Review: The Story of Bacchus by Andrew Dalby

Review: The Story of Bacchus by Andrew Dalby

Andrew Dalby is a linguist and historian who seems to know his stuff. I just can’t quite get behind is manner of presentation.

The Story of Bacchus is written almost like a biography, which might seem cute and charming but I didn’t think it was pulled off very well. Biographies tend to be linear and factual and usually don’t have many contradictions and differing evidence (usually, right? I actually haven’t read a biography in years, but this is how I imagine them to be.)

When writing about a God, however, how does one write linearly? How does one stick to facts? How does one avoid contradictions and how does one reconcile the evidence? Dably makes a gallant attempt at this. Seriously, he knows his stuff. It’s not the content that I thought was weird (well, it is, but that’s just Bacchus for you.) The presentation of The Story of Bacchus was just… strange, awkward, and sometimes a bit bizarre. (Or is this just the nature of Bacchus…?) I read it quickly, and it was an easy read. I even enjoyed the content. I just couldn’t get behind the writing style.

The Story begins with the love story of Zeus and Semele, and Dalby makes what I think is a reference to butt sex. He then tells about Bacchus’s childhood, adolescence, his wild wanderings in India, wine, his friends, his lovers, his triumphs, his agonies, and how he fits into the Hellenistic cosmology. All of this is great and detailed and really interesting. I’ve been studying Bacchus for years and this book really helped fill in some gaps and connect some pieces that I’ve been struggling with.

So the book is written like a story (“Zeus said this, and then Semele said this, and this is what Hera thought, and then this happened, and then this thing, and then this.”) But then he inserts some historical stuff, like chapter breaks, and this just disrupts the flow of the writing. It’s a unique way of annotating the text without adding footnotes, but it’s distracting and he doesn’t pull it off gracefully. And then the story resumes, and poor Dalby tries to be conversational with his presentation but it just seems a bit awkward and fumbling.

That all said, I liked the content of this book. (I just really didn’t like the writing style and the presentation of the information.) Dalby knows his myth, and his knows his primary (and sometimes secondary) sources. I appreciated this because now I have a better idea of which dead Greek guys said which thing about which Deity. And while I think Dalby wasn’t trying to present a heavily academic book, I think I would have appreciated old-fashioned footnotes as opposed to random paragraphs and interruptions in the text.

I keep on trying to compare this book to Otto, but they’re just too different. At first I wish I had read this one before reading Otto, thinking this one might have been easier to read and added context to Otto, but they both do different things. Dolby tells a story, Otto presents… well, somewhere between an academic treatise and a devotional piece. I don’t know if it matters if one is read before the other, just as long as both are read. They’re both useful additions to any Dionysian library.

Review: Dionysus: Myth and Cult by Walter F. Otto

Review: Dionysus: Myth and Cult by Walter F. Otto

“Dionysus was the god of the most blessed ecstasy and the most enraptured love. But he was also the persecuted god, the suffering and dying god, and all whom he loved, all who attended him, had to share his tragic fate.”

This book been sitting on my shelf for years, and I was excited to finally make the commitment to read it this winter. I’m taking an on-line course on Dionysus, and figured now is as good as any other time to finally pick it up. What a good decision!

Over the years I’ve seen Dionysus: Myth and Cult referred to as the “Dionysian bible”, and it’s referenced all over in websites, encyclopedias, blogs, and other religious texts. There’s a reason why it’s so popular, and Walter F. Otto presents a text that is both academic and scholarly, but beautiful and inspirational. I’ve also read that he received criticism as a scholar because of the devotion and love he showed while putting together this book. I guess his colleagues accused him of being a Pagan. (oooohhhhh!) Some Christians have also attacked him for trying to revive Classical religion, which he just laughed at. But while Otto may not have been a Pagan, his works live on in the Pagan and Polytheist communities as approachable and accurate texts that continue to inspire and inform.

“It is only in the opposite of all agreement, in supreme tension, when the antitheses become wild and infinite, that the great mystery of oneness is proclaimed from the very depths of being. Nor is it just proclaimed. Oneness itself is revealed to Greek myth and cult as the deity who is mad – As Dionsyus.”

Written in 1960s, it reads a lot like James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, (which I've been 100 pages away from finishing for about 5 years...) but maybe a bit more interesting. I’m not sure if this is the nature of Classical or philological scholarly books or the nature of writing in the early half of the 20^th century. This style of writing might bother some people, but I tend to like academically presented works rather than reading super fluffy new agey stuff all the time. My one complaint is that he uses a lot of Greek and Latin terminology and makes references to writers or other mythological figures who I’m not familiar with. This just meant I had to google some stuff or ask my husband, who is a bone fide expert on these things.

The first section of the book is a short survey of the nature of myth and cultus, which talks a lot about the practices of some of the ancient Greeks, as well as a fair amount of information regarding the study of ancient Greek cultus. This section was less about Dionysus or any other deities and more about theories and speculation regarding ancient Greek worship and the nature of religion.

“At the height of ecstasy all of these paradoxes suddenly unmask themselves and reveal their names to be Life and Death.”

The second section is about Dionysus, with 19 short chapters about his birth, his death, his friends, his madness, and his associations. Some of the sections got bogged down in academic jargon, but for the most part each chapter is a rich tapestry piecing together this and that about “The God Who Comes”. Otto spends a lot time talking about Dionysus’s maenads and nurses, because how can you have Dionysus without his maenad/nurses? And I was pleased to learn so much about these women, especially Ariadne, and to learn more about the Bacchanal experience which is really just so foreign to me (and still is).

I really enjoyed this book and I’m glad I waited until now to read it. It came at a good time in my life, and is a good resource for me to have in the future. I’m also going to keep my eyes open for other books by Otto, though he was a German philologist and unfortunately it doesn’t seem like a lot of his stuff has been translated into English. (and my German isn’t good enough to read this type of stuff.) But mostly I just loved how it seemed like Otto loved Dionysus, and that was just wonderful.

“And so Dionysus made his appearance at a time of his choosing in the spiritual world of the Greeks, too, and his coming was so shattering that it still affects us today.”

Pagan Blog Project – week 52 – Z – Zagreus

http://zoecarnate.wordpress.com

Pagan Blog Project – week 52 – Z – Zagreus

My husband has his degree in Classics, and his department’s Classics Society had this poster up on campus. It was this life-sized, goofy painting of Dionysus - some generic dude with a toga and some purple and some grapes and a big cup of wine. The caption at the bottom said “Born Again Pagan” and while my Pagan friends thought it was super clever, I guess it caused quite a stir among some of the other students and faculty.

At first I didn’t get the joke. I didn’t think it was terribly clever. In my experience growing up Baptist, and later spending time in an evangelical fundamentalist church, the phrase “born again” takes on a pretty specific meaning. To be born again means that you are born physically and then you change your life around and give it to Jesus and start listening to Christian rock and watching the 700 Club and your old life is dead and you’re reborn living a new very boring life.

(Sorry, Christians… I know that this isn’t 100% accurate to the “born again” experience, and I don’t want to discredit how powerful the experience can be. This is just what it was for me which is probably why I’m Pagan now and not Christian.)

So in my experience, born again meant that you were born by your momma and then your old life dies and you live a new life. Or it kind of meant that maybe you tried the Christian thing and then it failed and then suddenly it makes a lot of sense and you are born again and given a do-over for Christianity. Maybe you’ll get it right this time. Maybe it will stick.

So the phrase “Born Again Pagan” just seemed kind of silly to me. When I became a Pagan, no part of me died. It just changed, it morphed. I was the same old me I always had been, but I didn’t have to give anything up, and really, I didn’t have to do anything new (like watch the 700 Club). I could just be Pagan now, and that was that. There was no death or rebirth, but rather, a transformation.

This actually reminds me a lot of the Death card in tarot. It (usually) doesn’t mean a literal death, but more of a metaphorical ending of something in order for something new to grow. The old stuff acts as fertilizer for the new stuff, and the new stuff is often stronger and better than the old stuff, but it needs to be fertilized by the old stuff.

So my coming to Paganism was pretty similar to the Death card. I didn’t die. I wasn’t reborn. I wasn’t born again. I was just transformed.

I’m a huge fan of myth and storytelling and metaphor, so it wasn’t until I began to study mythology that I finally began to understand the phrase “born again Pagan.” There are lots of dying/resurrecting god/man/godman myths from all over the world. In particular, the Classicists of my husband’s degree program were drawing upon the myth of Zagreus/Dionysus when they thought they were being clever with their little poster.

Ancient Crete is a bit different than mainland Greece in many ways, and the Cretians tell the story of Zagreus, who is the infant child of Zeus, or maybe Hades, after they impregnate Persephone while disguised as a snake. Hera gets jealous, as she often does, and she convinces the Titans to murder little baby Zagreus. While in the form of a bull he is torn to pieces and eaten. Someone finds the child’s heart, and Zeus gives this to Semele so she becomes pregnant. Zagreus is reborn as Dionysus.

So finally I was finally able to begin to understand why Dionysus is a Born Again Pagan. (Though I guess one could debate on the term “Pagan” as it applies to Dionysus, but I’m not going to get into that right now.) But what does the term “Born Again Pagan” mean for me? What does it mean for you?

Zagreus has been born again as Dionysus, and that means anything you damn well want it to mean.

And that's part of the fun of being a Born Again Pagan.