Chapter 40. Dionysus and Orpheus: Ecstasy, Orphic Asceticism and the Bacchic Threat to Order

Eleusis offered a better lot after death through a single, publicly administered rite. A second current of Greek religion offered something more radical. Through Dionysus it offered ecstatic union with a god of wine, madness and rebirth. Through the literature attributed to Orpheus it offered a doctrine of the soul as a divine fragment imprisoned in a Titanic body, to be freed by a pure way of life. The two were intertwined: Orphic myth made Dionysus its suffering god, and Bacchic rites carried Orphic ideas into graves across the Greek world. Both also stood in tension with civic order. This chapter treats Dionysus’ antiquity, Orphic theogony and anthropogony, Orphic asceticism and its link to Pythagorean and later Gnostic dualism, and Rome’s suppression of the Bacchanalia. It ends with modern Traditionalist, ecofeminist and Keshe readings.

An ancient and foreign-seeming god

Greek myth often presented Dionysus as a latecomer. Alain Daniélou’s comparative study Gods of Love and Ecstasy argues the reverse: “The Mycenaean tablets from Pylos (about 1500) already mention the name of Dionysus together with those of the Aryan gods” [Daniélou, Gods of Love and Ecstasy, #63449, ch. 2]. Daniélou’s thesis is that Dionysus and the Indian Shiva are forms of one pre-Aryan god of ecstasy. He finds parallels even in the god’s violence: “Dionysus’ wars are also presented as the chastisement of the Titans. Like Shiva, Dionysus takes part in the destruction of his unfaithful followers” [ibid.]. He also reads Apollo’s killing of the Python at Delphi as symbolising “the change-over from a feminine to a masculine representation” of divine protection [ibid., ch. 2]. This is Daniélou’s comparative argument.

Within the polis, Dionysus was also the god of the theatre. Claude Calame’s Handbook chapter argues that Greek tragedy “also served as part of ritual practice” [Eidinow & Kindt (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Ancient Greek Religion, #66316, “Chapter Overview”, ch. 13]. The City Dionysia, with its dramatic competitions, was Athens’ second festival after the Panathenaia [Wikipedia: Dionysia].

Orphic theogonies and the Titanic crime

Kearns notes that “the theogonic traditions exemplified in Hesiod and the Orphic poets narrated the violent overthrow of gods older than Zeus” [Kearns in Eidinow & Kindt (eds.), Oxford Handbook, #66316, ch. 3]. The Orphic versions diverged sharply from Hesiod. The reference shelf summarises several. In the Eudemian theogony Night comes first. The Rhapsodic theogony begins with Chronos (Time), who produces the egg from which the bisexual Phanes is born. The Derveni papyrus, found in Macedonia in 1962 and dated to around 340 BCE, preserves an allegorical commentary on an Orphic poem of the later fifth century BCE and is described as “Europe’s oldest surviving manuscript” [Wikipedia: Orphism].

The central Orphic myth concerns Dionysus-Zagreus, son of Zeus and Persephone, whom Zeus names as his heir. Incited by Hera, the Titans lure the child with toys and a mirror, tear him apart and eat him. Athena saves the heart, and Zeus burns the Titans with his thunderbolt. Culianu, quoting Guthrie, gives the anthropogonic conclusion: “from their smoking remains came forth a race unknown until then, the race of mortal men. By virtue of these facts our nature is double: we are born from the Titans, the hateful sons of the earth, but in us there yet subsists something of the divine nature, because into our body have passed fragments of the body of Dionysus” [Culianu, Gnozele dualiste ale Occidentului, #87087, ch. I §5, quoting Guthrie p. 98]. The reference shelf states the consequence in Orphic terms: “The soul of man (the Dionysus part) is therefore divine, but the body (the Titan part) holds the soul in bondage”, bound to “the wheel of rebirth” [Wikipedia: Orphism]. It also notes that the sources differ. The extant witnesses to the Hieronyman theogony “do not mention the Titans’ eating of Dionysus”, and the Derveni text breaks off before Dionysus appears [ibid.].

The Orphic life: asceticism and dualism

For Culianu the myth explains a way of life. He writes: “it seems that, for the authors who speak of it, ‘Orphism was a way of life, namely an ascetic way of life’ (Guthrie, p. 27), implying vegetarianism. The well-known Orphic ‘abstentions’ (apochai) were justified by a dualist myth created around the child Dionysus” [Culianu, Gnozele dualiste ale Occidentului, #87087, ch. I §5]. The Titanic crime is, in Ugo Bianchi’s term, an “antecedent sin” that marks the human condition for ever. It can be expiated only by embracing the “Orphic life” (orphikos bios), consisting in “abstention from eating the flesh of living beings” (apoche ton empsychon) and the practice of asceticism [ibid.]. Culianu judges it “exaggerated” to attribute an anticosmic doctrine to these “Greek puritans”. They were, however, “clearly antisomatic”, antinomian in relation to majority custom (they taught men “not to kill”) and vegetarian. He thinks it “almost certain” that they held metempsychosis together with the Pythagoreans, Empedocles and Plato [ibid.].

Culianu places Orphism in Bianchi’s typology of dualisms, where “Orphism and Empedocles” are classed as radical and dialectical (cyclical), alongside Heraclitus and Indian atman/maya. Zoroastrianism, by contrast, is “radical, eschatological, procosmic”, and “moderate” Gnosticism is “moderate, eschatological, anticosmic” [Culianu, Gnozele dualiste ale Occidentului, #87087, ch. I §7]. Bianchi traces the Platonic dualist inheritance to “older traditions linked to the names of Orpheus, Pythagoras and Empedocles” [ibid., §5]. Culianu’s genealogy runs from Orphism through Plato to the Gnostic systems examined in later chapters of this study.

B. R. Hergenhahn’s history of psychology reaches a similar result from another discipline. Of the two theologies available in the sixth and fifth centuries, Olympian and Dionysiac-Orphic, the Olympian gods “showed little concern with the anxieties of ordinary humans” [Hergenhahn, An Introduction to the History of Psychology, #30761, ch. 2]. He adds: “We see many elements in common between Dionysiac-Orphic religion and Pythagorean philosophy. Both viewed the body as a prison from which the soul should escape … Both accepted the notion of the transmigration of souls” [ibid.]. The reference shelf records the long dispute over priority. Ion of Chios claimed that Pythagoras wrote poems under Orpheus’ name, while Neoplatonists such as Proclus held that “all the Grecian theology is the progeny of the mystic tradition of Orpheus” [Wikipedia: Orphism].

Gold tablets and Bacchic afterlife

The material evidence for this current is the “Orphic” gold tablets buried with the dead. Edmonds describes them as “designed for a very private audience, perhaps only the individuals in whose graves they were placed”. Some ask Persephone to send the bearer “to the seats of the blessed”, and others refer to “celebrations of festivals beneath the earth, where the deceased will receive wine”. The deceased “claims to be pure and from the pure or to have been specially liberated by Dionysos Bacchios”. The tablets assert “a special identity of the deceased that transcends the usual categories of polis, genos, and family” [Edmonds in Eidinow & Kindt (eds.), Oxford Handbook, #66316, ch. 37]. That last point explains why such cults could seem politically threatening: they defined the self outside the city’s categories. Edmonds sees Greek afterlife ideas as “an ongoing contest of differing views… jostling for authority”, not a clean replacement of Homer by Orphism [ibid.].

The Bacchanalia: Rome confronts ecstasy

The sharpest political collision came in Italy. The reference shelf, drawing on Livy, reports that a Bacchic cult reached Rome around 200 BCE via southern Italy and Etruria. In Livy’s account, Paculla Annia, a Campanian priestess, turned the rites into nocturnal gatherings mixing sexes, ages and classes, with wine and loud music. A Senate inquiry under the consuls Spurius Postumius Albinus and Quintus Marcius Philippus claimed that under cover of religion initiates committed crimes and even murders. Livy “claims that seven thousand cult leaders and followers were arrested, and that most were executed”, and he presents the cult as “a murderous instrument of conspiracy against the state” [Wikipedia: Bacchanalia]. The Senatus consultum de Bacchanalibus of 186 BCE survives as an inscription. It did not ban the cult. It dismantled its colleges, limited gatherings to “no more than two men and three women”, required Senate permission and forbade men the priesthood [ibid.]. Modern interpretations differ. The article calls Livy “tendentious to say the least”. Gruen reads the decree as Realpolitik, the Senate asserting its authority over Italian allies after the Second Punic War, while Burkert sees signs of “moral panic” [ibid.].

Samuel Dill’s study of imperial Roman society records the lasting moralist suspicion of ecstatic and eastern worships. Juvenal “had all the old Roman prejudice against those eastern worships which captivated so many women of his day”. In Dill’s own judgement, “there were the gravest moral abuses connected with such worships as that of Magna Mater” [Dill, Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius, #60232]. The Bacchanalia affair set the template for Roman dealings with Cybele, Isis and, later, Christians (see the following chapters).

Modern reinterpretations

Julius Evola puts Dionysus on the chthonic side of the opposition that, for him, defines Greek religion. The struggle was “not merely between Hades, Persephone, Demeter, Dionysus and Zeus, Hera, Athena, Apollo” but between “radically different cults” [Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World, #67630]. He maps the polarity onto politics: in the traditional view “the state was related to the people, just as the Olympian and Uranian principles are related to the chthonic and ‘infernal’ world” [ibid., ch. 4]. On this reading the Dionysian current falls on the side of the ruled. Evola frames the argument as Traditionalist metaphysics of history rather than as a reconstruction from historical evidence.

Sophie Strand’s The Flowering Wand reverses the valuation from an ecological and feminist standpoint. She describes discovering that “the masculine hadn’t always been conflated with the violence of hierarchy and domination” and urges readers, “like Dionysus”, to “remember our deeper, pre-patriarchal root systems” [Strand, The Flowering Wand, #62689, Part II]. She calls on “the vine and the ivy of Dionysus/Liber” and “Orpheus’s mycelial underworld”, and she contrasts Dionysus with the Christ of the Gospels: “The Gospels disembody Jesus, while Dionysus is primarily a god of embodiment” [ibid., Part II]. Dionysus, she suggests, “does not need to commit rape or violent assault in order to attract lovers”, which “makes him even more masculine” [ibid.].

Mehran Keshe, in Knowledge Seekers Workshop 520 (11 January 2024), offers a polemical genealogy of Judaism that makes the wine god its source. He claims: “The god of wine, and the man who’s always drunk in Greek mythology, is quoted (in Torah) because they were all living in the same area”. He also says: “they chose the story of his life, the Greek, the God of wine, drunken man, and he’s become the rule of the Torah” [Keshe, Knowledge Seekers Workshop 520, #378232]. The workshop summary adds that the stories were “copied from 1000 years earlier into Torah”. Keshe presents this as part of a programme to “dismantle religions by the truth of their own history – not accusations” [ibid., part 8]. These are Keshe’s assertions, recorded here for the comparative thread on how Keshe reads the origins of religions. In the same workshop he ties the claim to arguments from Torah narrative and population figures (“70 people could not become 6 (3) million”) and calls the result “all the story of a drunken man – god (from Greek mythology)” [Keshe, Knowledge Seekers Workshop 520, #378232, part 32].

Key points

• Daniélou dates Dionysus’ name to the Mycenaean Pylos tablets and argues that Dionysus and Shiva are forms of one god of ecstasy. Their parallels include the “chastisement of the Titans”.
• Orphic theogonies (Eudemian, Rhapsodic, Derveni, Hieronymian) rewrote Hesiod. The Derveni papyrus (c. 340 BCE) is Europe’s oldest surviving manuscript.
• In the Zagreus myth humans arise from the ashes of the Titans who ate the child Dionysus, so human nature is double: a Titanic body and a Dionysian spark.
• Culianu, after Guthrie, calls Orphism “an ascetic way of life”, vegetarian and “clearly antisomatic”. Bianchi classifies it as a radical, cyclical dualism that fed Platonic and later Gnostic dualism.
• Hergenhahn finds the body-as-prison and transmigration common to Dionysiac-Orphic religion and Pythagoreanism.
• The gold tablets promise the “pure” a place among the blessed and an identity beyond polis and family (Edmonds).
• Rome’s Senatus consultum de Bacchanalibus (186 BCE) regulated rather than banned the cult. The reference shelf calls Livy’s account “tendentious”, and Dill records the moralists’ hostility to ecstatic eastern cults.
• Evola (Traditionalist), Strand (ecofeminist) and Keshe (who claims the Torah derives from the wine-god myth) offer modern reinterpretations, each attributed here to its author.