The God Of Wine

Cabernet Sauvignon Vista Point, which my local
restaurant sells for $6.5 (half price on Tuesdays).

Here is how it is described:
Vista Point Cabernet Sauvignon from California.
Intense blackberry and currant, a smooth easy
drinking wine for any occasion.

I go to my local restaurant (Moxie's in Mississauga) to read C. S. Lewis' Mere Christianity or Roger Scruton's Beauty. They also have WiFi, so I can take my laptop and work on my projects, either this Reclaiming Beauty weblog, or my own chapters of my book Mere Culture. The 5oz glass of red wine is enough where: "Under [Dionysus, the Wine god's] influence courage was quickened and fear banished, at any rate for the moment...[W]hile it lasted it was like being possessed by a power greater than themselves" as Edith Hamilton writes in Mythology, (the fuller quotation is below).

Below are photos I took recently of Dionysus at the Toronto Royal Ontario Museum:


Dionysos: God of wine
Marble head and torso
Roman copy after Praxitelean work of the 4th Century B.C.
His appearance matches descriptions in classical literature:

"A magical enchanter..., his bond hair smelling of perfume
his cheeks flushed with charms of Aphrodite in his eyes"
Euripedes, Bacchae 192-194

[The above description is from the information plaque beneath the sculpture]
[Photo by Kidist P. Asrat]


Protome of Bearded Dionysus
The wine god is shown here holding an egg and a drinking cup (kantharos).
The handsome face shows stylistic influences of the great Attic sculptor Phidias
[The above description is from the information plaque beneath the object]
[Photo by Kidist P. Asrat]

Phidias, according to Wikipedia was:

Phidias, or The Great Pheidias (c. 480 – 430 BC), was a Greek sculptor, painter and architect, who lived in the 5th century BC, and is commonly regarded as one of the greatest of all sculptors of Classical Greece. Phidias' Statue of Zeus at Olympia was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Phidias designed the statues of the goddess Athena on the Athenian Acropolis, namely the Athena Parthenos inside the Parthenon and the Athena Promachos, a colossal bronze statue of Athena which stood between it and the Propylaea, a monumental gateway that served as the entrance to the Acropolis in Athens. Phidias was the son of Charmides of Athens.

The ROM has no online photo or description of this bearded Dionysus, and the museum's research and Greek department experts were unable to help ("it's Friday," "it's Friday afternoon," told me the telephone responder - as though people don't work on Friday's, especially in museums. Finally he just told me to come over. Until then, I will provide the information above which I hopefully reached correctly through deduction).

According to the great female historian Edith Hamilton, whose book Mythology I've used as a reference for many antiquity-related material, Dionysus was the Greek version of the Roman god Bacchus (actually, that should be the other way around, if we are to follow chronology).

The Greek Dionysus was a much more interesting and imaginatively created god than Bacchus. Hamilton is enchanted by the Greeks, whose fertile imagination she admires much more than the staid Roman personality. The Greek gods were equally imaginative, but often harsh and cruel, both to each other and to their human proteges.

Hamilton writes about Dionysus:

The ideas about Dionysus in these various stories seem at first sight contradictory. In one he is the joy-god -

He whose locks are bound with god,
Ruddy Bacchus,
Comrade of the Maenads, whose
Blithe torch blazes.

In another he is the heartless god, savage, brutal -

He who with a mocking laugh
Hunts his prey,
Snares and drags him to his death
With his Bacchanals.

The truth is, however, that both ideas arose quite simply and reasonably from the fact of his being the god of wine. Wine sib ad as well as good. It cheers and warms men's hearts; it also makes them drunk.The Greeks were a people who saw facts very clearly. They could not shut their eyes to the ugly and degrading side of wine-drinking and see only the delightful side. Dionysus was the God of the Vine; therefore he was a power which sometimes made men commit frightful and atrocious crimes. No one could defend them, no one would ever try to defend the fate Pentheus suffered. But, the Greeks said to each other such things really do happen when people are frenzied with drink. This truth did not blind them to the other truth, that wine aws "the merry-maker," lightening men's hearts, bringing careless ease and fun and gaiety.

The wine of Dionysus,
When the weary cares of men
Leave every heart.
We travel to a land that never was.
The poor grow rich, the rich grow great of heart.
All conquering are the shafts made from the Vines.

The reason that Dionysus was so different at one time from another was because of this double nature of wine and so fo the god of wine. Hewwas man's benefactor and he was man's destroyer.

On his beneficent side he was not only the god that makes men merry. His cup was

Life-giving, healing every ill.

Under his influence courage was quickened and fear banished, at any rate for the moment. He uplifted his worshipers; he made them feel that they could what they had thought they could not. All this happy freedom and confidence passed away, of course, as they either grew sober or got drunk, but while it lasted it was like being possessed by a power greater than themselves. So people felt about Dionysus as about no other god. Hew was not only outside of them, he was within them, too. They could be transformed by him into being like him. The momentary sense of exultant power wine-drinking can give was only a sign to shwo men that they had within them more then they knew;"they wold themselves become divine."

Hamilton then continues a fascinating thesis that Dionysus was the precursor to Christ (which many other scholars have also discussed:

To think in this way was far removed from the old idea of worshiping the god by drinking enough to be gay or to be freed from care or to get drunk. There were followers of Dionysus who never drank wine at all. It is not known when the great change took place, lifting the god who freed them through inspiration, but one very remarkable result of it made Dionysus for all future ages the most important of the gods of Greece.
[...]
The greatest poetry in Greece, and among the greatest in the world, was written for Dionysus. The poets who wrote the plays, the actors and singers who took part in them, were all regarded as servants of the god. The performances were sacred; the spectators, too, along with the writers and the performers,were engaged in an act of worship. Dionysus himself was supposed to be present; his priest had the seat of honor.
[...]
The strange god, the gay reveler, the cruel hunter, the lofty inspirer, was also the sufferer. He, like Demeter, was afflicted, not because of grief for another, as she was, but because of his own pain. He was the vine, which is always pruned as nothing else that bears fruit; every branch cut away, only the bare stock left; through the winter a dead thing to look at an old gnarled sump seeming incapable of ever putting forth leaves again.. Like Persephone Dionysus died with the coming of the cold. Unlike her, his death was terrible: he was torn to pieces, in some stories by the Titans, in others by Hera;s orders. He was always brought back to life; he died and rose again. It was his joyful resurrection they celebrated in his theater, but the idea of terrible deeds done to him and done by men under his influence was too closely associated with him ever to be forgotten. He was more than the suffering god. He was the tragic god. There was none other.

He had still another side. He was the assurance that death does not end all. His worshipers believed that his death and resurrection showed that the soul lives on forever after the body dies. This faith was part of the mysteries of Eleusis. At first it centered in Persephone who also rose from the dead every spring. But as queen of the black underworld she kept even in the bright world above a suggestion of something strange and awful: how could she who carried always about her the reminder of death stand for the resurrection, the conquest of death? Dionysus, on the contrary, was never thought of as a power in the kingdom of the dead. There are many stories about Persephone in the lower world; only one about Dionysus - he rescued his mother from it. In his resurrection he was the embodiment of the life that is stronger than death. He and not Persephone became the center of the belief in immortality.

Around the year 80 A.D., a great Greek writer, Plutarch, received news, when he aw far from home, that a little daughter of his had died - a child of most gentle nature, he says. In his letter to his wife he writes: "About that which you have heard, dear heart, that the soul once departed from the body vanishes and feels nothing, I know that you give no belief to such assertions because of those sacred and faithful promises given in the mysteries of Bacchus which we who are of that religious brotherhood know. We hold it firmly for an undoubted truth that our soul is incorruptible and immortal. We are to think (of the dead) that they pass into a better place and a happier condition. Let us behave ourselves accordingly, outwardly ordering our lives, while within all should be purer, wiser, incorruptible."

Of course, there is also the Eucharist:

Matthew 26, verse. 27-28
And he took the cup, and gave thanks , and gave it to them, saying , Drink ye all of it;
For this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins.

The bottle has a small poppy flower as its motif.



According to this list of epithets, Dionysus is also called "Dionysos of the Poppies."

Of course, the poppy produces a drug which, like alcohol "Under [whose] influence courage was quickened and fear banished, at any rate for the moment...[W]hile it lasted it was like being possessed by a power greater than themselves."

I will conclude with a happy note that some amongst modern folks may have still some understanding of our history and our inheritance, and are able to bring it subtly into the forefront.

A $7/glass of a 2009 Cabernet Sauvignon [pdf file] carefully crafted so that its taste and its appearance has some poetic and cultural significance is something to wonder at.
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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat