The God of Wine

“Together, gloriously drunk, we no longer know the meaning of unhappiness” Zen master Ryokan

“I am a disciple of the philosopher Dionysus. I would rather be a satyr than a saint.” Friedrich Nietzsche

“In vino veritas” Pliny the Elder (likely plagiarizing an older saying)

Any time you pop open a bottle of wine, the old gods come back to life again.

Or, at least, one of them does. Dionysus is the wildest deity in the entire Greco-Roman pantheon (even though Pan disputes that claim). He is the god of grapes, wine, and altered states of consciousness. He is the protector of outcasts and those who don’t fit within mainstream society.

Worshipped by the Greeks for at least 3,500 years (give or take a century or two), Dionysus is said to hail from somewhere east of Greece. Some scholars go so far as to suggest he may have come from India and was related to Shiva. Whether there’s any truth to this or not, Dionysus is often portrayed as returning from somewhere far away, from outside of the boundaries of what the Greeks recognized as the civilized world. He sometimes arrives in a chariot drawn by lions or tigers while a soundtrack of flutes, drums and cymbals announces him. Accompanying him in a triumphant parade are dancing satyrs (the horny half-man, half-goat creatures of Greek mythology) and Bacchantes (his wild female devotees).

Unlike most other Greek gods who were worshipped in temples, buildings, and cities, Dionysus is a nature god, associated with the woods, mountains and the open air. And unlike most other Greek gods, who contributed to maintaining the social order, Dionysus subverts it. Whereas civilization is built on separation from nature, Dionysus is all about unity with nature and getting in touch with life’s primal energies. Dionysus doesn’t simply question authority—he constantly challenges it and its restrictive moral codes. The religious ceremonies that constitute his worship were known as the Dionysian Mysteries. For lack of a better comparison, you could think of them as psychedelic rituals. Through a combination of mind-altering substances, dancing, and music, Dionysus frees his followers from fear, inhibitions, and the constraints of society’s rules. Needless to say, this was appealing to those low in the Greek power structure, particularly women, slaves, and foreigners. The Dionysian Mysteries allowed them an escape from their social roles and obligations. According to Euripides, Dionysus’ female followers scared the hell out of the guardians of the law, out of kings and those in charge of upholding the social order. And when guards are sent to stop them and arrest them, in their frenzied state, these ladies are able to use simple sticks to beat fully armored guards. They seem to have supernatural powers, display superhuman strength, and can’t be hurt by weapons.

According to the words of an Italian historian named Aldo Schiavone, what Dionysus represents is “the unfathomable contradictoriness of life, who overturned fixed roles, inebriated minds, erased borders—between the living and the dead, the human and the animal, nature and culture—exalted reproductive functions…”

Pliny the Elder, likely repeating an older saying, wrote, “In vino veritas” (translated as “In wine, there is the truth”). This doesn’t only mean that people who have consumed Dionysus’ medicine are more likely to spill some truths that their sober inhibitions would keep secret. But it also means that wine can reveal who we are once we peel away a couple of layers of civilized self-control. It’s an answer to the Zen koan, “What did your face look like before your parents were born?” In some cases, the answer is beautiful and liberating. In others, it may be terrifying. Whenever I drink, I become infinitely more pleasant to be around and want to hug everyone. But of course, I’m more than aware that plenty of people, whenever they drink, become violent and mean. Throughout history, untold amounts of abuse started with alcohol. And it’s undeniable that some individuals are better off keeping the lid on whatever is bottled up inside of them.

In addition to wine, music and dancing, Dionysus uses another medicine to free his followers: he is also a god of sex, an orgasm god, a god of unrestrained life force—a god of mystery and enthusiasm, a god of instinct and of the wilderness, an outlaw god offering his middle finger to social conventions. He very much is a god who insists on joy in spite of everything. The god of the Here and Now. A physical god who is all about muscles, sweat, tendons, heart and guts. The overarching theme is that he encourages ecstasy which, much like love, is irrational and doesn’t follow the sober dictates of logic.

While this may not sound very Jesus-like, there are interesting parallels. Both Jesus and Dionysus were the sons of a god and a mortal woman (Mary in Jesus’ case, and Semele in Dionysus’). Both Jesus and Dionysus died and were resurrected. Both performed miracles involving wine. And, in the early days of Christianity, the followers of both were viewed with suspicion by the powers that be.

Some Greek rulers considered the worship of Dionysus a threat to civilized society. Since every time they tried prohibiting the cult, it always backfired and never worked, they decided instead to co-opt it by creating a domesticated form of worship as a state religion in Athens. In Rome, things got even more dramatic.

In the 180s BCE, Rome experienced a ‘Dionysian panic’ that made the Satanic panic of the 1980s in U.S. look like child’s play in comparison. In the Roman world, Dionysus was usually known as Bacchus. And there’s evidence that Dionysus merged with a local wine god known by the Latins as Liber (“the free one”). The problem began when Roman authorities became equally alarmed as the Greek ones when they realized the potentially revolutionary qualities of the worship of Bacchus. This situation reached a boiling point around the year 186 BCE. The Roman historian Livy tells us Roman upper-classes were scared by the growing popularity of Bacchus because it broke rigid Roman barriers between men and women, between free citizens and slaves, between patricians and plebeians. Bacchus’ worship erased social differences, and this is something that Roman society, with its heavy emphasis on hierarchy and obedience to prescribed roles, found deeply troubling. Your position in society meant everything in ancient Rome. It determined your political rights, your economic status, your individual choices, and even who you could and could not have sex with. By doing away with all of that, Bacchic ceremonies were a direct attack on everything that Rome stood for.

Here’s where the story gets juicy. In the area of modern-day Tuscany, Bacchus was catching on. In Livy’s words, “When wine had inflamed their desire, and it was night, and the mixing of males and females… extinguished all vestiges of shame, every kind of lewd behavior began to be practiced… The illegal sexual liaisons of free men and free women were not the only type of crimes that were being committed.” I can only imagine the faces of upper-class Roman men imagining upper-class Roman women drinking and having sex with lower-class men, or perhaps even slaves (incidentally, behaviors that were perfectly acceptable for upper-class Roman men, but not for their women). In the words of Schiavone, authorities were, “… well aware of their potentially subversive effects on the social order. A rigid disciplining of the female—of bodies no less than minds—lay in fact at the basis of the republican aristocratic ethic.”

Livy further tells us that during the ceremonies, people took advantage of the noise caused by the howling and clashing of drums and cymbals to settle scores with their enemies and murder them. As he writes, “Nobody who cried out could be heard amid the sexual orgies and the slaughter.” Most historians tend to think that Livy was running wild with his imagination. Was Livy right, and the Bacchic ceremonies included some brutally violent aspects? Or is he repeating invented gossip against a religion clashing with upper-class Roman values? Of course, over 2,000 years later, it’s pretty much impossible to separate slander from reality.

When the cult of Bacchus moved to Rome, an informer offered information to one of the consuls, who quickly organized a campaign of repression. The cult was banned by Senatorial decree in 186 BCE. Immediately after, the Roman state arrested about 7,000 people and executed a large percentage of them. The current scholarly opinion holds that while there may have been some cases when the accusations were true, most cases are based on charges made up to squash a religious movement perceived to be challenging traditional Roman values and the very philosophical foundation of Roman society. The Roman Senate sought to ban Dionysian rites throughout the Empire, restricting their gatherings to a handful of people under special license in Rome. However, this only succeeded in pushing the cult underground. We know from modern experience how well prohibition works. Any time you outlaw something people want… guess what? If there’s demand, supply will be there. If not legally, then illegally.

Bacchus, however, wasn’t done clashing with the Roman state. He shows up again within most slave rebellions that would rock the Roman world. As Historian Brent Shaw writes, “The Bacchanalia were therefore consistently associated with slave resistance in southern Italy.” After the 186 BCE crackdown, there were revolts in Apulia among slave shepherds who were devotees of Bacchus. Both major slave revolts in Sicily (135-132 BCE and 104-100 BCE) featured the worship of Bacchus. During the Social War (91-88 BCE), the Italian allies used the image of Bacchus on their coins to symbolize their rebellion against Rome. And there’s quite a bit of speculation indicating that it may have been important in Spartacus’ rebellion (73-71 BCE) as well. Spartacus’ wife, after all, was a priestess of Dionysus. Given all we know, the fact that the wife of the man who launched the greatest slave rebellion in Roman history was a devotee of Dionysus doesn’t seem like a coincidence at all.

This is probably why Roman authorities passed laws trying to crush the cult of Bacchus among the lower classes. Because it gave them an ideology. It gave them an experience of life lived outside of hierarchy. It offered them a glimpse of a society with no masters and slaves. This concept was clearly intolerable for a society like Rome that was based on slavery, and rigid class distinctions. And by its very nature, the god of wine couldn’t tolerate what Rome represented.