Classical Myth: Fertility and Death

You see Dionysus (also known as Bacchus) here because he is central to the myths of fertility and death described in Barry Powell’s Classical Myth. I have been blogging my way through this book, and you can find my earlier posts on this book: Getting Started, Myths of Creation, and The Olympians.

Demeter (Ceres) and her daughter Persephone are the power of vegetable fertility. They bring the growing season and make the grain grow. Without them, we die. But Persephone also is taken to the underworld and eats the pomegranate, a symbol of blood and death. The fertility stories include death, because death is necessary before new life can come.

Whereas Demeter is calm and fruitful, Dionysus is active, agitated and destructive. He careens through the middle east and Greece, demanding allegiance and imposing terrible consequences when he doesn’t get it. In Euripedes’ play The Bacchae the king is destroyed by his own mother. Dionysus is the male fertility principle. He brings life, but he also brings death. Powell explains,

In his role as a fertility-deity, Dionysus can be compared to Demeter. Demeter gives the grain, which is precious to human beings, but by nature dry and passive.  Dionysus, on the other hand, represents a wet and active substance, the “juice” that gives life to things.

Further, whereas most gods are distant, the experience of Dionysus was strong and personal. His followers were not content to sing praises and make sacrifices. They ran through the countryside; they danced; they ate raw meat.

To the rational, conscious mind, which values order and balance above passion and spontaneity, Dionysus must appear the antithesis of all that is good and right…. Wherever Dionysus and his cult originated, the persistent portrayal of him as a new god, and likewise the many stories of the resistance he encountered, must  reflect the Greeks’ aversion to the violent, irrational side of human existence, their reluctance, and ours to accept the power of unreason.

Reluctant to accept unreason they were, but they did not deny its existence and its power.