Dionysus

One interesting book set to check out is The Golden Bough by J.G. Frazer. It's a compendium of myth and legend, and is really interesting. You can read it here. Dionysus is someone featured in it, he's a very interesting god. Also called Bacchus, his cult and myth have many different parts--a tragic death and revival, a group of wild female followers called maenads, a focus on the opposite of Apollonian values. The Dionysian Mystery cult was very interesting and featured an emphasis on the chthonic [underworld/earth].

The cult is depicted in huge wall paintings in one of the ruins of a Roman Villa near Pompeii that survived.

Nietzsche laid out some interesting thoughts on this idea of logic [logos in Greek] vs chaos--ie. Apollonian versus Dionysian. Apollo is the god of beauty, restraint, refinement, cool wisdom, measured grace and art and music [think of Bach] while Dionysus represents passion, impulse, wild feeling, ecstasy and drunkenness. They are two sides of a coin. What an interesting dialectic.

He had many names, or epithets: Bromios [he who roars/sounds/rumbles], Eleutherios [emancipator], Dendritês [the tree god], Delphis [the dolphin--because of the myth of him turning sailors into them] and Lysios [liberator], read some here.

His emblems are many: the bull, fig trees, grape tree vineyards, the thrysus staff [a wand/staff sometimes made of fennel stalks topped with a pinecone and often covered with ivy and a ribbon. It was sometimes dipped in honey, and the maenads are often shown to carry it.

Above is a mosaic of Dionysus from Cyprus--it's beautiful there, I still have to take a trip and see it. If you like Dionysus or classical/neo-classical art, check out the Weguelin painting of Dionysus with the nymphs here [1888]. Michelangelo did a statue of the young Dionysus and Caravaggio did a painting.

Dionysus was even featured in the True Blood books and tv show if you want a quick, easily accessible way to get into it. Sometimes light confections can give way to a true interest and serious learning.

The Orphic Hymns [supposedly by Orpheus, circa 200 b.c.] mention Dionysus often, here's hymn XLIV:
A Hymn
Come, blessed Dionysius, various nam'd, bull-fac'd,begot from Thunder,
Bacchus fam'd.Bassarian God, of universal might, whom swords, and blood, and sacred rage delight:
In heav'n rejoicing, mad, loud-sounding God, furious inspirer, bearer of the rod:
By Gods rever'd, who dwell'st with human kind, propitious come, with much-rejoicing mind.

Here's another:
Hymn XXIX:

"I call upon loud-roaring and revelling Dionysus,

primeval, double-natured, thrice-born, Bacchic lord,

wild, ineffable, secretive, two-horned and two-shaped.

Ivy-covered, bull-faced, warlike, howling, pure,

You take raw flesh, you have feasts, wrapt in foliage, decked with grape clusters.

Resourceful Eubouleus, immortal god sired by Zeus

When he mated with Persephone in unspeakable union.

Hearken to my voice, O blessed one,

and with your fair-girdled nymphs breathe on me in a spirit of perfect agape".