Dionysus, twice-born, torn apart and reassembled – and the only Olympian who was not entirely Greek
Dion Bar at St Paul’s holds a 4.1 from eight hundred people and charges ten to fifty pounds.
And the god in the name has now appeared twice in this survey – we did him at Baby Bacchus in this same postcode, and established that he is not the cheerful fat man on the wine label but the god of losing control, and that the play about him ends with a mother carrying her son’s head down a mountain believing it to be a lion’s.
So this time we will do the other half, which is where he came from.
Twice-born
His mother was Semele, a mortal woman, and Zeus was the father.
Hera, who had every reason to be furious and generally was, persuaded Semele to ask Zeus to appear to her in his true form.
He had sworn an oath and could not refuse. He appeared. And the sight of a god undisguised destroyed her instantly.
Zeus took the unborn child from the ashes and sewed it into his own thigh, and carried it to term, and Dionysus was born a second time out of his father’s leg.
Hence the epithet: the twice-born.
The outsider
Which is the thing that makes him different from every other Olympian.
He arrives. That is the entire structure of his mythology – Dionysus is always coming from somewhere else, always foreign, always turning up in a city that has to decide what to do about him.
The Greeks themselves regarded him as an import, from Thrace or from the East, and told stories about his arrival rather than his residence.
And in almost every one of those stories, a king refuses to admit him, and is destroyed.
Pentheus at Thebes, torn apart by the women. Lycurgus, driven mad. The daughters of Minyas, who stayed at their looms and would not join the rites, and were turned into bats.
The pattern is not subtle. The god arrives, the establishment says no, and the establishment is annihilated.
What it is about
The thing you have decided not to acknowledge.
Dionysus is not the god of drinking. He is the god of the part of a person that the daylight arrangements do not accommodate – and the myth’s argument is that this force is real, that it will not be legislated away, and that a society which builds no room for it will find that it makes its own room, violently.
Every civilisation has worked out some version of this. The carnival. The saturnalia. The Friday night.
The Prat’s theological desk regards the Greeks as having been considerably more honest about it than we are.
The bar
Champagne, a good view of the cathedral, and a 4.1 across a serious sample – an honest number for a large room full of people who all arrived at six.
Verdict
Good bar. Go, drink, and remember that the god on the door was born out of a thigh and destroys anybody who will not let him in.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
My mate said “The London Prat is irresponsible. It doesn’t offer solutions. It just destroys faith in everything.”