CLA204H5 Chapter Notes - Chapter 11: Pentheus, Pactolus, Pangaion Hills
Document Summary
Dionysus is the god of wine, the life force, and the instinctive side of personality. He was admitted to olympus later than the others according to some writers and displaced hestia. To the ancient greeks dionysus (aka bacchus) was the god who taught the art of turning grape juice into wine. At center of his mythic character was his identity as a male principle of fertility, complementary to the female principle embodied by demeter. As a fertility god he encouraged the burgeoning of everything alive: plants, animals, humans. Thick luscious ivy was a sign of his presence. Wore leopard skin, and panthers pulled his chariot. Phallus and horns of a bull were his emblems. He also came to stand for a distinctive form of human experience, a divinely inspired madness in which one"s ordinary sense of self is lost and with it the accepted norms of decent and rational conduct.
