WHAT DO IVY, GRAPE VINES, LIONS, BEARS, BULLS, AND MASKS HAVE IN COMMON? They’re all associated with Dionysus in ancient myth, literature, and art.
Dionysus is not simply the god of wine. He cannot be reduced to the jovial, tipsy Bacchus immortalized in the Disney treatment of Beethoven’s “Pastoral” in Fantasia — although that is one facet of the god’s character.
Indeed, Dionysus is a complex mythic figure of great depth and power. Walter Otto called him “the wild spirit of antithesis and paradox (Dionysus: Myth and Cult, 1965, p. 136). Carl Kerényi, a mythologist and colleague of Carl Jung, sums up a different take on the god in the title of his study, Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life (1976).
The vine, growing abundantly and precociously, is a fitting natural image of indestructible life. As both ivy and grape, the vine may be the image most often associated with Dionysus. The two classical myths of the god’s birth point to the same theme. The story told in the Orphic literature says the Titans took the new-born god and dismembered him. He is reborn, however, when Athena finds his heart and is able to restore the infant to life. In the tale alluded to by the classical dramatist Euripides in The Bacchae, Semele, while carrying Dionysus in her womb, is destroyed in the glory of an epiphany of Zeus, the baby’s father. Zeus then sews the child into his own thigh and carries the baby to term. Here again, we see Dionysus represented as indestructible life.
Lions (or leopards or panthers) and bears and bulls are mythical “attributes” of Dionysus, animals closely associated and typically pictured with him. (Did you hear echoes from The Wizard of Oz just now? — “Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!”) Big cats, bears and bulls are also attributes of the archaic Great Goddess, the Magna Mater, of the ancient Mediterranean world. On the one hand, these animals manifest the fearsome and terrifying qualities of Dionysus. On the other hand, they simultaneously indicate an intimate relationship between the god and the Goddess. Consider, as well, the fact that Dionysus was often pictured as a beautiful, effeminate youth, and you’ll begin to see the god, paradoxically, as a “mask” of the Goddess, as the Goddess manifesting in masculine form, if you will.
Interestingly, a mask on a pole was one of the god’s more common and more mysterious representations. Was it the mask of terror one’s face would take on when confronting the awe-inspiring god face-to-face during an initiation into a Dionysian mystery cult? Was it related somehow to the masks of drama, of tragedy and comedy, because Dionysus was thought to have established and been present in the Greek theater? We don’t know the answer, but it’s clear the mask points toward the powerful transformations experienced in encounters with Dionysus.
Seeing Dionysus as a god of transformation brings us back to Bacchus because, in fact, the crude intoxication brought about by drinking wine transforms consciousness. So, in a way even Disney’s silly cartoon figure points toward the profound spiritual transformations communion with Dionysus offered his devotees.
“I am the vine, you are the branches,” Jesus says to his disciples (Jn. 15:5), and Dionysus peeks out through the mask of Christ — wild, paradoxical, transformative, offering abundant, exuberant, indestructible, eternal life.
For more on Dionysus and the Christological symbolism in the Gospel of John, see chapter four in my book Moonlight Shines in the Darkness: A Psychosymbolic Reading of Jesus and the Feminine in the Fourth Gospel.
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