Dionysus: Lord of Misrule - Ronald Hutton

Added: 2026-05-07

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[00:14:50]Good evening everybody. Uh my name is Sarah Hart and I had the honor a couple years back to be the Gresian professor of geometry here. Um so it's my special pleasure to introduce my colleague Ron Hutton uh who is the Gresian professor of divinity as I'm sure most of you know because professor Hutton has been giving his marvelous lectures for nearly four years here. Not continuously. We do let him out every so often to have a break.

[00:15:16]Um, but he's coming close to the end of his time. This is his penultimate lecture, everybody. I know. So, we we're very very sad about that. But we're we're so pleased to still have you here for a little longer. Um, and we'll make you come back. There's no escape. But tonight then, before we start, just a tiny bit of housekeeping for those here in the room. The fire exits are at the back. Uh, if there's a fire alarm, usual thing, we're not expecting one. So, please leave the building in an orderly fashion. an hour uh colleagues will guide you to safety. Um there will be a chance for questions uh a few minutes at the end and those in the room of course you can raise your hands in the time of fashion but there are also QR codes uh which you can scan if you prefer to ask a question by stealth uh you can do that and I'll have a little tablet to see the questions coming in from those in the room but also for those watching online.

[00:16:09]So if you're online, welcome to you as well. And that's your method for asking questions will be via this QR code. So you don't want to hear from me, you want to hear from from Ron Hutton. Uh tonight he is going to speak to us about a wonderful subject, wonderful character in mythology, and that's Dian Isis, the lord of mis rule. So over to you, Ron.

[00:16:30]Thank you.

[00:16:31]>> Thank you, >> ladies and gentlemen. Good evening.

[00:16:39]This series was rather cheesily entitled dodgy deities and they don't come dodgier than die.

[00:16:48]He was an ancient Greek god. That statement seemingly self-evident actually conceals a fundamental truth about him. We have been certain since the 1990s that his name appears on the linear B tablets from the bronze age of Greece dating from the 14th century BCE.

[00:17:13]The point here is that some other major deities of the better known classical age of Greece like Aphroditi don't.

[00:17:24]Their cults entered Greek culture later, but were then fully accepted into its pantheon of beloved Olympian deities. In that later classical age, by contrast, Dionis was still always treated as a newcomer and a stranger. He was never quite welcome. In other words, even though he'd been part of Greek religion since prehistory, the Greeks were never really comfortable with him and never accepted him fully among them. Homer in the earliest Greek literature dealt extensively with the other goddesses and gods, including the newcomers, but marginalized and rather scorned Dionis.

[00:18:16]The most obvious reason for this conundrum is that he stood uniquely among the deities for something that humans found at once indispensable and disturbing and which they often felt that they should perhaps do without.

[00:18:35]This is alcohol.

[00:18:38]Specifically, it's wine, a form of alcohol which can be delicious and is potent in quite low quantities.

[00:18:48]Socially, its consequences can be either splendid or catastrophic.

[00:18:54]As an individual stimulant and relaxant, it can be equally superb, but it's also essentially toxic. This uh 17th century portrait of him looking at once debortched and rather queasy sums that up.

[00:19:13]Dianisis is the patron god of anybody who has looked haggardedly into a mirror in a morning with a throbbing head and roing stomach and asks, "Why do I do this to myself?" He is equally the one of anybody who rolls over in bed at the same hour and in the same condition and asks wearily and with norsier of the other person in the bed, who are you?

[00:19:42]The rest of this talk will be devoted to exploring the implications of this uneasy relationship.

[00:19:52]I propose not to do so in the mythology or literature embodying Dionysus. That's a vast subject. But with respect to his actual cult in the ancient world, I should only refer to literature, art, or myth when that cult is concerned with them. There'll be some serious casualties of this approach. There will, for example, be no mention of his wife Ariadne. However devoted to her I am personally. She's prominent in his mythology, literature and art, but not in his worship. I'm concerned here with how people did worship him and interact with him and what this says about his nature. A number of aspects of that and of human attitudes to it immediately become clear. The first is that like a great many ancient deities who came to embody complex human needs, desires and ambitions, he was originally based in hard economic reality.

[00:21:04]This was the need to cultivate vines once people had acquired a taste for wine and were prepared to pay for it.

[00:21:13]Dionus is therefore in some respects a dying and returning vegetation god of the kind so beloved of the Victorian scholar Sir James Fraser author of the golden bow. One of Dionosis's titles was dendrites tree being. He's a kind of ant. Maximus of Ty recorded that peasants venerated him in their fields as a cutdown tree trunk. Images of him in temples were also sometimes made of wood. I think this Roman mosaic portrayal sums up that aspect nicely. Indeed, he didn't have as many actual temples as most major gods.

[00:22:00]His shrines often being caves or woodland groves. And the caves themselves were sometimes described as green, that is hung with or surrounded by foliage. Two aspects of him derive from the botanical truth that vines were once har are harvested and cut back severely and then grow again verdantly and become fruitful even more. One which will be considered later is that Dionis is a god who conquers death. The other is that he's a youthful and energetic deity associated especially with the spring when vines start to grow again.

[00:22:47]An anonymous late Greek song about him runs. We will sing Dionis in the sacred days who has been away for a year. Present is his season and all the flowers. So this is a dionus time.

[00:23:04]Now spring starts earlier in the Mediterranean than elsewhere in Europe and the first of the god's annual festivals in ancient Athens and the oldest there was held in late February.

[00:23:18]It's called the anestisteria and celebrated the opening of the new wine that had been laid down in the autumn.

[00:23:26]Dionis represented either by an image or by a man in costume was carried into the city in a chariot disguised as a ship.

[00:23:37]Again, the point was being made that he was a foreigner arriving from overseas.

[00:23:44]About a month later, the next festival of his was held to confirm his provisional acceptance into the Athenian community. It was called the city dionia.

[00:23:58]Finally, in the autumn, the Oscar Foria celebrated the bringing home of the grapes. The twinning of spring and autumn festivities both marked practical economic processes and highlighted the god's nature as a deity of life and death. His season is therefore restricted to the time of year when vegetation grows. And on Roman mosaics like this one, he is especially associated with flowers and fruit. The festivals to him held in other cities paid further testimony to his role as a bringer of abundance. At Ellis in the Pelpineese, three pots were sealed up in his temple and the next day found brimming with wine. On the island of Andros, wine seemed to flow spontaneity spontaneously from the gateways of the temple there down the steps to the thirsty people.

[00:25:04]Alcohol can also provide a very effective focus and stimulus for social activity as in this Barack painting. And so the second abiding aspect of Dionis's nature is that of the unifying and reconciling force within a community.

[00:25:24]Ancient Greeks were so aware of the damaging potential of alcohol that they normally restricted its consumption to adult male citizens. I know in the early 20th century women were banned from a lot of pubs in England, but in ancient Athens they were banned from alcohol altogether most of the time. And even the adult males usually mixed it with water to lessen its impact. But at the anestia, women, slaves, and strangers were all encouraged to join in the drinking of the new wine. Children were admitted to it as well and got their first experience of it under proper supervision during the celebration.

[00:26:11]When the Oscaria festival brought home the grapes in the autumn, landowners joined the laborers in the same work of doing so. class was annihilated. The Athenian philosopher Plato and the orator Deosineses agreed that the god came for everybody in the city without distinction. He was the great leveler.

[00:26:35]It was a time for the release of prisoners and the freeing of slaves.

[00:26:41]More snoodily, the Greekeaking Egyptian queen Arinoi was said to have called the crowd at one Dioniac festival a mixed up mob.

[00:26:53]Dianisis was also a great reconciler of rival communities. Hey, let's talk about it over a glass of wine.

[00:27:03]and his temple on the island of Lesbos was at the disposal of all its five waring cities. As a classic outsider, he was splendidly positioned to arbitrate between people and reunite them. He was the Greek god most concerned with us, with humanity, and likely to intervene in its affairs. He was nicknamed Epiphanies because he appeared among humans so often. Plato called him our companion of the festival. As part of this sociability and conviviiality, he was also the only god who was a gang leader. He traveled everywhere with a retinue of lesser nonhuman beings of both sexes, spreading revalry everywhere they went. We'll return to those in a moment.

[00:28:00]The third abiding aspect of his nature is that he is scary. I chose this modern portrait to bring that out. This is clearly related to the unpredictable effects of alcohol and its propensity for causing disorder and bad behavior, including fights. When a wooden mask was found floating in the sea of ancient Lesbos, which seemed to the islanders at once divine and alien and disturbing, they decided at once it must represent Dionis.

[00:28:36]Pagan deities often have traumatic and dramatic family histories and life stories. Dionis outdoes the lot in this respect. A horrific violence runs constantly through his mythology and starts even while he is a fetus.

[00:28:58]A lot of deities, hey, like a lot of people, come from broken homes. No other god, however, had a father who casually burned his pregnant partner alive, following which the quickwitted Hermes had to form an emergency cesarian on the child corpse to save the baby. Dianisis was then placed in an incubator consisting of his father's thigh for the remaining three months of gestation.

[00:29:30]As a toddler, he was then kidnapped by titans who dismembered, cooked, and ate him before he was regenerated by his grandmother Ria from his heart alone.

[00:29:44]With this background, no wonder he was disturbed.

[00:29:49]This theme of destruction and rebirth of course relates to the reality of farming that vegetation is butchered by being harvested and then regenerates. Whenever Dionis' mythology leaked into his cult, however, it generally added a darker touch to the celebration. At the amphestia, for example, young girls were swung around by their arms to commemorate Origamy, the young daughter of a local peasant called Iicario.

[00:30:24]Icarius was shown how to make wine by Dionis and shared it with his neighbors.

[00:30:32]Experiencing their first ever sensations of drunkenness, they became convinced that Ias had poisoned them and they lynched him. Igony then hanged herself.

[00:30:44]All in all, it's an everyday dionessic story of country folk. One can imagine the god standing by shaking his head and exclaiming, "I was only trying to help."

[00:30:56]A lot of the time, however, Dionis is not trying to help, but destroying the old in human affairs in order to create the new. His whole mythical entourage is dangerous. Indeed, for much of the time, it functions not so much as a bunch of new age travelers, but as an army. His second in command is the guy at the top of the screen, his boyhood tutor, Selenus, who's like Frier Tuck gone to seed. He's fat, drunken, debortched, and generally irresponsible. The reverse of a conventional teacher. His followers consist of two kinds of being, both neither human nor amunable. The males are sats half human and half animal with male bodies, horses tails and enormous libidos. They are the antithesis of civilization, professional troublemakers.

[00:32:01]The female entourage is exactly equivalent. It consists of minads who are not human women, but a demented and violent variety of nymph. Apart from dancing, reveling, and screaming, their favorite ledge pastime is to tear animals to pieces and eat them raw.

[00:32:24]They're in the lower part of the screen.

[00:32:27]There are animals thought to be favored by Dionis, but they're generally the most dangerous examples of either wild or domestic beasts. His favorite among the wildlife is the leopard which can easily kill or eat humans and was common in the countryside around the Greek cities of Asia Minor. It survived in Turkey until the late 20th century and may do still. I I was born in India and grew up in an AngloIndian Melia and human eaters were still discussed in my childhood and the general ratio was that a humaning tiger was generally shot after it had eaten an average 20 people.

[00:33:14]A leopard would eat an average 200.

[00:33:18]His equivalent favorite from the farmyard was the bull. By far the most dangerous kind of human livestock and one that annually still kills people in the United Kingdom. The god was not only accompanied by such beasts but was at times believed to transform himself into one of them. He was sometimes represented as one in cult. The Mayads were customarily depicted as wearing the skins of baby deer forms which shared with the leopard the quality of being spotted. They therefore echoed the big cat and also the hides were useful spin-offs from the routine work of dismembering and devouring the animals inside. Again, like leopards, nymphs would often feature in mythology for ideal figures for male erotic fantasies. Guys with minads just say no.

[00:34:20]Their figures out of horror stories instead. Their humanoid counterparts to leopards as sats were to stallions. both like Dionis himself collapsed all kinds of being deity human and animal into one.

[00:34:40]This leads us to the next aspect of the god as the greatest of divine transgressors. There he is on a Greek vase dancing with a minad. He's a natural breaker of barriers, boundaries, and rules. In many ways, the ideal revolutionary deity, the chevara of the Greek divine pantheon, the manner in which his oldest Athenian festival was associated with jailbreaks, freedom from slavery, and giving alcohol to children immediately signals that he had a particular habit of privileging women, the sex who in ancient Greece were generally excluded from public life and confines the household. Dionis arrived at the Athenian amphestia in a ship on wheels as said accompanied by men costumed as rowdy pipe playing sats. At the heart of it, however, was a right conducted in secret by 14 women on behalf of the whole city in front of an image of the god consisting of a mask on a post that was suthed in a robe. We know the ritual included a sacrifice, an oath, and allegedly some kind of ceremony in which somehow the leading woman symbolically mated with Dionis.

[00:36:10]At Brace in the Pelpines, there were two statues of him kept in the temple. One on display to all worshippers, the other was hidden deeper in the building, and only women were allowed to see it.

[00:36:27]Increasingly in the ancient world from the classical period onwards it's the henistic period of Greek expansion across the Middle East and then that of the Roman Empire exclusively female clubs formed in many Greek cities. They were devoted to the worship of the god and left the city itself in groups to do so. Now remember, Greek women are supposed to be mainly confined to the home. So this is rulebreaking on an enormous scale. They were devoted to the worship of the gods so men couldn't argue with them. And they left the city in groups to do so.

[00:37:11]They went off into the countryside, preferably into wild places such as woods and mountains. What they did there is of course not known for certain. It was secret. It's often supposed to consist of and was portrayed on vasees as being a medley of wild dancing, drinking of wine normally as said forbidden to women and rituals of worship. Uh this modern serialist painting captures their atmosphere. The worship included singing of hymns to the god and sacrifices to him. These women were at first known as bachi or bachands after the god's alternative Greek name of Bachoy.

[00:37:59]By the Roman period, however, they're increasingly called minads, taking on the name of his mythical and superhuman female followers. In fact, they seem to have been an ancient example of what's now called ostension when human beings act out a myth or a legend in reality. In this case, the script was provided by one of the greatest and most famous Greek plays, Uripides, the Bachi, which became famous throughout the ancient world and beyond. The women were acting out the behavior of the feeban women in the play, or at least were believed to be doing so. They were said to dress in thorn or leopard skins, go barefoot and with loosened hair instead of tying it up demely as Greek women were supposed to do. Wear ivy crowns, enter frenzies and altered states of consciousness, and even tear wild animals to pieces. The historical geographer Diodoris Sichulus was more precise, stating that the maidens in the party would carry ivycovered staffs and engage in frenzied revalry, shouting aoy. The married women would conduct the sacrifices and sing the hymns. The truth of all this may be correct or male fantasy or something between. We shall simply never know what went on.

[00:39:37]Certainly such groups could at times be mixed sex, though still led by women.

[00:39:44]There is an inscription from the ancient Greek city of Magnesia, recording the arrival of three women from thieves in mainland Greece to found back at clubs in the city. They were allowed to do so if each paid a fee to the established senior priestess of Magnesia.

[00:40:06]Two of the resulting clubs would be all female and the third mixed sex.

[00:40:12]Unhappily, when one was founded at Rome at the opening of the 3rd century BCE, it was mixed sex and held its rights in the city itself.

[00:40:24]At first it was accepted being made the subject of a good naturatured joke in a play but in the year 186 the government turned savagely on on it and banned it.

[00:40:37]Uh this is a modern interpretation of it but far more polite than actually what went on as a secret society which was growing at a rapid rate. It would probably have hit trouble anyway.

[00:40:50]However, it does seem to have been too much in the Romans face, occupying the open streets with men prophecying in fits of madness with jerking bodies and women dressed as minads running with flaming torches to plunge them in the river Tyber. It would be hundreds of years before the Romans allowed Dionistic clubs back into Rome itself or into much of their western empire and then they were to take as shall be seen a different form.

[00:41:26]Another major aspect of Dionis was his ambigu ambiguity mirroring the positive and negative aspects of alcohol. And that's why I have chosen this modern representation which is at once grimin and dignified.

[00:41:44]Reasonable people made the point that his gifts could best be enjoyed by exercising self-restraint, responsibility and moderation in effect watering the wine as every civilized Greek did. The god could even therefore be credited with teaching these qualities. The philosopher Socrates, at least according to his friend Plato, called Dionis a divine helper in the search for a well-mixed and wellbalanced life. One of the god's common epithets was dimorphus, dualformed, which could be a reference to his double birth from his mother and his father, and the fact that he could bring joy or misery, help or harm. The scholar Plutarch said that well-mannered Athenians always poured wine with a prayer that it would not harm them before they began to drink it. They were acutely aware of the risks. Plato found a positive consequence of the god's gift of frenzy by suggesting it was related to creative inspiration.

[00:43:02]To Plato, Dionis could thereby thereby be regarded as one of the patrons of poets, a giver of the quality that the medieval Welsh bs would call Arwin, moments of spontaneous and intense creativity.

[00:43:21]The god was certainly the patron of Athenian drama, one of ancient Greece's great gifts to the world. In the sixth century, when a revolution at Athens deposed and exiled the city's despotic ruling family, the March festival of the city Dionia was either established or much embellished to provide one of the leading democratic celebrations of Athens. It started as a procession singing hymns then became a performance of the hymns on a stage at the conclusion of the procession that in turn developed into plays and these became the core of the festival effectively representing its main ritual.

[00:44:22]Playwrights now competed to put on productions for the festival which blossomed into a full-blown creative industry by the fifth century. The result was the first enduringly famous and popular body of drama in the world.

[00:44:43]The Athenians knew that they had Dionis to thank. And when his image was carried into their city at festivals, it was taken not to a temple, but to the theater.

[00:44:58]Part of his appeal was his essential dynamism.

[00:45:04]In ritual, he never stayed in the city long, but visited it for festivities and then departed again for the countryside.

[00:45:14]His mythology shows him moving restlessly from one land to another.

[00:45:20]Even once taking the hippie trail to India, not with a backpack, however, but with his armed and aggressive followers, wreaking havoc wherever they went.

[00:45:34]a graffitito on a wall at the Mesopotamian frontier town of Dura Europos from the 3rd century CE or AD calls him earthquake and invites him to come laughing. The Greek word for triumph thribbos was first associated with him. His habit of entering splendidly into cities and countries from outside was made a pattern for ancient human conquerors. Demetrius the besieger and Mark Anthony were both hailed as human counterparts of the god when they received grandiloquently in cicities submitting to their rule. And poignantly uh the story was told that when Mark Antony's career was finally on the skids after he had taken up with Cleopatra and the Romans had turned against him and his former partner Octavian Augustus had destroyed Antony's army as the enemy closed in on Alexandria and Antony prepared to resist in it. The sound was heard from the air in the middle of the night of Dionis and his minads and sats leaving town abandoning Anthony to his fate. And it said that was the point when Anthony ran a sword into himself instead of mounting a resistance of the city.

[00:47:10]The two most famous stories about Dionis from ancient Greece, one traditional, one literary, reflected often in his cult.

[00:47:22]Both testify to this dynamic and scary aspect of the god. One is one that appears very often in art and sometimes in cult, which is that he was kidnapped by pirates who took him off to sell him into slavery. And Dianis, of course, found this highly amusing.

[00:47:45]And after a while, he decided to flex his divine muscles. And so grape vines began growing all over the ship and running up the masks and the ribbing.

[00:47:56]Wild beasts suddenly appeared from the holds beneath, and the pirates found themselves swimming for the nearest land, followed by Dionis's mad laughter.

[00:48:08]Much more famous since I've cited it already and adapted for a direct inspiration for cult is Uripides play the Bakai which remains one of the most stunning pieces of ancient drama and one of those most familiar to people at the present day. I've seen it performed everywhere from the top London theaters to school groups in the provinces and always with a twist in the tail. Uh if there is anybody who don't know doesn't know the plot, it's of the arrival of Dionis from outside at the city of thieves where there's a spoiled teenage brat of a king Pentheus in charge and the women who know better leave town to worship Dionis and the the old guys, the geriatrics also find their youth again by following Dionis And PMPus meanwhile is throwing a tantrum and claiming he's not going to have anybody rule this city except him.

[00:49:13]He actually jails Dionis uh assuming that this guy is simply a kind of missionary and not realizing he's a god. And Dionis in that lazy way of his that sprouts vines over pirate ships gets inside Pentheus's mind and convinces him that to check out what's really happening he needs to spy on the women at their rebels in the forest and mountains outside thieves. So off goes Pentheus in disguise to do so. And the women go into a backit frenzy and tear him to pieces. His own mother, uh, this is one of the most tearjerking parts of the play, still in a state of holy dementia, is carrying her son's severed head around thinking it's that of a bear.

[00:50:08]The point of the story is pretty clear that gods may be dreadful but you don't get in their way.

[00:50:18]The final aspect which I shall consider is as the focus for an ancient mystery religion. Such religions had deep roots in ancient Greece. The most famous the elucinian mysteries probably going back into prehistory.

[00:50:37]They proliferated both in number and popularity. However, throughout the classical and henistic Greek periods and especially in the Roman Empire, what mystery cults did was to focus on a particular deity or divine couple and offer an intimate, personal, and lasting relationship with that divinity or those divinities. They also offered personal transformation and growth and an ultimate prospect of a better existence after death. It must be observed immediately that the charismatic dynamic Dionis, the natural gang leader with his pornhaw for breaking barriers, transforming identities and offering death and rebirth was tailorade for such a form of religion. Mystery cults were based on small closed groups of members who had been through initiatory rights that were themselves intense experiences of trauma, survival, renewal, and acceptance.

[00:51:50]They met secretly and privately for most of their activities.

[00:51:56]As these closed initiatory groups attached to a common devotion spread through the Roman Empire, they provided networks equivalent to Freemasonry or Hari Krishna temples in modern times.

[00:52:12]The mystery religion of Dionis, most famously represented in panels like this one from the Villa of Mysteries at Pompei, is first securely attested in the fifth century B.C.E., but by then it's already found from one end of the Greek world to another. It's apparently recorded on bone plaques from a colony on the northshore of the Black Sea which mention the god's name and seem to be initiation certificates. It's simultaneously found at Cumi on the west coast of Italy where an inscription reserves a burial ground for those who are made back. It seems that initiates wanted to be together in death as well as meeting in life.

[00:53:02]We naturally know very little of what went on in the cult ceremonies. There was a widespread impression that initiation into it was particularly grueling. The Christian apologist Oregon believed that apparitions and other fearful things manifested in them, but necessarily knew very little about what these were. These may be linked to the fact that an author of a book about the meaning of dreams, artisus, thought that to dream of Dionis was to be released from terrible things. Less spectacularly, it was said that the initiation ceremony included the repetition of set prayers dictated by a priest. It almost certainly included the removal of sacred objects from a special basket and their display to the initiate rather like the display of ceremonial tools in modern Freemasonry.

[00:54:05]This fresco from the Villa of the Mysteries shows that the Greek poet Theocritus wrote that the objects were placed on an altar after being shown.

[00:54:17]Certainly the basket of artifacts and the showing of them to the initiate is depicted quite often in villa wall paintings and mosaics and on terra cotta plaques and sarcophagi. It seems central to the whole cult. One of those objects often pictorially represented was a model erect fallus representing the power of the renewal of life and the ecstatic release of love making. These objects were always associated with Dionis.

[00:54:53]They were carried in the civic procession of the Athenian city Dionia as the god formally re-entered Athens.

[00:55:03]The 14 Athenian women who conducted the secret ritual at the other spring festival of the god the amphestia were said to handle sacred artifacts.

[00:55:16]The basket of them used in the mysteries clearly went back a long way. The Roman comic playwright Ploutus said that initiates had special signs and passwords like modern freemasons. The Roman historian Libby recalled that the effeminate men were especially attracted to the cult. That may have been hostile and vective. The dionessian mysteries were still forbidden in Rome when Libby was writing, but it does does fit with the generally transgressive nature of the god and also with a part of his mythology that he was brought up disguised as a girl. Dionius could quite legitimately be a deity of LGBTQ plus.

[00:56:08]Dressing up in general was a part of his mysteries. The carvings on sarcophagi show people wearing masks and some apparently costumed as Selenus and other characters from the divine entourage.

[00:56:24]What happened to initiates of mystery religions after death was of course even more important than what happened to them during life. They were often buried with inscribed gold leaves. These appear not to have been initiation certificates but calling cards to present the powers of the underworld giving them a right to better accommodation there. A typical one from northern Greece reads, "You have died and been reborn upon this day, oh blessed one. Tell Pphanie that Bakus himself freed you, but you jumped into milk. Ram, you jumped into milk. You have wine as your source of joy, and the other blessed ones await you with ritual beneath the earth." As a god who cared for the dead, Dionis had two evident qualifications.

[00:57:22]One was that he'd been there. He had died himself and been resurrected by his grandmother. Another was his classic habit of breaking boundaries. In this case, between worlds and states of existence.

[00:57:38]Paintings and carvings often show him in the company of the king and queen of the dead, Hades and Pesphanany. One showed him shaking hands with Hades. The Roman poet Horus called him the only being on whom the terrifying threeheaded dog who guarded the entrance to the underworld, Cerberus, actually forms. The notion of Dionis petting Cberus rather like Hagrid in the Harry Potter stories and calling him Fluffy is an especially compelling one. As a balance, I chose this majestic modern representation of him as a god of the dead. There seems to be a very common idea that initiates of his cult were given entrance to a region of flowering meadows as their home, the afterlife. There they would drink and dance upon the grass. An inscription to a dead boy in Macedonia described this wonderland with vivid extra detail such as that it was wandered by nymphs carrying baskets filled with mystical objects. The mystery cult of the living was expected to continue among the dead.

[00:58:56]That cult spread through the Roman Empire including Britain. When the shrine of another mystery religion of the god Mithras was decommissioned in London in the 4th century CE, it was converted to the worship of Bakers. The Romans usually employed that name for the god, probably because although Greek, it sounded more Latin than Dionis. They also however identified him with their own archaic god of vineyards and wine lie part. He's the chapen statue and his name means literally father freedom and testifies against the liberating value of alcohol. In the imperial period, the mystery cult was admitted to Rome because in contrast to the earlier Bak Club, it was much quieter, more private, and more respectable. Indeed, most of the many inscriptions that survive from it in the imperial period deal with membership fees, not drunken frenzy. Nevertheless, we should probably not underestimate its endearing ability to provide ecstasy, altered states, and the radical transformation of both consciousness and identity. Plato had said that initiates were expected to pass through a kind of madness. Dionis, the god of primal scream therapy. Roman commentators like Varro remarked that Bakus was the god who purged the soul and set people free.

[01:00:41]It's entirely possible that even in its imperial Roman respectable form, it was in part a kind of possession cult like voodoo, Santaia or Santo.

[01:00:55]It's time to conclude. Clearly, Dionis is one of the most complex, ambiguous, and multifaceted of Greek deities, which is why I've chosen this elegant modern sculpture as a last illustration.

[01:01:11]In the ancient world, he had several hundred epithets attached to his names, most of them restricted to particular localities.

[01:01:21]Ancient commentators themselves were unsure whether these were all forms of the same god or whether at least some of them were different deities. The Roman politician and intellectual Cicero made one of the characters in his book about the nature of the divine declare that there had to be at least five different gods called Dionis.

[01:01:46]In essence, his endearing as appeal is that his worship encourages drinking, wild dancing, wild music, and wild sex.

[01:01:58]We have to ask what's not to like. The answer, of course, is all of the above, because all of them, and especially the drink, can lead to trouble. He will therefore remain not only the patron deity of some of the greatest nights of one's life but of the morning after the night before. At least his present day activities seem to concern individual people. In his mythology it was entire kingdoms and dynasties that ended up wasted when he passed through. This is a case where we can be really glad of the gap between myth and reality.

[01:02:57]Thank you so much. That was absolutely amazing. Um, we do have a few minutes for questions. If there are questions in the room, people would like to raise their hand. Then we have a roving microphone that will come to you so that everyone can hear your questions.

[01:03:09]There's one straight away there.

[01:03:16]>> Thank you very much. Always a delight.

[01:03:18]Um, you mentioned Mark Anthony.

[01:03:21]Mark Anthony I I think is described as being a member of the cult and being quite into the cult, which I'm not really sure. Is is he really a religious man even if the religion is drinking and debauchery? I I don't think especially uh you see that the point here is that pagan Roman leaders liked to have deities who were especially on their side and uh for example for Julius Caesar and therefore for his heir Octavian it's the goddess Venus from whom they are descended and if that sounds rather like a a sweet soft option the Roman Venus is a goddess of war as much as she is a goddess of love. Venus Victrix, it was her name that Caesar's legions shouted as they jack booted their way onto the beaches of what was going to be Kent to invade Britain. But I think it says something about Mark Antony's recklessness as a person that he chose Dionis. Uh Mark Anthony was a party animal and his critics said that was part of his downfall.

[01:04:37]So I think uh it's kind of Mark Antony's edgginess.

[01:04:42]He's kind of the Russell Brand character of uh ancient Roman politics and uh public opinion wavered over him accordingly. Although it must be said that a lot of what we know of him was written about his en written by his enemies uh after he became a loser. But certainly his identification with Dionis is undoubted.

[01:05:08]>> Thank you. Just to remind those watching at home, there should be a QR code that you should be able to see and that will allow you take you to the place to ask questions. Um, any hands? There's one here. Thank you.

[01:05:23]>> Here comes the microphone. Thank you.

[01:05:28]>> Thank you very much. Um, can I just can you just speak to the the parallels with the with the crisis story, the kind of dying and living God coming from the outside? Um, the whole wine thing.

[01:05:38]>> Yeah. Um, I I won't draw a parallel with the Christ story. uh largely because it's one that was almost drawn by the author of the most enduringly popular work of uh anthropology ever. Uh Sir James Fraser, the famous golden bow which has never been out of print. Uh Fraser was out to undermine Christianity which he loathed. And his way of doing it was to suggest that uh Jesus was uh actually a dying and returning vegetation god uh part of uh a cult that was global at a certain stage of human evolution.

[01:06:22]And the interesting thing is that when it came to it uh Fraser was too chicken actually to say this. And so he put a hint in a footnote of his second edition. uh and then he was probably going to come out of his shell if that worked. Instead of which not just Christians but experts in ancient religion walked all over him for the parallel and so he backed off and deleted it from the third edition thereby removing the entire reason for writing writing the most famous multi-olume work of anthropology.

[01:06:56]So there's been a huge reaction against that, especially in recent America with good classes there denying the existence of a type of dying and and returning god in the near east. I think that's too far. I think there are goddesses and gods, uh, Ishtar is one, uh, Bal is another, who actually do die and return.

[01:07:20]And in the case of some you can relate them particularly well to vegetation and Osiris is an example and I would boldly place Dionis as part of that loose family without suggesting that it's a a cohesive and uniform form of religion and without attempting to relate it to Christianity because the links are just not that firm.

[01:07:46]>> Thank you. Yes.

[01:07:48]Um I was just wondering whether you would agree that although we've got these ancient gods but uh even to this day their presence is like in the tradition songs like John Barleyorn is John Barleyorn a a a dionist figure who's appeared through the centuries to us without the sex of the dancing but with the drinking definitely >> I I think the emission of those is quite significant.

[01:08:15]uh the John Bolicorn has another way if you like at looking at the vegetation regeneration cycle uh in which uh there's this timid and inoffensive creature John Baricorn uh who is then vile treated and doesn't resist and uh then we get the benefit of the result.

[01:08:35]Uh had John Baracorn been Dionasis, dismembered bits of the men who tried to kill him and grind him up would have been strewn all over the landscape. So there is rather a difference in the personality involved.

[01:08:53]So I've got a question here. Um, do you think there is a need for this kind of personality, this kind of emblem in terms of the misrule, the the turning upside down of social norms, these kind of you think in TUDA times where over Christmas, you know, certain little boys were made bishops and things. Is this something that's needed in society? And if so, how do we scratch that itch nowadays? Uh I I think that it's a con constant tension inside society that without radicalism, transgression, rethinking, we're not going to move. Uh these are some of the wellsp springsings of art and culture. Uh but if society tips too much into that, then it disintegrates. uh those who have ever occupied a flat either directly above or directly below or exactly beside Dioniac neighbors at 2 or 3 in the morning will have taken this lesson to heart and the same is true on a a wider social scale.

[01:09:59]Anybody who has lived on a drug council estate uh knows the consequences. So the answer is yes. I mean, being an aging hippie, of course, I have an instinctual sympathy for the radical, the transgressive, the the barrier breaking, but uh if the barrier concerned happens to be one's front hedge, then things do look a bit different.

[01:10:24]>> Yes, I had upstairs neighbors who had one Chemical Brothers album that I can never listen to again now.

[01:10:30]>> Yes.

[01:10:30]>> Anyway, not that I don't like the Chemical Brothers. Um, any other questions in the room? Oh, there's one at the back here that you might be the final question, madam.

[01:10:45]>> Thank you very much. That was very interesting talk. Um, could you forgive my ignorance, but could you explain what a possession cult is, please?

[01:10:51]>> Yeah. Uh it's a cult which is centered on both the veneration of particular spiritual or divine beings and the entry of the worshippers into alternative states of consciousness as part of the process. Uh you uh you cease to be your normal selves. uh induced by drugs as in Santo Da uh induced in other cults by uh by by by rave type approaches you know uh dancing yourself into a trance. Uh the basic thing is to leave your normal self to escape its limitations and thereby make contact with the divine.

[01:11:37]One one could I could say rather pompously that one way but only one way of dividing up world religion is into uh religions of the book in which you read sacred texts and you follow them and that's the way to know the divine religions of internal exploration in which you me these are not mutually incompatible they're often mixed in the same religion religions of internal exploration in which you meditate and you go inwards and there you find the divine and what I might politely call the dynamic religions in which you blow up your everyday self and mind and are released into a different space in which you encounter the divine.

[01:12:20]>> And Dionis is quintessentially a god of the third category.

[01:12:27]>> Wonderful. So, I think um we'll perhaps call the formal proceedings to a close here, but um Ron, I don't know if you are able to hang around for a couple of minutes if people want to come and ask you anything else.

[01:12:36]>> I I always do that. It takes a while to uh get ready to leave. Anyway, >> well, that's very kind. So, um, we'll draw things to a close, but I just want to mention that, uh, Professor Hutton's final lecture as the professor of divinity here, though I'm sure not final lecture ever at Gresham because we won't we won't let him stop. Um, will be on the 17th of June. So, for those watching online who hadn't haven't yet seen him in person live, you know that then you've got one more chance. So, make sure to to book your seats for that. And obviously anyone here would like like to return. We would love to see you again on the 17th of June for um Professor Hutton's final lecture in this series on the Morgan the nightmare queen. Sounds fascinating.

[01:13:22]>> Baddest of bad girls in >> a war goddess and the goddess of uh lots else beside. But I'll also use it to look at the particular character of Irish mythology which sets it apart and also ask why it is when that mythology abounds with war goddesses the Morgan is the one we all still know today.

[01:13:46]>> Wonderful. So that's next month. Thank you very much.