The Changeling

Dark windings and great chasms, anxious wanderings,
Lost in the maze-like entrails of the silent earth,
Abandoned and alone as Dionysus was;

Then roarings and shield clashes, sudden thunder claps,
Here at the hidden centre of the ancient maze,
Helpless and full of fear as Dionysus was;

Offered, then trampled on, the blood-red grape is crushed,
Here in the secret caverns of the sleeping earth,
Offered, then trampled on, as Dionysus was;

The changing has begun, the strangeness and the cries,
The sudden frenzied rapture and the aching, throbbing pangs,
Resplendent and alone as Dionysus was;

Slow tides and drifts of feelings, carefree wanderings
Through forest floors and oceans, lakes and burning skies,
I speak and I am spoken through as Dionysus was;

Spring meadows, garlands, sounds of flute and pipe and drum,
Bright forms that dance the windings of the sacred dance,
Radiant and full of grace as Dionysus was;

Assembled, then dispersed, the ancient self is lost,
Here in the secret places of the cavernous earth,
Nothing of it remains: the immortal self is born.

Sebastian Hayes (from the collection “Far Cries”)

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The Greeks got round the problem of Dionysus’ mortal mother by having him torn from his incinerated mother’s womb and sewn into Zeus’ thigh, from where he was born (as Athena had been from Zeus’ head) hence his title ‘twice-born’.

Although Dionysus was long regarded as a late-comer from the East, and was the last to join the Olympian pantheon (displacing Hestia and thus at last achieving numerical parity of male and female, and the end of the female dominance that had existed since Minoan times), his name appears on a Linear B tablet, and at a Minoan sanctuary on Keos. This allows us to see Dionysus in the double way that Nietzsche does – as the ground of being, the fundamental chaos that we must gaze into and acknowledge if we are to be honest; and the antithesis, as god of music, ecstasy, drunkenness etc, of Apollo, god of sculptural form, dream, individuation etc. (Ref: Birth of Tragedy)

At the Anthesteria festival, when the Lesser Mysteries (the first stage of Eleusinian initiation) took place, the wife of the chief archon of Athens was ceremonially given in marriage to Dionysus.

Apollo abandoned Delphi for the winter three months (when he went to dwell with the Hyperboreans – the British?), and the cult of Dionysus was celebrated there – there is a cave above Delphi, which I’ve visited, where women gathered to celebrate his rites, a difficult, even penitential, climb to a terrific location.

In “Bread and Wine”, Holderlin twins, even fuses, Christ with Dionysus, seeing Christ as his final incarnation, offering us the last faint light of the departed gods.

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