id.,H; Quaest. Grace. 36; Athenaeus, xi. 476 a; Clemens Alexandr., Protrept. ii. 16; Orphica, Hymn xxx. vv. 3, 4, xlv. 1, lii. 2, liii. 8; Euripides, Bacchae, 99; Schol. on Aristophanes, Frogs, 357; Nicander, Alexipharmaca, 31; Lucian, Bacchus, 2.
38. Euripides, Bacchae, 920 sqq., 1017.
39. Plutarch, Isis et Osiris, 35; Athenaeus, l.c.
40. Diodorus, iii. 64, 2, iv. 4, 2; Cornutus, De natura deorum, 30.
41. Diodorus, l.c.; Tzetzes, Schol. in Lycophr. 209; Philostratus, Imagines, i. 14 (15).
42. Müller-Wieseler, Denkmäler der alten Kunst, ii. pl. xxxiii.; Daremberg et Saglio, i. 619 sq., 631; Roscher, Ausführl. Lexikon, i. c. 1149 sqq.
43. Welcker, Alte Denkmäler, v. taf. 2.
44. Plutarch, Quaest. Graec. 36; id., Isis et Osiris, 35
45. Nonnus, Dionys. vi. 205.
46. Firmicus Maternus, De errore profan. religionum, 6.
47. Euripides, Bacchae, 735 sqq.; Schol. on Aristophanes, Frogs, 357.
48. Hesychius, s.v. Ἔριφος ὁ Διόνυσος, on which there is a marginal gloss ὁ μικρὸς αἴξ, ὁ ἐν τῷ ἔαρι φαινόμενοσ, ἤγουν ὁ πρώϊμος; Stephanos Byzant. s.v. Ἀκρώρεια. The title Εἰραφιώτης is probably to be explained the same way. [Homer], Hymn xxxiv. 2; Porphyry, De abstin. iii. 17; Dionysius, Perieg. 576; Etymolog. Magnum, p. 371, 57.
49. Apollodorus, iii. 4, 3.
50. Ovid, Metam. v. 329; Antoninus Liberalis, 28; Mythogr. Vatic. ed. Bode, i. 86, p. 29.
51. Arnobius, Adv. nationes, v. 19. Cp. Suidas, s.v. αἰγίζειν. As fawns appear to have been also torn in pieces at the rites of Dionysus (Photius, s.v. νεβρίζειν; Harpocration, s.v. νεβρἰζων), it is probable that the fawn was another of the god’s embodiments. But of this there seems no direct evidence. Fawn-skins were worn both by the god and his worshippers (Cornutus, De natura deorum, c. 30). Similarly the female Bacchanals wore goat-skins (Hesychius, s.v. τραγηφόροι).
52. Varro, De re rustica i. 2, 19; Virgil, Georg. ii. 380, and Servius, ad l.;;, and on Aen. iii. 118; Ovid, Fasti, i. 353 sqq; id., Metam. xv. 114 sq.; Cornutus, De natura deorum, 30.
53. Euripides, Bacchae, 138 sq. ἀγρεύων αἷμα τραγοκτόνον, ὠμοφάγον χάριν.
54. Schol. on Aristophanes, Frogs, 357.
55. Hera αἰγοφάγος at Sparta, Pausanias, iii. 15, 9 (cp. the representation of Hera clad in a goat’s skin, with the animal’s head and horns over her head, Müller-Wieseler, Denkmäler der alten
56. Porphyry, De abstin. ii. 55.
57. Pausanias, ix. 8, 2.
58. Plutarch, Quaest. Gracc. 38.
59. Aelian, Nat. An. xii. 34. Cp. W. Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, i. 286 sqq.