Dionysian Solstice

(A version of the following story first appeared in the December issue
of 'Mountain Music'. To read the full narrative of 'the voyage of the
bloody, snake chariot see www.libbyhome.blogspot.com )

Perhaps the days that we are living through, now, give some idea of the
terror and anxiety that our ancestors felt in the time of the fading,
the seeming dying of the light.

For our early ancestors every year's descent
into winter solstice darkness felt like the end of the world, just
as the winter solstice day of December 21, 2012, feels like the end
of the world to many, today.

Our ancestors would closely note the movement of the rising and setting
sun on the horizons. Eventually elaborate ancient observatories, such
as Stonehenge, would be built to observe this movement, to fix the point on the
horizons at which the rising/setting sun would stand still and then
begin the movement to the springtime, the movement to the rebirth of
the light.

It would take about four days for our ancestors, and their ancient
observatories to discern this movement of the sun. And that day,
December 25, became the birth day of gods, such as the Greeks'
Dionysus, and Christian Orthodoxy's Jesus -
potent, solar gods of liberation and illumination who like the food
and shamanistic
plants died and were reborn.

These gods' birth day became celebrations of the light, celebrations of
the resurgence of the life force. The eve of the day and the day would
be celebrated with
shamanistic plants, the kindling of lights, bonfires, uninhibited,
free behavior, music and dance.

Dionysus like Christian Orthodoxy's Jesus was born right after the
Winter Solstice, the son of a divine father (Zeus) and a virgin mother
(Semele). They were both hailed as the King of Kings, and both were
murdered. Both
conquered death, were reborn, and elevated to be beside their divine
fathers. Both made water into wine.

And yet, the wine, Dionysus is the god of, is not like our wine.
Dionysus' wine was a mixture of fermented grape and the rye ergot, a
fungus that infects ripe rye and is a powerful entheogeon (Albert
Hoffman was studying rye ergot extracts in 1945 when he "discovered"
LSD).

Dionysus was the god of the cultivation of the shamanistic, power
plants. The devotees of Dionysus would deliberately cultivate this
fungal blight on an important food plant to make the wine of Dionysus.

The wine of Dionysus makes you trip hard.

And that's the way the Greeks participated in, observed all the
Dionysian Festivals including the Winter Solstice/Birthday Celebration
known as the Lenaea, the festival of the original girls gone wild.

The birth day of Dionysus was the day the year's wine was born, in
that the grape wine had stopped fermenting and was ready to be drunk.

The Greeks believed the winter solstice time was when the boundaries,
the membranes that separated the light and the dark, the living and
the dead, the masculine from the feminine, the gods and the Human,
mortals and immortals, drunkenness and higher consciousness, tragedy
and comedy became stretched and permeable. The gods, goddesses, the
satyrs, the nymphs, the spirits of the dead, and all manner of
devotees of Dionysus attended the Lenaea. Participants would wear
masks and disguises depicting themselves as such archetypal entities.

Many of the Greek plays that have survived were written for the
Lenaea, for Dionysus is the god of theatre, the god of music, the
god of ecstatic dancing and ecstasy itself.

The day was tragic in that the god had been murdered. The day was
joyful, comic in that the god had outwitted death and had been reborn
into his greater and further powers.

The intent of all Dionysian festivals was to allow devotees to fight,
to conquer, to suffer, to triumph as the god did. To share in the
cosmic triumph of the light and the life force and the manifesting of
this eternal life force in vegetative fruitfulness, and abundance.

The disguising of participants as satyrs, and nymphs concealed
excesses, and what would usually be considered unacceptable behavior,
under a mask. Participants in the festival colored their bodies with
plaster, soot, vermilion, and different sorts of green and red juices
of plants. They wore goat and deer skins round the loins, covering
their faces with large leaves and masks.

And yet the Dionysian Festivals were not about drunkenness and sexual
license. They were about leaving the business-as-usual of the Human
Circumstances and going into a novel and strange world.

Drinking the entheogenic wine was considered to be a joyous duty of
gratitude to the god of wine. To not drink the wine was considered
shameful.

The boisterous, joyful music of flutes, cymbals, and drums,
were common to all Dionysian festivals. There would be processions led
by women dressed as Bacchae (all devotees of Dionysus), Lenae/Maenads
(women who resisted Dionysus and were driven mad), Thyades (ravers,
women who had accepted Dionysus and had retained their sanity),
Naiades, Nymphs, and other mythic females, bearing oversized
phalluses, and wearing garlands of ivy. Men, some disguised as women,
would follow.

The choruses sung on the occasion were called dithyrambs, and were
hymns addressed to the god in the freest metres and with the boldest
imagery, in which his exploits and achievements were extolled.

During the earliest Lenaeas young men were sacrificed. They would
literally be ripped apart by nine savage, blood thirsty, drunk,
ecstatically dancing Lenae/Maenads (the original girls gone wild) and
the ripped flesh would be eaten by the women in a strange, disturbing
spiritual ecstasy. Eventually the ecstatic dancing would
produce a baby, the divine Dionysus child, in a winnowing basket,
crowned by snakes.

Eventually it would be a young hill goat that would be ripped apart by
the Lenae/Maenads, eaten bloody and raw and then miraculously reborn
by the god's ecstatically
dancing, mad priestesses.

The sacrifice celebrated the eternal continuity, cycle of birth, life,
death, and rebirth.

The festivals celebrated the liberation/illumination possible to the Human in
theatre, dance, music, art, the cultivation of shamanistic,
entheogenic plants, spiritual insight and prophesy.

Christians didn't celebrate December 25 as Jesus' birth day until the
Fourth Century A.D. The residual Dionysian traditions of celebrating
the day with drunkenness and sexual licentiousness would cause
organized Christian denominations to periodically ban the practice of
celebrating Christmas.

And it wasn't until the Sixth Century A.D. that organized Christianity
stamped out the overt worship of Dionysus by Greek wine-makers.

And yet, in spite of organized Christianity's best repressive efforts
there is something Dionysian about our culture's celebration of the
winter solstice.