![]() ![]() As in numerous other tales, Hera, the oft-betrayed wife of the Sky God, discovered the affair after the woman had become pregnant. In it, his mother Semele, who was a mortal woman (daughter of the Phoenician king, Cadmus), catches the eye of the notoriously philandering Zeus. The existence of these two equally well-established creation accounts is perhaps an indication of the difficulty that the early mythographers had incorporating the foreign wine-god into the pantheon. Homer has little to say about him the aristocratic epic poet lacked sympathy for this god of drunkenness and sexual license." BirthĪlong with Athena (who emerged fully formed from her father's skull), Dionysus holds a place of honor for possessing two of the more peculiar origin stories in the mythic corpus of the ancient Greeks. As Powell notes, "the myths of Dionysus must be pieced together from many different sources. Unlike many of the other gods in the Olympian pantheon, tales of the Dionysus are relatively difficult to find-especially when taking the god's near-universal popularity. ![]() In the Roman pantheon, Sabazius became an alternate name for Bacchus. In the Greek pantheon, Dionysus (along with Zeus) absorbs the role of Sabazios, a Phrygian deity, whose name means "shatterer" and to whom shattered pottery was sacrificed (probably to prevent other pottery from being broken during firing). In addition, Dionysus was known as Lyaeus ("he who releases") as a god of relaxation and freedom from worry. ![]() Other, more colorful titles for the god of fertility include the Samian Dionysus Enorches ("with balls" or perhaps "in the testicles" in reference to Zeus' sewing the babe Dionysus into his thigh, i.e., his testicles). Some of these included: Bromios, meaning "the thunderer" or "he of the loud shout" Dendrites (Dionysus Dendrites), "he of the trees," a name which represented him as a powerful fertility god Dithyrambos ("he of the double door"), which refers to him or to the solemn songs sung to him at festivals Eleutherios ("the liberator"), an epithet for both Dionysus and Eros Iacchus, possibly an epithet of Dionysus, which was associated with the Eleusinian Mysteries, as he was known as a son of Zeus and Demeter in Eleusis Liknites ("he of the winnowing fan"), which referred to the god as fertility deity connected with the mystery religions Oeneus, which represented his role as god of the wine-press. The range of epithets attached to the wine god signify the breadth of associations that he possessed within the Hellenic milieu. ![]() Qingdao Beer Museum, Qingdao city, Shandong province, China. Sculpture of Dionysus, commissioned to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Qingdao Beer. Ĭlearly, Dionysus had been with the Greeks and their predecessors a long time, and yet always retained the feel of something alien. A connexion with the legendary Nysa has been suggested another and very ingenious theory is that there existed a word nyso-, akin to the Latin nurus, Greek γυός and that it meant 'child' or 'son'. Concerning the meaning of the name, since Thrako-Phrygian was … fairly akin to Greek, we can say with reasonable confidence that the first member contains the name of the sky-god, who was called in Phrygian Dios. That he is himself a Thracian deity we are abundantly assured but we know that the Thracians and Phrygians were closely allied races, and by good luck we know the Phrygian form of the god's name, Diounsis. In general, the name Dionysus is of uncertain significance it may well be non-Greek in origin, but it has been associated since antiquity with Zeus (genitive Dios) and with Nysa, which is either the nymph who nursed him or the mountain where he was raised. Indeed, Dionysus's name is found on Mycenean Linear B tablets as "DI-WO-NI-SO-JO", and Kerenyi traces him to Minoan Crete, where his Minoan name is unknown but his characteristic presence is recognizable. The variety of mythic and cultic attributes of Dionysus suggest to some that the mythographers were dealing with a god whose foreignness was inherent to his character. He was described as being womanly or "man-womanish". Within the bulk of Greek mythology, Dionysus was described as the son of Zeus and Semele, though some other versions of the story suggested that he is the son of Zeus and Persephone. Dionysus was an important figure in the religious imagination of the Greeks, as he was thought to represent the union between the realms of the living and the dead (as per the two mythic stories of his death and rebirth). ![]()
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