A recommended reading list for getting started with Dionysos

Although there are countless handbooks on Greek mythology (many of which devote at least a single chapter to Dionysos, and often more) I would advise against these. To begin with, they tend to lump the accounts together, ignoring or watering down their contradictions, and in the process often lose the important elements in the story. Secondly, they are often poorly written, providing little more than a skeleton account, lacking the charm, poetry, and  power of the originals. Thirdly, many of these handbooks are full of errors and can give you a wrong impression about the myths. Case in point, Robert Graves frequently pulled myths out of his own head and tried to pawn them off on the ancients. (The story of Hestia giving up her seat for Dionysos is the most conspicuous example of this, but there are numerous others.) When he bothered to cite sources for some of his neo-myths (which he often didn’t do, simply stating ‘the ancients said …’) those works often do not support his assertions, and sometimes were made up whole-cloth along with his myths. And sometimes an author can accurately cite a source but twist it’s meaning so much that it ends up saying something completely different from what the original author intended. (Barbara Walker is especially guilty of this sort of revisionism.) Therefore I think it’s far better to go to the sources yourself and draw your own conclusions about the material.

The most important sources for ancient Dionysian mythology are:

Euripides’ Bacchae
Nonnos’ Dionysiaca
The Homeric Hymns
The Orphic Hymns
Hesiod’s Theogony
Apollodorus’ Library
Ovid’s Metamorphoses
Plutarch’s Moralia (Especially On Isis and Osiris, Table Talks, the Pythian Dialogues, and the Greek and Roman Questions though there are numerous references spread throughout almost all of his works)
Athenaeus’ Deipnosophistae
Pausanias’ Guide to Greece

There are, of course, many other valuable sources which could be added to this list (especially many of the poets, and some of the Christian apologists who provide important details only touched upon by other authors, albeit with their own hostile spin) but this should be more than sufficient to provide a working knowledge of Dionysos’ mythology. All of these should be readily available in popular English translations (Loeb, Penguin, and Everyman being the most easily obtainable) especially Euripides, whose play on the confrontation between Dionysos and Pentheus has been a perenial favorite with translators, scholars, and audiences down through the ages, and thus has produced an over-abundance of versions. Try a couple out and see which flows best for you.

If you don’t feel like spending a fortune to build up your own personal library, or spending hours searching through the dusty shelves of your public library, you can always look to the internet, where many, if not most of these volumes can be found. Some excellent resources for ancient Greek literature are:

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/
http://www.users.drew.edu/~jlenz/authors.html
http://www.fordham.edu/HALSALL/ANCIENT/asbook07.html

And a very handy collection of Dionysian quotations can be found on Aaron Atsma’s Theoi.com website.

Moving beyond mythology, we next turn to ancient cult practice and the history of his worship, which reveals a great deal about how Dionysos was conceived of in antiquity and how men and women related to him through ritual.

Writing about Dionysos has become sort of a cottage industry among academics and historians of religion, and consequently one may find there to be too many volumes to possibly wade through. Especially when many of them treat obscure aspects of his cult and history, arguing about things only an author of a doctoral thesis could possibly care about. It seems every couple years someone comes out with a revolutionary theory that challenges everything we know about Dionysos and how he was worshipped – only to have their theories dissected, debated, and often discarded by their contemporaries. While it can be exciting and enlightening to keep abreast of these developments, in the end I often think they are much ado about nothing, and think it best not to leap onto every new fad that passes through academia, preferring instead to wait and see if it receives general acceptance in the scholarly community and has some genuine relevance to my understanding of the god and my attempts to create a valid form of worship rooted in the ancient ethos before I accept them.

What follows, then, is a list of titles which I think are especially relevant for an understanding of Dionysos’ historical and cultic background. This list is by no means meant to be considered an exhaustive bibliography, nor do I think it necessary to have read every single one of them. Many cover the same ground as their predecessors, providing only minimal new insight. And yet all of them have some value – or else I wouldn’t have recommended them!

The two most important volumes to get are Carl Kerenyi’s Dionysos: Archetype of Indesctructable Life and Walter Otto’s Dionysus: Myth and Cult. I cannot recommend these books highly enough! In addition to providing an overview of what’s known about the god’s history, mythology, and cultus these two provide poetic and profound insight into his very nature, and treat him, not just as an interesting antique specimen, but as a living, breathing, powerful divinity. In particular, Otto is my favorite, and practically serves as my Bible. I go back each year and read this book cover to cover, and it never fails that I find some new piece of the puzzle, some glimpse of Dionysos that I’d failed to apprehend previously. Although every page surges with his spirit, I find Otto’s chapters Pandemonium and Silence, The Somber Madness, and Dionysus and the Women to be truly prophetic. Similarly, Kerenyi’s treatment of the Dionysian cult in Southern Italy deserves special attention since there is so much that is beautiful, powerful, and profound packed densely into those handful of pages that it’s easy to miss out on it. I know that I did the first couple times I read him.

Other important works include:

• The Bibliotheca Alexandrina edited Written in Wine
• Thomas Carpenter and Christopher Faraone’s Masks of Dionysus
• Marcel Detienne’s Dionysos at Large and Dionysos Slain
• Xavier Riu’s Dionysism and Comedy
• Andrew Dalby’s Bacchus: A Biography
• Arthur Evans’ The God of Ecstasy: Sex Roles and the Madness of Dionysos
• Jane Ellen Harrison’s Prolegomenna to the Study of Greek Religion
• Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy

Now, the last two are not without their problems. Much of Harrison’s conclusions have been discarded by subsequent scholars (especially those which rely heavily on Fraser’s ‘dying and resurrecting god’ model) and at times she’s a little overzealous to find connections where they do not actually exist. But her work is seminally important in the history of ancient Greek scholarship (she was one of the first women in the field and subsequently inspired many individuals including the Dionysian poet James Douglas Morrison) and aside from that, her work is an interesting Dionysian document in its own right. Originally she had intended it just to be study on Keres or the spirits of the dead, and about half-way through found that it had taken on a life of its own, becoming a treatise on Dionysian worship, a fact she bewilderingly confessed to one of her coleagues in a personal letter quoted in the introduction to the present edition.

Nietzsche’s work, which explores the creative impulse through the medium of ancient Greek tragedy is fascinating and highly poetic (especially the passage on Dionysian epiphany which reads like a prose hymn to the god) and has had great influence in philosophy ever since. His theory about tragedy’s origins, however, are generally no longer accepted by academia, and many have argued that he makes too much of the polarity between the Dionysian and the Apollonian, although these are important concepts that passed into the philosophical vernacular. Despite these caveats, Nietzsche deserves a place in Dionysian literature because of the degree to which he identified with the god, going so far as to sign his letters ‘Dionysos Zagreus’ in his declining years in a sanitarium where he suffered from insanity and other complications from syphilis which he had contracted in his youth.

While not specifically Dionysos-related, there are several sourcebooks which contain important information on Dionysos’ cult in antiquity, being collections of literary, epigraphical, and monumental evidence. The best of these are:

• Marvin W. Meyer’s The Ancient Mysteries
• David G. Rice’s Sources for the Study of Greek Religion
• Frederick C. Grant’s Hellenistic Religions
• Ross Shepard Kraemer’s Women’s Religions in the Greco-Roman World

There are a couple other books that I would recommend, but with the caveat that these are fictional, and thus do not necessarily portray a proper historical conception of the god. Needless to say, however, they have a power and provide a unique insight which the other sources might miss. Noteworthy portrayals of Dionysos in fiction include:  

• Percival Everett’s Frenzy
• Donna Tart’s Secret History
• Betley Little’s Dominion
• Frank Palescandolo’s Phallos Dionysos

In addition to these excellent works on Dionysos, another valuable resource for gaining a better understanding of the god is to speak with those who already know and worship him. We are lucky to live in an age of widespread and instant communication, since chances are there isn’t going to be a large Dionysian community directly where you live. There are a small handful of online groups devoted to discussions about the god, of which the best are:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ThiasosLusios/

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cultofdionysos/

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dionysos-l/

Members of these groups have produced some truly excellent websites, among which my favorites are:

http://neosalexandria.org/dionysos.htm

http://www.hermeticfellowship.org/Dionysion/

http://home.earthlink.net/~delia5/pagan/dio/index.htm

http://www.baubo5.com/dionysos.html

Most of these sites contain contact information, or their authors can be found on the lists already mentioned. Feel free to ask these people questions. All of them are pleasant, intelligent, and deeply devoted individuals who would be most eager to help you out and answer whatever questions you might have, no matter how simple or silly they might seem to you. Chances are we’ve heard the questions a dozen times already – or asked them ourselves when we were first starting out.

Additionally, community plays an important role in Dionysian worship. He is a god of the throng, and is always depicted surrounded by companions, both mortal and divine. His ecstacy is contagious, spreading among a mass of people, who serve to enhance and infect each other, building to ever greater states of bliss and connection together. Many of the things that come out during contacts with Dionysos can be difficult and painful, and it is good to have others to turn to to help you deal with this, and to put those strange experiences into context. While it’s certainly possible to worship the god on your own – and indeed the most intense moments of contact will be experienced as individual communion no matter if it takes place amid a group of revelers – it doesn’t hurt to have that support group in place, and for many of us the only community of fellow-worshippers we have is to be found online.

But one must never forget that Dionysos is a personal god, and the journey you are taking with him is an individual one. While it is important to know what others have said about him, and how others experience him, the most important thing is how you, personally, relate to him. You aren’t going to find that in any book or website, or in any way other than communing directly with the god. As the philosopher Aristotle so wisely observed, “It isn’t learning that makes an initiate, but experience and entering into a proper state of mind.” (Fragment preserved in Synesius’ Dio 10)