Demeter and Dionysus - Grade: A PDF

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I compare two Olympian gods, Dionysus and Demeter. I reflect on how they moth represent fertility and have cults of worship surrounding them, but they represent different aspects of the Earth....

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Shannon Stokes CLSA:2016:0EXV Fall 2020 Deities of the Earth There are countless Greek gods associated with the Earth, but two of the Olympian gods in particular stand out. Demeter and Dionysus do not interact much in Greek mythology, but their similarities are notable. Demeter and Dionysus represent different aspects of the Earth; they encompass multiple cultural binaries which manifests themselves in their similar cult worship. Dionysus and Demeter both rule over the realm of the Earth; they are gods of fertility and nutrition, although they represent different aspects. Dionysus’s mythological followers, the satyrs, are “perpetually in a state of sexual excitement” (Morford et al. 321), representing his fertility. Demeter is also the “the goddess of crops and the fertile earth.” (Lemming). Demeter encompasses a more symbolic fertility as she controls the harvest. The Homeric hymn to Demeter is a etiological nature myth that describes the seasons of the harvest. Each year when Persephone lives a “third part of the circling year to darkness and gloom,” (“To Demeter” line 446) Demeter falls into a depression and ceases the harvest. Demeter’s control over the harvest ties in to her association with nutrition. She is the goddess of grain and food, and she demonstrates power over these elements, for she can make “fruit spring up from the rich lands” (“To Demeter” line 471). She is the goddess of dry nutrition while Dionysus is the god of wet nutrition. He exhibits reign over not just wine but all liquid nutrition. In The Bacchae, one of his cult followers “struck her thyrsus against a rock and a fountain of cool water came bubbling up”

(Euripides, Bacchae, lines 704-705). In this respect, using theorist Claude Levi Strauss’s ideas, they represent the binary of wet and dry. Demeter and Dionysus both have duel natures of both life and destruction. “Dionysus represents the sap of life, the coursing of blood through the veins” (Morford et al. 321), but he can also be incredibly destructive. For example, in the Bacchae he tricks Pentheus and offers him up as a sacrifice to be torn apart limb from limb: “every hand was smeared with blood as they played ball with scraps of Pentheus' body”( Euripides, Bacchae, lines 1134-1135). ). Dionysus is wild and destructive. In comparison, Demeter also encompasses the duel nature of both life and destruction, but her destruction comes from a place of suffering. When her daughter was taken from her, “she caused a most dreadful and cruel year for mankind over the all-nourishing earth:” (“To Demeter line 307). Her motherly emotions drive this famine, for “bitter pain seized her heart” (“To Demeter, line 40). Both the gods can bring great joy and great pain, and this aspect of their nature is also revealed in their chthonic ties. As gods of the Earth, they are associated with the underworld. Demeter’s daughter is the queen of the underworld, and some sources even say that Persephone is Dionysus’s mother: “Zeus mated with his daughter Persephone, who bore a son, Zagreus, which is another name for Dionysus” (Morford et al. 322). While he and Demeter are different, they both have a duel nature that reveal aspects of the human condition. They are mediums between life and death; they are the intermediate between nourishment and suffering. Dionysus and Demeter both have similar mystery cult worshipers due to their powers of fertility and destruction. Dionysus alludes to his cult worship in the opening lines of The Bacchae, “I taught my dances to the feet of living men, establishing my mysteries and rites” (Euripides, Bacchae lines 17-18). Due to Dionysus’s association with and the binary of life and

death, the cult has a sexual component to it. In the Homeric Hymn “To Demeter”, Demeter establishes the Eleusinian mysteries. She goes to Eleusis and reveals herself to the ungrateful family whose child she tried to make immortal. She proclaims as punishment to “build me a great temple and an alter with it” (“To Demeter” line 270). The hymn establishes and reinforces the social institution of mystery cults. The Eleusinian mysteries promised initiates “hopes for a blessed afterlife” (Lemming), perhaps relating to Demeter and Dionysus’s chthonic ties. The Eleusinian Mysteries may have had a sexual component as well. Some insist on a “literal sexual union between the Hierophant and the Priestess of Demeter” (Morford et al. 350). Others still claim that Dionysus “may have been linked with Demeter and Kore” (Morford et al. 350). The mysteries included a “procession to Eleusis behind a figure of the ecstatic Dionysus.” (Lemming). Even if Dionysus was not directly involved in the Eleusinian processions, the themes of the cult of Eleusis have “in common with Dionysiac cults, a belief in the immortality of the soul and in redemption” (Morford et al. 351). Both cults, established through an ancient text, reveal aspects of the god and goddess’s nature. Both gods have ties to fertility, life, death, pain, emotion, and the underworld. While one falls into the mother goddess archetype and the other is a wild, chaotic wine god, the two gods share more similarities than one might find at first glance. The most stunning similarities reveal themselves in Demeter and Dionysus’s worship, but scholars may never know for sure exactly how these similarities unfolded in secret these secret mystery cults.

Bibliography Euripides. Bacchae. Translated by W. Arrowsmith. 2013. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Leeming, David. "Eleusinian mysteries." The Oxford Companion to World Mythology. : Oxford University Press, , 2006. Oxford Reference. Morford, Mark, et al. Classical Mythology. Oxford University Press, 2019. “To Demeter.” Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica, translated by Hugh G. EvelynWhite, William Heinemann, 1920, pp. 289–325. Word count: 941...