BY TORSTEN SCHWANKE
Bacchus‘ Childhood.
Fleeing from Hera's jealousy, Bacchus grows up far away from his hometown Thebes.
At first Hermes takes the Bacchus-child to Boetia.
When Hera finds Bacchus there, he goes even further east - far into Asia - to Nysa.
Hera gives no rest and so Zeus has to let his little son grow up far away from Olympus.
Many poets tell their own stories about the place where Bacchus spent his childhood, his nurses and childhood games.
One of the stories is set in Boetia - its main heroes, besides little Bacchus, are his mother's sister - Ino.
Bacchus in Boeotia with Ino
In order to protect his son Bacchus from the revenge of Hera, Zeus gives his little son to Hermes and has him raised in Boeotia by Ino, the second wife of the king Athamas who rules there.
For the same reason, Zeus had little Bacchus disguised as a girl.
But Hera tracks down little Bacchus and takes revenge on Ino.
First Ino, then Athamas too, fall into madness. Bacchus is now no longer safe with Ino, his mother's sister, and is taken by Hermes to Nysa - south of Lake Aral - far to the east.
Athamas, however, kills one of his sons in madness.
Fleeing from her enraged husband, Ino kills herself by jumping into the sea with her other son.
Bacchus in Nysa near Rhea
In Nysa, another childhood story of the young Bacchus begins.
Here, too, Bacchus is raised and protected by women.
Rhea, his grandmother, as mother of Zeus, is named as his nurse. She loved the little Bacchus.
In her care Bacchus grew up and was instructed in all the important arts.
Bacchus and Silenos
But there is also a story according to which it is Silenos - a son of Hermes or Pan with a nymph - who educates Bacchus in Nysa.
Silenos will then also accompany the grown-up Bacchus on all his journeys.
Together with his friend Ampelos, a well-grown juvenile satyr, Bacchus grows up in Nysa among wild animals, especially leopards, lions and tigers.
Leopards in particular are considered the epitome of strong male sexuality and drives.
Ampelos, as Bacchus grows out of childhood, becomes his lover.
Thus Bacchus becomes familiar not only with wild animals at an early age, but also with his own passions and drives.
Bacchus and Kantharos
Ampelos and Bacchus discover the secret of the vine here in Nysa. They feed on the tasty grapes. And finally one day they discover that a fragrant juice begins to flow from the remains of the grapes.
The lover of Bacchus, Ampelos finally has an unfortunate accident when he tries to ride a particularly beautiful bull.
This too, some poets tell us, was the work of Hera. She had sent Bacchus and his lover a particularly beautiful and tame bull.
Ampelos, full of joy wants to ride it, but Hera has sent not only the bull but also a cow to Nysa.
The cow makes the previously tame bull furious and throws his rider off. Ampelos breaks his neck.
In Nysa, Bacchus becomes the lord of the beasts and of irresistible passion and intoxication.
The young god will need both on his soon to begin mission.
Bacchus Zagreus with Persephone
Immortality through ecstasy - not for the gods. They were thought to be immortal anyway - qua divinity, so to speak.
Immortality - for the people. That is what the orgiastic festivals of Bacchus are about.
To be able to show people this, he himself costs death. And madness.
The other Greek gods are immortal gods. They only know death as something that happens to people. Only from a distance as a rule.
They stay away from humans. They themselves are not touched by the prospect of having to die.
The god Bacchus is different.
The god of ecstasy is a god who knows death. Dying and being raised again. Bacchus is closer and more similar to humans than other gods. The god Dionsysus knows what it means to die.
Thus, it is precisely this god who is understood by people as the god who knows the secret of life.
To die and to be raised again. This is how the life of the god Bacchus begins.
Bacchus, he is twice the son of Zeus. As Zagreus the son of Persephone and Zeus, as Bacchus the son of Semele and Zeus:
Bacchus Zagreus, son of Persephone.
Zeus approaches the goddess Persephone as a serpent and begets with her the son Zagreus.
Zagreus had the gift of transforming into any animal at any time.
Zeus tries to hide his son from the jealous Hera in a cave. In vain.
Hera instructs the Titans to track down the still childlike Zagreus and kill him.
The Titans use a ruse. They lure him out of his cave. First they promise him apples, then the gift of understanding animal sounds.
Zagreus is not impressed by this. But the third promise: A mirror, makes him curious.
He forgets his caution and lets himself be lured out of the cave. The lurking Titans pounce on him and tear him into seven pieces.
The god Bacchus, son of Semele
What happened to the dead Zagreus is told in many variations. All stories show very clearly that Zeus fights for his son Zagreus Bacchus with all means.
Zeus punishes the Titans by destroying them with lightning.
From the ashes of Zagreus and the Titans the human race was born, is the version of the Orphics.
Another: The god Zeus has the seven parts of Zagreus buried in Delphi and celebrates the annual resurrection there.
Another: the first vine grows from the ashes of Zagreus.
In the best-known version, Zagreus is reborn as Bacchus. Zeus proceeds very purposefully and is assisted by his daughter Athena.
She, Athena, saves the heart of Zagreus. The heart (or the phallus) is eaten by his father Zeus.
Then he looks for a wife with whom he can beget his son Bacchus Zagreus anew. Zeus chooses the beautiful daughter of the king, Semele, for this purpose.
Zeus falls in love with the beautiful Semele and begets Bacchus with her, as the reborn, resurrected Zagreus.
Semele burns, struck by lightning, and dies - the child Bacchus still in her womb.
Rhea, the mother of Zeus and grandmother of the still unborn Bacchus, throws ivy on the burning Semele. She cannot save Semele with it, but she can save the child in her womb.
And again Zeus has to get creative. He sews the still unborn Bacchus into his thigh and three months later gives birth to him himself.
The god Bacchus
Bacchus is worshipped today above all as the god of wine, intoxication and drunkenness.
Drunkenness, however, is not quite right.
In the cult of Bacchus, intoxication was a means of connecting with the god Bacchus. It was precisely the opposite of regular alcohol consumption becoming a habit.
Moreover, as for this difference between ancient cults and what has become of them: Bacchus himself had an amethyst that protected him from drunkenness.
Bacchus is the god of intoxication and ecstasy - but he is not a drunken wine-soaked raptor.
Bacchus is a god who not only stands for ecstasy and enthusiasm - he was and is enthusiastically worshipped by his followers.
Individual passages in Homer also point to the orgiastic cult of the god Bacchus - ecstasy, enthusiasm and divine madness are mentioned as characteristic.
And Nietzsche sang about Bacchus in poems - the Bacchus Dithyrambs - one of them:
The Lament of Ariadne
Bacchus:
Be wise, Ariadne!...
You have little ears, you have my ears:
Put a wise word in them! -
Don't you have to hate yourself
Before you can love yourself?...
I am your labyrinth...
The Thracians in the centre of Greece are named as the origin of the cult of Bacchus, as the starting point from which it spread throughout ancient Greece.
At that time Bacchus was still in the form of a bull.
The ancient Greek god Bacchus was also known by other names: Bassareus, Gigon, Dyalos, Sabos, Bakchos, Iakchos, Bacchus, but also Sabazios.
The wine of the festivals of the god Bacchus in Thrace served - in combination with other intoxicating drinks and fruits as a means to a certain end. The aim of intoxication was to reach a state in which man felt equal to the gods.
The Thracian steps completely out of his everyday condition, becomes a completely different person, and the whole world appears different from the ordinary day.
In Delphi, Bacchus was conceived as a dead god who had to be brought back to life every two years by the Thyiads.
The god Bacchus became the god of intoxicating wine and the resulting pleasures, especially in Attica, after the Icarian cult of Bacchus as the god of wine had established itself there.
One historical interpretation goes from a vase with the image of the god Bacchus standing in a ship's cart (carrus navalis) to the carnival processions of the present day and the Italian word carnevale derived from this.
The Icarian Bacchus festivals were accompanied by mummery, especially in the countryside.
Other legends tell of heroes or people who were friendly to the god Bacchus and were therefore given the gift of the vine by him.
Bacchus has a long way to go before he, the son of Zeus, is recognised as a god in Greece.
Hardly grown up, Hera beats him with madness. Back in Greece, he has to deal with his former family.
Pentheus, the new king in Thebes, son of his mother Semele's sister, insists that Bacchus was killed in the womb of his burning mother. To acknowledge him as a god, Pentheus refuses.
Madness by Hera and healing by Cybele
Aged up, Bacchus returns to Greece. But even now Hera's anger against him is still not appeased. She strikes Bacchus with madness, so that he wanders for years through various countries in Africa and Asia.
No details are known about his wanderings in madness, but it is quite possible that it was only on these journeys that the leopards that later became typical of him became his companions.
Finally, Bacchus arrives at the holy place, Mount Ida on Crete.
The goddess of Mount Ida, Cybele, cures Bacchus of his madness and initiates him into her cult.
Now Bacchus has grown up, cured of madness, which he can henceforth also cause in other people: Mania is the name given to this madness, with which Bacchus punishes people who resist or deny him.
There were no other nascent gods like Bacchus in Greece. Nor was there a god who went mad. And certainly not one who dies and is raised again.
Presumably - the myths surrounding Bacchus show that a counter-movement to the dominant deity is in order. Gods who do not simply play their game with people, but who dedicate their lives to freeing people from their narrow bonds through ecstasy.
Bacchus and King Pentheus
The triumphal procession of Bacchus through the cities of Greece begins. The hometown of Bacchus, Thebes, is where the action of Euripides' tragedy "The Bacchae" begins.
To begin with, Euripides' Bacchae is the first tragedy known to us in which a god appears as a person.
The following is narrated: Bacchus returns with his entourage to the city of Thebes, his birthplace, disguised as an itinerant preacher. In the meantime, it is no longer Kadmos, Semele's father, who rules there, but his grandson Pentheus.
Pentheus is about to put an end to the rampant cult of Bacchus. He has the strange itinerant preacher searched for and paints a picture of Bacchus as a madman gone wild. He refuses to acknowledge him as a god - the Son of Zeus.
Everyone knows that Zeus was only given as the father of his sister's dead child in order to cover up his sister's jealousy. Besides, the child had been burnt in its mother's womb.
Pentheus has the itinerant preacher caught, confronts him and finally throws him into the deepest dungeon of his palace.
But while Pentheus is still in dialogue with his grandfather Kadmos and the blind seer Theresias, who admonish him to acknowledge the new god, the wall of the dungeon collapses and Bacchus stands before him again.
Pentheus still refuses to acknowledge Bacchus as a god. But he allows himself to be persuaded by Bacchus - the supposed itinerant preacher - to come with him to the nearby mountain where Bacchus' secret orgies take place.
To do this, however, Pentheus must disguise himself as a woman. Only women - the Bacchae (the Maenads) - are admitted to the orgies.
With the help of Bacchus, Pentheus climbs to the top of a pine tree near the place of worship to observe the events. Then the itinerant preacher disappears and a voice (that of Bacchus) sounds from a distance, alerting the dancing women to the unwanted spectator.
The women - one of them Pentheus' mother - surround the fir tree and uproot it. Pentheus, in his distress, reveals himself to his mother. But in her intoxication she is under the delusion that the whimpering something in front of her is nothing other than a small lion. She and the other women tear Pentheus apart - believing they are tearing a young animal.
When Pentheus' mother finally - returned to Thebes - awakens from her delusion and realises that she has torn her own son apart, she falls into despair. Nevertheless, she is sentenced to exile - by Bacchus himself - and must leave Thebes.
In Argos, where Bacchus subsequently went, the young god proved his power in a similar way. He makes the daughters of King Proitos fall into mania so that they devour their own children.
Bacchus and the pirates
Now that Bacchus is also recognised as a god in Greece, taking the place of Hestia in Olympus, his first "official act" will be his own wedding - to Ariadne.
Whether he already had Ariadne in mind as his future wife, I have not been able to find anything about that so far. After all, there is the intervention of Athena, who persuades Theseus to leave his bride Ariadne on Naxos.
Assuming that Bacchus was already on his way to Naxos at that time, Athena's intervention would already be an indication that Ariadne had already been chosen by the gods as the wife of the youngest god of the Greeks.
In any case, Bacchus embarked in Ikaria for Naxos, not knowing that the crew of the ship consisted of pirates.
They did not recognise the god. They tied him up and wanted to sell him as a slave in Italy or Asia.
But Bacchus knew how to defend himself this time too. The shackles loosened of their own accord and the ship was brought to a standstill by ivy and vines that entwined themselves around the mast and the sails.
Not only that, Bacchus also produced hallucinations of his wild animals. Frightened, the pirates all threw themselves into the sea and became dolphins.
God Bacchus crosses the sea
As the god of ecstasy, Bacchus is closer to people than any other god.
More earthly, mysterious, unpredictable, ecstatic, sensual, corporeal.
According to myth, the Greek god Bacchus was surrounded by maenads who followed the god of ecstasy in wild revelry and exuberant lust. They were his constant companions.
Evil calamity struck those people who got in the way of the ecstatic god.
But many people followed him and danced with him - the wild dance of life itself.
Ecstasy and enthusiasm
The Maenads, his companions, have a special meaning: Greek has developed two terms for their intoxicating, lustful activity that are familiar to us: Ecstasy and enthusiasm. Ecstasy and enthusiasm are closely connected. But they are not identical.
Ecstasy means something like: To step out of oneself: Ex-stasis. In the cult of Bacchus it becomes clear that only ex-stasis and ecstasy can lead to a person opening up to divine powers. Experiencing oneself as half-divine is the greatest happiness a person can experience: Enthusiasm, unimaginable joy, God-filledness.
One can also say that the maenads dancing in wild lust are not themselves racing, but are filled with Bacchus.
It is he who dances in them full of wild lust. The longing of many religions of mankind, the merging of man with God is the central theme in the cult of Bacchus. It is therefore no wonder that the cult of the god Bacchus spread with irresistible power and furiously fast, so to speak, to many countries and was also included in the pantheon of gods in Greece and then in Rome.
And this despite the fact that he actually does not seem to fit into the well-ordered structure of the gods.
Originally, the god Bacchus came from Asia Minor and the myths about Bacchus tell how - across the sea - he reached Greece and was finally recognised as a god there.
With Bacchus, an amazing god developed in Greece. The god Bacchus is not only typically Greek, but tells of man's greatest longing to transform himself from his deepest, lustful inner self in ecstasy into something quite different, sublimely great.
To grow beyond oneself. And this - as myths tend to do - in an archetypal way that is valid for every human being.
So it is no wonder that the great mythologists chose Bacchus as the epitome of the myths of humanity.
And the poet-philosopher Nietzsche not only contrasted Bacchus with Apollo and described him as the epitome of creativity, but even identified himself with Bacchus:
Friedrich Nietzsche sends holiday greetings from Turin:
It is a prejudice that I am a man. I am the crucified. I am Bacchus. Relentlessly I am in battle against everything and continue to re-evaluate the values sacred to you. Your all-too-human morals I crush and violate. Forgive me if I address you too vehemently, you are still so young....
Do not dismiss it as decadence when I proclaim to you the great festival of existence. You are to become a poet of your own life, the meaning of culture, the superman in the eternal recurrence of events, lest you fall to the beasts of the banal. Rise up and overcome. Create new things out of scorched earth.
Never forget that God is dead, but our errors can always rise him anew. Man's greatest art is to deceive and enchant himself. Now be free from resentment, and dance to the Dionysia I arrange for you.
Yours, Nietzsche.
Athenian festivals for the god Bacchus
Three Athenian festivals were dedicated to the god Bacchus.
The best known are the annual Dionysia celebrations.
In classical Athens, Bacchus was worshipped as the exciter of ecstasy and also as the god of masks.
It is therefore no coincidence that Athenian theatre developed in the wake of the cult of Bacchus.
An actor also gives up his individual self in order to let another speak from himself:
A hero or a god.
An actor also has to step out of himself in order to unite with another being.
Wedding of Bacchus, Bacchus and Ariadne
Bacchus's first act as a now recognised god is his own wedding.
The king's daughter Ariadne is his chosen one.
Bacchus is known as now thus recognised as the god of wine, ecstasy, joy and wild oriastic dancing.
In his thiasos are Leoepards, Nymphs, Bacchae and Silenes, as well as the lustful Satyrs - usually depicted with an erect phallus.
The phallus is also one of the most important symbols in which the god Bacchus is worshipped.
How does Ariadne,- the Cretan king's daughter Ariadne fit into this picture? We will see in a moment - first the two meet - on Naxos.
Ariadne, the wife of Bacchus
The Cretan princess Ariadne, who helped Theseus defeat the Minotaur, was a clever and courageous young woman.
Without Ariadne, the hero Theseus would have stood no chance against the Minotaur. Ariadne gave the king's son from Athens a sword and a ball of yarn.
The yarn was the trick that Ariadne had devised for finding one's way out of a labyrinth.
Ariadne, in love with Theseus, made Theseus promise that he would take her as his bride on his journey home to Athens. And he did.
But on the island of Naxos a whole new chapter in Ariadne's life began. Theseus leaves the sleeping Ariadne alone on the island.
Some see him as a heartless hero who is no longer interested in Ariadne.
Others think it was Bacchus himself who ordered Theseus to leave Ariadne on Naxos.
Personally, I don't think either is quite right.
Bacchus only came to Naxos after Ariadne was left back, and Theseus seems to long for Ariadne again and again for the rest of his life.
That's why I was glad when I found a drawing in which Athena instructs the reclining Theseus to leave Ariadne on Naxos.
The accompanying illustration shows Athena standing and Theseus lying down, holding the sleeping Ariadne in her arms.
Bacchus and Ariadne marry
What is undisputed, however, is that Bacchus falls in love with Ariadne as soon as he sees her. They celebrate a lavish wedding feast.
And how does Ariadne behave towards this ecstatic god, whose mission it seems to be to make people - and especially women - happy through orgiastic feasts?
Women - into ecstasy - and thus out of themselves - through orgiastic festivities?
Wedding with Aphrodite
Nowhere is a jealous Ariadne reported.
On the contrary, Ariadne as Goddess now leads - together with Bacchus - his triumphal processions through the countries of the world known to the Greeks. She also becomes the mother of Bacchus' children.