Dionysus

Dionysus, the Roman Bacchus, is the god of the vine and of wine, of ecstasy and divine madness, of the mask and the theater. He comes from the margins, loosening the bonds of the ordinary self in his frenzied rites, and stands as the great counterpart to the luminous order of Apollo — the two sharing the shrine at Delphi between them.

In the Orphic mysteries he has a deeper role. As the child Zagreus, son of Zeus, he is seized and torn apart by the Titans and devoured — and from their ashes, blasted by Zeus's bolt, the human race is born, part Titanic and part divine. So each soul carries a Dionysian spark imprisoned in a Titanic body, and the rites aim at its liberation. The Neoplatonists read the dismemberment of Dionysus as the descent of the one divine life into the scattered multiplicity of the sensible world, and his restoration as the soul's return to unity.

Epithets

• Bromios Βρόμιος — the roaring, the thunderer
• Lyaios Λυαῖος — the releaser, looser of cares
• Eleutherios Ἐλευθέριος — the liberator
• Iacchus Ἴακχος — the ritual cry of Eleusis
• Zagreus Ζαγρεύς — the Orphic 'first Dionysus', torn and reborn
• Liknites Λικνίτης — of the winnowing-basket cradle
• Dithyrambos Διθύραμβος — of the choral hymn
• Liber Lat. — 'the free', his Italian name