Ask Angus
Shellgame: I am very confused about my experiences with Dionysus. It seems most people describe him as a God of 
partying, of losing yourself in total abandon. I’ve also read a few descriptions of him being a God of death and rebirth. My experiences however don’t seem to match most peoples (or at least not the people I’ve talked to and read). Whenever Dionysus has shown up in my life it has been to point out a difficult truth that I didn’t want to acknowledge or to give me a severe kick in the butt to do something I needed to do. He isn’t nice about it either, but usually that’s what I need. Even though he has helped me out so much, he doesn’t seem to want anything from me. All of my offerings have been met with indifference and whenever I ask what he wants of me I am met with silence. All of the other deities I interact with have their preferred offerings and occasionally request specific things, but not him. I’m very confused about all of this. Why doesn’t he want anything in return?
Dear Shellgame, Dionysus is the god of Partying in the same way that St. Patricks Day and Cinco De Mayo are holidays devoted to public drunkenness. Meaning, modern hu-mans have seized upon one aspect of something ancient and sacred, distilled out all of the hard work and sacrifce and redefined the entire experience around the seeming license to drink until you throw up into your hat. We have been looking for every single opportunity to get shit-faced from the very first moment we dropped from the trees and discovered that our hands would be perfect for holding a beer stein. But Dionysus is more multifaceted and in some ways rather brutal. He is so much more than the Lord-of-cheap-karaoke-after-12-tequila-fanny-bangers. But as to the particulars of your dilemma, Shell, I will defer to my friend Jason Mankey, blogger extraordinaire and fellow Pretty Hair Twin, who was nice enough to look over your letter and supply the following wisdom:
Dionysus is a god of contradictions. For every quality we associate with him, there’s another myth out there expressing the opposite of that. Over the last 600 years humanity has attempted to simply Dionysus into a “god of partying” but that’s not really him at all. Sure he likes parties, but he also likes to punish those who take it a bit too far. Dionysus is the god of wine after all, but he’s also the god of hangovers. If you read The Bacchae by Euripides you’ll see a very vengeful, take no prisoners type of god. Those who decline his worship are punished, severely, and driven mad. Dionysus isn’t often nice, and sometimes he’s here simply to kick us in our asses to get us to do what we should be doing. The Greek Gods have been known to reject offerings with frequency, sometimes they just aren’t interested in taking what you offer. Perhaps simply doing what Dionysus wants is good enough. There’s also another thing at play and that’s that Dionysus is just “different” from the other Greek gods. Some of his followers performed sacrifices in his honor by simply eating the raw flesh of animals, no burnt offerings required. In modern times my wife and I’ve found that simply offering the god a toast works as well as an offering. Despite his sometimes fearsome ways I think he does want us to be happy.
Curse the Darkness: What is the proper way to celebrate Yule? I need some ideas, quick!
Dear Curse, You’re asking a pagan what is proper? Aaa-HAHAHAHAHAHAHA…….! Good one. Let’s take a look at the history of our relationship with the Winter Solstice, and I’ll bet you’ll get some ideas from it. If nothing else, just make with the matches, pop open a frosty cold one, (offer some to Dionysus) and read your clan the following:
What is the most enduring symbol of the Holiday Season?
- A Christmas Tree?
- A Menorah?
- A Yule log?
- A Nativity?
- A big Visa bill come January?
None of the above. The oldest and most widespread symbol of Winters festivities is the candle. The lighting of a small fire on the night of your holiday goes back beyond any of these holidays.
Before the Celts, before the Christ, before Saturnalia, before Judiasm, before Isis mourning Osiris, before Santa with a Coca-Cola in his hand, before December, before the Elder and Birch tree months, before any calendar, before sundials – there was the sundown candle. How old is our awareness of the Solstice? “Prehistoric” doesn’t begin to describe it. The earliest physical evidence of our knowledge of a lunar calendar with Solstice and Equinox is a crude graph on a bone found in a cave near Dordogne, France. This bone is from the Cro-Magnon people of the Middle Paleolithic, about 28,000 years ago. But the knowledge must go back much farther than that. The reason Homo Erectus survived at all was because we knew how to accurately seasonally navigate long distances, using celestial navigation and the wheel of the year. (“Yule” is from the Old Norse “Iul”, meaning “Wheel”.) The first calendar then was the two Solstices, the first clock the polar constellations. So the night we know now as Yule is at
least a million years old. Fine: What’s the candle for? I believe that this goes back even further, to our very emergence as a spiritual creature. The Winter Solstice flame was first struck 800,000 years ago with the domestication of fire, but the impetus behind it goes back perhaps two million years to the beginning of the Pleistocene era (where all the porters had looking-glass ties). You may light a candle to herald the emergence of the Oak King from the shadow of the Holly King, but somewhere in the cognitive map (that we all still carry around) you are assuaging our primeval fear that the ever-weakening sun Winter sun will GO OUT. Ridiculous? Sure. We know now that wheels are round………..but at some point we did not. Imagine that. You can, because you were there, wondering how you could help relight the Sun.
On the longest night, when we light the menorah, the yule log, the petitionary votive, or switch on the Christmas tree lights and the moving Santa with the bottle of soda in his hand, we are soothing the fears of the first humans – a distant echo of whom still resounds within us all.So hey; cave people: relax. Have a Coke. The days will get longer from here, and the Sun will rise tomorrow. ……Won’t it? Angus McMahan @AngusMcMahan Send your questions to: angusmcmahan@gmail.com Pics from: Dionysus (Richard Werner) in The Bacchae, directed by Brad Mays, 2000. From Wikipedia Commons. Baby Dion on a dare: mlahanas.de. http://locallocale.wordpress.com/, http://www.ancient-wisdom.co.uk/astronomy.htm, and the Oak Court (that’s my left arm up there!).
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