Dionysus: God of Wine, Ecstasy, and the Dissolution That Liberates — The Olympian Who Refuses to Stay in His Place
Dionysus — Roman marble sculpture after a Hellenistic model, 2nd century CE, Musée du Louvre, Paris. The god in his most composed form: youthful, androgynous, serene — the still center of a deity whose mythological role is defined by the opposite of stillness, by the dissolution of every boundary that gives a still center its definition. There is a paradox at the heart of Dionysus that the ancient Greeks seem to have understood perfectly and that we are still trying to articulate: he is the god of the loss of self, and yet he is a very specific, very particular god. He is the deity of dissolution, and yet his cult produced the most precisely crafted dramatic art in the ancient world. He is the outsider who is always arriving, always foreign, always the stranger at the gate — and yet he is one of the twelve Olympians, born from the supreme god himself, enshrined at Delphi alongside Apollo. Dionysus (Roman Bacchus ; also Bromios , "the Roarer"; Iacchos in the Eleusinian...