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The God of Ecstasy Through the Ages

The long, strange life of Dionysus

Aug 27, 2023

Man, religion used to be pretty different from what it is today. Nowadays, we associate faith with a certain seriousness. Religion is supposed to be morally strict, buttoned down, elevated. But this hasn’t always been the way people have worshipped the divine.

There’s no better example of how different some ancient religions used to be than the worship of Dionysus (aka Bacchus). He wasn’t a god of self-control or morality; instead, he was the patron of freedom, fun, and ecstasy. His worshippers engaged in wild festivals of drinking and sex. He represented the undermining of rules and authority, an invitation to abandon the strictures of ordinary life and let loose.

Worship of Dionysus emerged in Greece, an outgrowth of that civilization’s embrace of wildness. Those initiated into his mysteries experienced — with the help of wine and, perhaps, other drugs —possession by the god, complete with ecstatic dancing, singing, and a trance state. Peter Hoyle described the spectacle like this:

Following the torches as they dipped and swayed in the darkness, they climbed mountain paths with head thrown back and eyes glazed, dancing to the beat of the drum which stirred their blood’ [or ‘staggered drunkenly with what was known as the Dionysus gait’]. ‘In this state of ekstasis or enthusiasmos, they abandoned themselves, dancing wildly and shouting ‘Euoi!’ [the god’s name] and at that moment of intense rapture became identified with the god himself. They became filled with his spirit and acquired divine powers.

Here’s an early Greek depiction of Dionysus, holding a cup of wine:

Sometimes, Dionysus was portrayed as being younger and more clean-shaven:

The god’s cult spread far and wide as Alexander the Great’s armies sprinkled Greek culture all over Western Asia. Depictions of Dionysus, including this intimidating head, which dates to the 300s or 400s, have been found as far away as modern Pakistan, the far eastern edge of Greek influence. I love this one — the god seems to peer right through you.

Dionysus eventually made his way to Rome, where he was widely worshipped despite the fact that the wildness of the Bacchic mysteries was a little less compatible with Roman culture. Roman authors like Livy sneered at the god’s rituals, and the Roman Senate, distrustful of the god’s cult, took control of the worship of Dionysus by issuing a famous decree:

No one… is to possess a place where the festivals of Bacchus are celebrated; if there are any who claim that it is necessary for them to have such a place, they are to come to Rome to the praetor urbanus, and the senate is to decide on those matters…
No man is to be a priest; no one, either man or woman, is to be an officer (to manage the temporal affairs of the organization); nor is anyone of them to have charge of a common treasury; no one shall appoint either man or woman to be master or to act as master; henceforth they shall not form conspiracies among themselves, stir up any disorder, make mutual promises or agreements, or interchange pledges…
No one in a company of more than five persons altogether, men and women, shall observe the sacred rites, nor in that company shall there be present more than two men or three women, unless in accordance with the opinion of the praetor urbanus and the senate as written above.

The Roman Senate’s decree, 186 BCE (public domain)

Despite tighter government control, worship of Dionysus flourished during the Roman period. The god, usually heavily bearded, showed up on all sorts of objects, from cups:

And on plaques that people would hang outside their homes:

It’s hard to think of a god more incompatible with Christianity than Dionysus. So you’d expect that, as Christianity filtered through the Roman Empire, eventually becoming the only legal religion, the cult of a god of excess and ecstasy would fall into disfavor. You’d think that Dionysus would disappear from the historical record. But he didn’t. The god of wine and revelry had a long and interesting afterlife.

We still see a lot of Dionysus, especially in Egypt, long after the emperor Theodosius had made Christianity the official state religion of Rome in 380. In the 400s, 500s, and 600s, Egyptians were still producing textiles like this, which shows Dionysus, holding a bunch of grapes aloft, with a satyr and maenads (his female revelers):

Here’s another, showing the god’s worshippers frolicking:

This one shows figures from the Dionysian myths — his tutor, Silenius, Pan, and some of his female worshipers:

One of the most common themes was the supposed conquest of India by Dionysus (in an echo of Alexander’s empire). In this Byzantine vessel from the 500s, we see him in a chariot defeating his opposition:

We can see a bit of Dionysus’ longevity in the amount of work that the church did to squash his cult. In 692, a church council held in Constantinople decreed:

Moreover we drive away from the life of Christians the dances given in the names of those falsely called gods by the Greeks whether of men or women, and which are performed after an ancient and un-Christian fashion; decreeing that no man from this time forth shall be dressed as a woman, nor any woman in the garb suitable to men. Nor shall he assume comic, satyric, or tragic masks; nor may men invoke the name of the execrable Bacchus when they squeeze out the wine in the presses; nor when pouring out wine into jars [to cause a laugh ], practising in ignorance and vanity the things which proceed from the deceit of insanity. Therefore those who in the future attempt any of these things which are written, having obtained a knowledge of them, if they be clerics we order them to be deposed, and if laymen to be cut off.

In the 1300s, the Scottish Lanercost Chronicle recorded more medieval Dionysus worship:

About this time, in Easter week, the parish priest of Inverkeithing, named John, revived the profane rites of Priapus, collecting young girls from the villages, and compelling them to dance in circles to [the honour of] Father Bacchus. When he had these females in a troop, out of sheer wantonness, he led the dance, carrying in front on a pole a representation of the human organs of reproduction, and singing and dancing himself like a mime, he viewed them all and stirred them to lust by filthy language.

Clearly, the god of wine wasn’t dead yet.

Despite the best efforts of the church, Dionysus never really went away. Though outright worship of him dwindled over the years, he became a favorite subject of art during the Renaissance and kept showing up over the next few centuries. Artists loved him because he represented beauty and pleasure, which often seemed to simultaneously attract and repulse them.

Many Renaissance artists showed the god as a youthful, somewhat effeminate beauty. Michelangelo sculpted the god deep in his cups, a louche, tipsy young man:

Caravaggio, likewise, shows the god as a seductive, debauched youth, straddling the line between sweetness and rottenness (the fruit in the bowl in front of him is going bad):

Rubens, however, depicted him quite a bit older and fleshier:

As time went on, tamer versions of the god emerged. This British punch pot, dating from the mid-1700s, is a little less worried about the immorality of the god; it pictures Bacchus as a jolly little guy:

Dionysus, like all gods, represents something powerful. But unlike a sun god or a rain god, he’s not representative of something external to us. Instead, he represents the wildness within us, our need to transcend ourselves.

The British owner of that cute little punch pot may not have thought a lot about it, but they were participating in a tradition over two millennia old. The Dionysian rituals of ancient Greece were long gone, along with their ecstatic dancing and secret rituals. But the god himself remained despite the fact that he stood against almost everything that Christian Europe stood for. The fact that Dionysus endured for so long shows that may have an inherent need to celebrate our inner wildness.