The Holy Grail (Part 2)
Dionysus & Jesus
TL:DR This mini-essay is the second in a three-part series about the strange continuity between paganism, Christianity, and the drug culture of the 1960s. The first mini-essay traces the origins of magical cups, which contained psychoactive potions in the centuries before the life of Christ. This second mini-essay follows the evolution of magic cup religions from the arrival of Dionysus at Eleusis to the transformation of Dionysus into Jesus. The final part is about the revival of Greek culture during the Renaissance, and the rediscovery of psychoactive plants during the 20th Century.
The contents of the magic cup used in the mystery rites at Eleusis was a closely-guarded secret. The penalty for sharing this knowledge with the uninitiated was death. Nevertheless, the secret eventually got out. Pilgrims at Eleusis tended to be wealthy and politically connected, but once common folk got their hands on the ingredients they began holding their own mystical ceremonies outside in forest clearings. And these were much more wild than the goings-on at Eleusis. They abandoned themselves to frenzied madness by sacrificing goats, guzzling potions, and having group sex. A new magic-cup cult called for a new mascot, and so it was that a fresh god named Dionysus became the personification of intoxication and wine. Needless to say, he was immensely popular. Eventually Dionysus became such a staple that he was welcomed as a late entry into the pantheon of Greek gods.
The priest of Delphi and the rulers of Athens tried to keep the cult at a distance but failed. All they could do was to adopt Dionysus into Olympus, hellenize and humanize him, give him an official festival, and turn the revelry of his worshippers from the mad ecstasy of wine among the hills into the stately processions, the robust songs, and the noble drama of the great Dionysia. For a while they won Dionysus over to Apollo, but in the end Apollo yielded to Dionysus' heir and conqueror Christ.
-Will Durant, The Life of Greece, 1939
The rise of Dionysus was the mythological reflection of a real class war. We think of Greek mythology as having been firmly established thousands of years ago. But as the Classical era was actually unfolding, those old stories reflected changing times by themselves shifting and evolving. There’s no more salient example than Dionysus, whose upstart admission to the pantheon of Greek gods mirrored a populist revolt against the ruling elite. The poor actually won that class war. The secret ingredients of the magic cup at Eleusis was only one among many concessions begrudgingly made by the rich. Massive programs of debt forgiveness and land redistribution set the stage for golden ages in Athens and Sparta. And as the class war faded into history, Dionysus became a permanent fixture in Greek mythology.
When Solon of Athens and Sparta’s semi-mythical Lycurgus liberated their populations from debt bondage, they did so as authors of a new civic order, not as drawing on an ancient covenant. Solon’s successors, the Peisistratids, sponsored social reforms as secular leaders, building up the Dionysus festival and Homeric recitations as counterweights to the Eleusan religion controlled by the old aristocratic families.
-Michael Hudson, …and Forgive Them Their Debts, 2018
The magic-cup religions of Eleusis and Dionysus reflected gender, as well as class, divisions. The rites were administered by women. The priestesses of these cults kept the secret knowledge of how to safely administer mystical sacraments without killing their initiates. During Roman times, the gender issue brought an end to the Dionysian cult. The Senate went berserk because of a witch named Paculla Annia, who had started letting men join her Dionysian cult. They were so threatened by her growing influence over young Roman lads that they banned outdoor Dionysian festivals in 186 BC, and punctuated their decree by putting 6,000 participants to death. There was no place for a rebel like Paculla Annia in a strictly patriarchal society like Rome. Eleusis was eventually destroyed by a Christian Emperor, Theodosius in 379 AD. But Dionysus would have the last laugh. The void he left in Roman society was filled by a new god. Like Dionysus, this new god was born of a virgin and half-mortal. He was also associated with wine, his followers regularly drank from a magic cup, and he had strangely long hair for his time. He was said to have been resurrected after dying, just like Dionysus. This new god, of course, was Christ. People don’t realize just how Greek the Christian religion is. The New Testament was written in Greek. And Jesus is venerated and symbolized by the Holy Grail because Christianity is the successor to the magic-cup, psychedelic, mystery religions of classical Greece.
The nativity of Dionysus himself was also something out of this world. In addition to his epiphany as the Holy Child of Persephone at Eleusis, the Greeks had a separate myth about the God of Ecstasy’s strange birth by an ordinary woman named Semele. She was impregnated by Zeus in the form of an eagle, but later incinerated when the King of the Gods showed his true form, killing the mere mortal with his lightning bolt. In order to bring baby Dionysus to term, Zeus decided to sew the fetus up in his thigh, later giving birth to his own son in Anatolia—where Dionysus found his very first female followers. Semele’s own sisters don’t believe a word of the alleged affair with Zeus. Mortals don’t mix with immortals. They think she made the whole thing up, but the wine god won’t stand for it. To save Semele’s good name, the whole plot of Euripides’s The Bacchae tracks the return of this exotic eastern Dionysus to his real motherland, Greece. The first two lines of the play stress the unusual bond between the wine god and his father in heaven. Dionysus calls himself the “Son of God” or Dios pais (Διὸς παῖς), and refers to his earthly mother as the “young girl” or kore (κόρη), which could also be “maiden” or “virgin.” Yes, mortals do mix with immortals. And as the ultimate hybrid, the God of Ecstasy is the miraculous result, both human and divine. As The Bacchae proceeds, these two sides of Dionysus are in constant tension. He wants to introduce the Greeks to a new sacrament for a new millennium, but he doesn’t want to repeat Zeus’s lightning mishap. So in order to avoid scaring everybody to death with the full force of his godhood, the shape-shifter “exchanges his divine form for a mortal one.” And a funny one at that: a long-haired wizard. He is ridiculed as “effeminate,” with hair “tumbling all the way down his cheeks.” Just like the “luxurious locks'' of Dionysus himself, who blurs the boundary between male and female.
-Brian Muraresku, The Immortality Key, 2020
