The Dionysian Mysteries were a ritual of ancient Greece and Rome which used intoxicants and other trance-inducing techniques (like dance and music) to remove inhibitions and social constraints, liberating the individual to return to a natural state. It also provided some liberation for those marginalized by Greek society: women, slaves and foreigners. In their final phase the Mysteries shifted their emphasis from a chthonic, underworld orientation to a transcendental, mystical one, with Dionysus changing his nature accordingly (similar to the change in the cult of Shiva). By its nature as a mystery religion reserved for the initiated, many aspects of the Dionysian cult remain unknown and were lost with the decline of Greco-Roman polytheism; our knowledge is derived from descriptions, imagery and cross-cultural studies.
Read more about Dionysian Mysteries: Origins, Early Dionysus Cult, Emergence and Evolution, Mystery and Public Rites, Temple and Officers, Invocation of Dionysus (from Orphic Hymns)
Famous quotes containing the words dionysian and/or mysteries:
“A life-worshipper’s philosophy is comprehensive.... He is at one moment a positivist and at another a mystic: now haunted by the thought of death ... and now a Dionysian child of nature; now a pessimist and now, with a change of lover or liver or even the weather, an exuberant believer that God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“For it is with the mysteries of our religion, as with wholesome pills for the sick, which swallowed whole, have the virtue to cure; but chewed, are for the most part cast up again without effect.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679)