Persephone’s captor: the Father is the son, part 9

In the most ancient written history we have from the Mediterranean, going back to the earliest Bronze Age Linear B tablets, there was Dionysus.

Dionysus was patron of, and intertwined with, many aspects of ancient life: like many facets of ancient thinking, these things are generally given to us as a laundry list of activities. When seen as an aggregate, these lists may or may not make sense to modern people. We need some context to get things into focus.

Mythology and cosmology were the context and source of function for the gods. These things were linked into everyday life through seasonal festivals and natural cycles.

Dionysus was the god of the frenzy, of inspiration, art and theater (in a particular initiatory sense), and the bounty of the harvest. He was the chthonic god, the god of the Underworld, but at that time in our history, the Underworld god was not only the god of the disconsolate, the lost and the damned that we have come to know in modern conceptions of Hell realms. One might dine with the gods in Elysium, a level of the Underworld. Dionysus was not evil, but certainly dangerous, and self-sacrifice, suffering and resurrection are keys to his deeper esoteric meanings.

Dionysus was the Mystery Cult god- this did not mean he was the only god worshipped by these Cults, rather that the stories centered around him as the Life Force itself. All of the things he represented have to do with Natural Cycles and vegetative growth, pharmacology, reproduction, Mediterranean shamanism, and cultism.

We know that psychology was not a concept that existed per se until the 19th century, but the Dionysian cults were performatively exploring individual and group psychology in ways that we would find fascinating, often horrifying and mostly unethical by modern standards.

Often, these cultic rituals were like something out of a modern horror movie. They were intended to bring the initiate through their fear of death.

The god of the Underworld was the embodiment of the Life Force in its subterranean phase. He was responsible for preserving Life itself in the root, pushing up the plants and giving weight and substance to the fruit.

This was a clear metaphor for what the shaman does in the spiritual/ psychological realms.

Anthropologists, and guilty indoctrinated academics in general, will balk at calling anything from the Western World shamanic; they mostly dismiss this type of comparison, but I believe it is beyond question. There is no one-to-one equivalence of shamanism in other parts of the world, no two regions or cultural groups have an exact equivalence to each other in this area.

According to the Orphic Hymns, Dionysus ruled the year between the Autumn Equinox and the Spring Equinox, the time when Life descends into the earth and acts underground, then prepares to come back up. Apollo ruled the year from the Spring Equinox until the Autumn Equinox, the time when the Life Force is extroverted.

Traditional Astrology gives the Sun rulership of half the year from the Winter Solstice until the Summer Solstice, and the Moon rulership of the other half. Clearly, this type of Dionysian thinking was the source of the astrological systems we have inherited.

It is uncertain exactly when and how Dionysus and Hades became two distinct faces representing the Underworld, or if perhaps one or the other was adopted from the regional cults. Dionysus seems to be the older of the two, and his story is distinctly different.

Dionysus may have come from Thrace, the Balkan area.

Having multiple gods with similar or overlapping areas of patronage or power was not really a problem for many ancient people, because they were interested in compelling cosmological stories that worked on multiple levels, and the function of the archetype in the stories.

Dionysus was associated with the dying and rising (resurrecting) “nature god” persona with direct connection to grapes and plant growth in general, and was associated with the baby Zagreus, and with youth. Later Roman readings of these mythic materials moved Dionysus toward being a god of sex, wine and revelry, and less the Underworld god like Hades, though he certainly retained a shamanic, prophetic and orgiastic focus. Hades was much more of a mature, chthonic Zeus with strong links to wealth and power.

Hades seems to be the “Establishment” Underworld, and Dionysus is the “Social Justice” Underworld. As we can see in our current day and age, these things tend to fuse into One quite seamlessly.

Heraclitus maintained that Dionysus and Hades were in fact one god. The Orphics claimed that Apollo, Hades and Dionysus were all faces of Zeus, a trinity or composite god named Iao, “ya-oh”, or Yahoo- likely the origins of Yahweh. The Orphic hymns, in separate places, hold that both Hades and Zeus fathered Zagreus, the infant face of Dionysus, by Persephone.

The baby Dionysus was in a unique category in the mythology, apart from the other gods: he was said to be the one and only inheritor of Zeus’ kingdom of Heaven, unlike all of the other children sired by the great Sky God. The Cults of Dionysus may have been unique in their often rebellious social justice ideology which often led them into conflict with society and the state.

Dionysus was very much a precursor to the baby Jesus. Their stories are so similar that initiates of any Mystery Cult in the Bacchic traditions would have definitely recognized Jesus as the Baby Dionysus or Zagreus.

The baby Zagreus was twice born, once by Persephone, but upon his birth he was ripped apart by Titans at the behest of Hera, Zeus’ jealous wife; angered at Hera’s actions, Zeus destroyed the Titans and had the heart of the baby Zagreus sewn into his thigh, where the baby gestated, and thence was born again.

The birth of Zagreus to a woman, only to be torn to shreds, and then re-birthed by a male deity gives us a template for the Christian resurrection story, a rebirth into the Kingdom of Heaven. In contrast to the mythology of Saturn castrating Uranus at the behest of Gaia, where the male Sky God is ultimately defeated through the machinations of the Goddess with her devoted son, this myth tells us that Hera is the destructive force, and we (like Dionysus) can be saved through this rebirth into a masculine world (presumed to be Apollonian… but this is not really the case).

We can interpret this to tell us that humanity will be torn to shreds at the hands of the “lower” or Titanic forces (the feminine realm) and can be saved through initiation, and re-birthed into this “pure” yet potentially pederastic world of the Sky God.

The hidden unity of the chthonic male gods with the Sky God shows the early creep toward the Christian monism happening in this Bacchic context. It also makes sense when we remember the central role of Persephone in this cosmological story.

Persephone was a mortal woman who bore a Divine Child, according to myth, and became the Queen of the Underworld- and yet maintained her life in the Upper World with her Mother, the goddess Demeter, for half, or 2/3 of the year. There really is no difference between Demeter and Persephone, in the myths the gods are transpersonal, just as the Chthonic God and the Sky God are faces of the same deity.

She was abducted so that the Father God could be born into the Underworld- in this case, the metaphor is relative.

The earthly world is an Underworld, relative to the realm of the gods. This idea which we have come to know as Gnostic, which tells our imprisonment in a Hell Realm- this was a belief held in the Mystery Cults of Dionysus long before Christians or proto-Christians adopted these ideas.

Platonists were speaking of breaking out of this realm, the allegory of the cave was one example; this was a radical break from earth-based, clan-based bloodline ideas dominant in Indo-European societies. The more traditional cosmologies held this realm to be cyclical, we are eternally reborn here in the same family or clan, and it is our responsibility to create honor and glory for the clan. We cannot, nor do we want to, break free of our duty to our bloodline.

Cults can be family-based or clan-based, but they can also break down the role of the clan in society. Formal schools of philosophy or orgiastic cults with initiation rites, like secret societies, can emphasize the ideals or religious faith over the clan,

By the time of the first Christian cults, it’s clear that the cult was not concerned with blood for its membership.