Sexual Depravity and Religion

For some reason, I feel that we are missing a central piece of the Dionysian puzzle in terms of our comprehension of this ancient religion. Obviously, governments considered it antisocial and anarchistic to the point of outlawing it in Rome at one point... but was it really?

Nowadays, many 'alternative' lifestyles have taken their concept of 'Dionysian mystery' and made it a blanket for every type of sexual activity including general orgies, but that was NOT what Dionysus represented. It was carefully-planned, carefully-limited depravity and anarchy that was one of the cornerstones of the Dionysian mysteries.

Essentially, Dionysus represented another aspect of the 'Lord of Misrule' traditions where, at the end of a year, some one from the very lowest rung of society's ladder was crowned king and allowed to dictate to EVERY ONE for a few days.
Turning society upside down was the beginning of a general rite of purification and cleansing before one embarked upon a new year.

I think that the Dionysian mysteries in their orgiastic component were much the same. They did not occur constantly. In fact, in some societies, it has been argued that the rite occurred only once every TWO years.

Many societies embraced the concept of taboo. Most taboos were actions that were utterly forbidden most of the time BUT were allowed on a single ritual occasion. Whether it was cannibalism, incest, human sacrifice or the eating of pork, the forbidden actually was mandated at a specific time and place.

This is where the ancient reports of Jews eating pork by moonlight fit. Pork, forbidden in the Jewish religion, HAD to be consumed at a specific time and place, evidently, in one society at least. Sir James Frazer speaks of this at length in the Golden Bough.

Did Dionysian initiates murder human beings with their bare hands and teeth and consume the flesh raw? It is possible that 'The Bacchae', the play on which MOST of contemporary comprehension of Dionysian rites is based, was as much a piece of fictional sensationalism as 'TrueBlood' is now! Obviously, the audience who watched the play originally knew where fact ended and fiction began.

Ancient myths were morality tales as well as a mixture of religion, history and inventive drama. Certainly the death of Penthius has its basis historically AND religiously in the annual rites of Attis. Kings were sacrificed ritually on trees and indeed the crucifixion of Jesus Christ probably was a ritual act in an ancient tradition, rather than being something utterly new. That does NOT make the crucifixion of Christ LESS of a powerful mystery but MORE of one.

Did Bacchantes run wild in the sacred rite killing humans and animals with their bare hands and teeth and eating the flesh raw? That they consumed raw flesh is undeniable... in the rite that preceded the omophagia, the ritual sacrificial animal probably had to be torn rather than cut, probably with the aid of cords and ropes rather than the strength of bare hands. It may have begun with a ritual hanging much like the hanging of Attis or Odhinn.

These are but details that now are the subject only of conjecture but Frazer operated according to the most logical premise, that ALL myths and practices are derived from the same original source and by studying one in his age, the scholar could discover the basis of others lost in the obscurity of time.

So it is with the mysteries of Dionysus. The three elements that occur again and again in literature and visual representation are the oreibasia, the sparagmos and the omophagia. Mind you, this is only ONE of the mysteries but it appears to be the only one of interest to contemporary society. Others included the making of sacred wine and the feeding of it to the spirits. Oreibasia is the energetic dance to the heights of the mountains, rather like a marathon of long-distance running. That was the preliminary to the sparagmos or rending of the sacrifice into pieces in ritual fashion. The omophagia was the 'holy communion' rite in which the sacrificial raw flesh became the flesh of the god.

In contemporary Western society, however, it is the sexual aspect of the rite that has been embraced without reference to any of the mystical rituals that preceded it in the ancient religion.

Sexual depravity WAS a component of the Dionysian rite but only in combination with the other aspects of the tradition. There were specific days when these mysteries were enacted. It was NOT a general lifestyle.

As previously argued, I believe that the sexual licence was on a par with the 'Lord of Misrule' celebrations. In ancient Egypt, five days were set aside at the end of every year and dedicated to the god Set who represented the Lord of Misrule and Anarchy. The killing of Osiris actually is very similar to the sparagmos ritual. The body of Osiris was divided into a number of pieces and thrown into the Nile. In Egypt, however, the rending may have involved a ritual knife.

This brings me to the final piece of my puzzle which is the unattached phallus taken from Attis, from Dionysus and from Osiris. It figured largely in the women's rites behind closed doors while the men paraded outside in the city streets carrying huge phalli in procession. Although these mysteries were secret and therefore never committed to writing, there are sufficient hints in other mystery religions to argue that they involved an act of copulation with an artificial phallic member who represented the god. This did not constitute self-pleasuring in a casual, carnal sense but rather a transcendental religious experience wherein the women were visited by the god and achieved another state of consciousness.

Orgasm is another state of consciousness and by divorcing it from any mortal partner on this particular day, it probably allowed the women to achieve a truly spiritual experience of divine visitation. It was a SPECIAL rite, and it was restricted to one night. It was not a general invitation to what Roman Catholicism terms 'self-abuse' and indeed was the very opposite of self-abuse. It was not a solitary pleasure. It was a holy communion with the god from whom the twin rivers of life and death flowed.

The phallus was cut from the god himself and then became available to humankind. In a different mystery dedicated to the Earth Mother, a basket containing a mystery was uncovered and contained the phallus of the god. Dionysus is the 'green ear of corn harvested' and the liknon contained that 'green ear of corn' or phallus. Attis sacrificed his phallus to the Earth Mother Cybele. All of these mystery religions contain the same central potent symbol. It is the phallis. That is why there are museums in Europe crammed with phalli.

The liknon in fact is a winnowing fan. In the ancient epic poem describing the struggle between Baal and Mot, the Goddess after killing Mot (Lord of Death), places him in her winnowing fan and winnows his remains. This was a ritual enacted every seven years.

Mot in the ancient poem declares to Ba'al: 'Because of you I have experienced splitting with the sword, Because of you I have expeirenced burning with fire; Because of you, I have experienced grinding with millstones; Because of you, I have experienced winnowing with the basket; because of you, I have experienced sowing in the field; because of you, I have experienced scattering in the sea'... His remains ultimately are scattered and eaten by birds.

This is interesting for a number of reasons as it is a rite that is echoed in many future religions, including funeral practices in India and Tibet where a corpse must be cut into pieces and placed in a high place to be devoured by vultures. Although it has been argued that the 'death' of Mot is nothing more than a description of ancient agricultural practices of preparing and sowing seeds, it is far more, just as the rites of Dionysus involve far more than a method of making wine from grapes.

The most important 'part' of any male god is the phallus. It is the phallus that is placed in the winnowing fan or liknon and uncovered at the strategic moment in the sacred rite.

When I visited Malta, I saw both the ancient female goddess figures and the phalli carved of stone. They cannot be considered separate. Dionysus gives his manhood to the Earth and to humanity.

At the Last Supper, Christ dedicated his body and blood to humanity, clearly commanding his followers to eat of his body and drink of his blood. The sexual component of his life is shrouded in total mystery. It is possible that he deviated from the ancient tradition in that respect, but unlikely. His later disciples, especially Paul, who never even MET Jesus, were the ones who were consumed with the idea of 'chastity' and 'denial' to the point where they rewrote the religion and made sex synonymous with the devil.

This was nothing new either, as in the Orphic tradition, humanity was made both of the element of Earth (the dross of the Titans) and of the element of Heaven (pure). Get rid of the body and what remains is pure in the form of the soul...

In conclusion, Dionysus does NOT represent complete licence and sexual depravity or self-indulgence. He represented many different elements in the journeys between conception and resurrection, both the life-force and the death-force and his rituals, including those of the Bacchanals, were cyclic in nature. Any one who would like to think that by calling themselves followers of Dionysus, they are given total licence to commit any and every act under the sun and moon in the pursuit of mindless pleasure are sadly mistaken. The rites of Dionysus were sacred mysteries and were committed for the Earth and humanity, in the cause of fertility. They were as far from acts of 'self-abuse' as the Earth from the Sun.

New Archaeological Discoveries

Typical of my own lack of organisation, I created a webpage for Ancient Sites and yet allow the topic to spill over onto this page.

Here is the link to the primary page devoted to Ancient Sites:

Freyashawk's Guide to Ancient Sites


Humanity's interest in antiquities is nothing new. Our species always has been fascinated by the past, and indeed, myths and legends often have been created to explain an ancient artifact or site. Buildings that defied the technological skills of the culture that rediscovered them were believed to have been built by a race of 'giants' or gods. Now, human beings like to think they are more sophisticated than that, but sociological theories with respect to the distant past are speculation after all. Even if they clothe those theories in scientific terms, they are no more certain of the truth than the bards long ago who wove tales about the past.

I have met individuals who had little knowledge or interest in their own ancestors and heritage. I never could comprehend that sort of indifference, but I am an explorer at heart and if given a thread will follow it to the end, however dark and complex the labyrinth may be. It is a delight to discover a new path, or to rediscover a path that has been lost.

I was thinking about our fascination with the past and what it signified in terms of our interest in others. I don't really think it is a measure of our interest in other people, to be honest, but is rather a form of self-interest. At the risk of offending an enormous profession, it has been said that every psychologist or psychiatrist is some one who is obsessed with self-analysis. Certainly I have found members of those professions in general to be less than balanced emotionally, spiritually and socially, and in many cases to have created more complex and less satisfying personal lives for themselves than one may have expected.

In the same way that psycho-analysts study others in order to better understand themselves, it is possible that we study the past in order to study our own reflections in the glass of time.

I always found it rather ludicrous that there were those who believed so-called 'cavemen' or cave dwellers to be somehow inferior intellectually or in any fashion to contemporary humanity. Why would paleolithic human beings be less human? Why would they be less capable of logic, imagination or any other human quality?

Of course, the theory that paleolithic and so-called 'prehistoric' cultures belonged to a species with 'primitive capacities' has been discredited fully now by a multitude of archaeological discoveries in the past century. It appears to have been part and parcel of a general 'superiority complex' in the 19th century. Without denigrating the accomplishments of 19th Western civilisation in the least, the spirits of the extraordinary builders in ancient Peru and Malta either must have been greatly outraged or amused by the depiction of the human beings from those periods in history as nothing more than remotely sentient creatures whose greatest accomplishment was the discovery of how to rub two sticks together to make fire!

What is ironic as well are the discoveries that, for all our advanced technology, there truly is 'nothing new under the sun'. Ancient civilisations understood the movements of the planets and constellations and possessed intricate calendars as well as knowledge of advanced medical techniques. The Greeks were correct when they defined our psychological Achille's heel as the flaw of hubris. In my view, it stems from an essential sense of insecurity. We want to feel that we have surpassed our ancestors in some fashion, even if nothing we ever accomplish truly can be considered unique or unprecedented. The truly superior human being, after all, is the one who admits he/she knows very little.

In any event, whatever the hidden motivations, I am thrilled that our contemporary culture is interested in preserving antiquities rather than allowing them to be bulldozed or otherwise swept into the dustpile. There was a time when a desire for a quick profit would have resulted in the obliteration of a newly discovered ancient site or tomb... now it appears that, even if the reasons are no nobler, governments recognise the value of tourism and are determined to preserve the history of our species on this planet. Furthermore, as much as one may cringe at the thought of thousands upon thousands of tour groups invading every corner of the globe, one does have an intense desire to be there as well. Perhaps one should be grateful that there always are people who are interested in something outside their own lives...

We do live in an exciting age. Every month, a new site is discovered somewhere and our knowledge of ancient history increases a hundredfold. Even as our own culture may be moving headlong towards a final obliteration of this planet, we are busy cataloguing and exploring our past. Perhaps our knowledge of our own power to destroy our entire planet is part of the reason we are so determined to prove our longevity as a species... if we survived despite the Great Flood and despite the sinking of Atlantis and Mu, perhaps we could survive a nuclear cataclysm as well. After all, Mad Max showed us how to do it

Reality, Virtual and Actual and their Intersections

I had to endure an MRI today. It is not possible to take an MP3 player (Zune or IPod) into the machine and I cannot stand the radio for the most part, so I went through it without any cushion where noise/sound is concerned. I had other MRIs in the past, but was in considerably severe pain this morning before the procedure, so it was a challenge to remain as still as a corpse for half an hour in a closed white capsule with the sound of a jackhammer beating down upon me every few seconds.

I thought I would try to use the MRI as an experimental meditation environment by transforming the sounds of the machine into hypnotic 'music' akin to drumming. It was difficult at some points, but I did learn to accept the 'heartbeat' of the machine, which is a little faster than a normal human heartbeat and 'breathier' somehow.

Time is warped in a situation like this. A minute can appear to be endless but if one relaxes, one can transform it into dreamtime to some extent. The fact that one is not allowed to wear a watch makes it impossible to guess how much actual time has elapsed. The trick is to suspend interest in time and space somehow and to simply float with the tide, accepting the annoying noises and transforming them into a kind of soundtrack to an internal adventure.

I always have been fascinated with small closed spaces, actually, and when I was a child, one of my favourite resting places was an enormous wooden rolltop desk we had inherited from a great-aunt. It was large enough that an adult could stretch out comfortably in it and shut the top without being cramped. The dim lighting, faint odour of old wood and its coziness all appealed to me. I spent many hours in that desk. Bizarre? Eccentric? Fortunately, I never cared about the opinions of others where matters like that were concerned. Furthermore, beds in enclosed spaces have been fashionable during different eras in different cultures. They still are used in parts of Brittany I think... Not to mention the Vampire or Vampyre, who sleeps in his/her coffin on a regular basis.

In the MRI, I tried to believe I was resting in a catacomb in Malta, on a slab of stone rather than the floor of a capsule made of plastic. I tried to imagine the coolness of the stone, the smell of slightly damp earth and rock, and far above, in another world almost, bright Mediterranean sunlight and fields filled with red poppies and other wildflowers. I never have had the opportunity to visit the catacombs in Malta, but in the photographs I have seen, they represent a sort of communal post-mortem paradise. The resting places for the dead were 'window beds' of sorts, shelves carved into solid rock, with another little niche for funeral meals.

Far from the reality of the MRI with its grinding noise, I retreated to a place I never had seen in actuality but longed to visit... and almost made it real.

I am by no means 'half in love with easeful death' nowadays like Keats but I do think that our culture is wrong to view death as a terrifying enemy or as something to be escaped. It always seemed hypocritical to me that individuals who proclaimed themselves to have faith in God were terrified of meeting Him and wished to prolong THIS inferior life as long as possible. After all, if Heaven does exist, who on earth would not wish to pack his/her bags and take the journey to that blissful place?

If, as Swinburne liked to dream, the tomb is nothing more than a place where eternal sleep can be enjoyed, that is not such a terrible fate either. I would like to think that one could face the prospect of death without terror or dread... At any rate, I do enjoy total darkness, sensory deprivation and unequivocal peace and quiet... as long as it doesn't last TOO long. An MRI may not be my resting place of choice, but its size and shape do not cause me any disquiet. It is the awful noise and the lack of any aesthetic beauty that is far less pleasant. Why can't they cover the inside of the lid with a wonderful mosaic pattern, for example? Even a pattern of stars against a velvet black sky would be appealing to the patient.

Meanwhile, I received an email from a player who is playing a game that is based on 'real time'. The game is 'Animal Crossing Wild World'. The player asked a number of questions, the last of which was: 'The last thing is that today it rained in real time but in my game it wasn't raining, why didn't it rain in the game? I thought it performed on real time, I tried restarting my game and it still wasn't raining, its been pouring rain here where I live (Canada)...'

At first I thought it was a joke. I could not imagine any game accepting not only the local time but being connected to local weather conditions as well! In fact, one must SET the DS clock to a specific time zone. The game then accepts that time initially and keeps using it as a guide. It does not communicate with local news and weather...

But what a thought! Why not, one might ask? There are virtual realities such as 'Second Life' that operate on 'real time', although it always is a time that is universal to Second Life rather than accepting individual time zones. It is not impossible to visualise a future where games could communicate with local weather stations and incorporate those weather conditions. Whether or not it makes any sense to do so is another matter.

Animal Crossing allows a player to map constellations in his/her own sky and the stars will move according to the seasons in the same way that our stars move across the sky in the course of the year. I suppose it is not that absurd for the player to think that it ought to be raining in his village in Animal Crossing at the same time that it rained in Canada.

Freyashawk's Return

Perhaps my absence during the month of April has gone virtually unnoticed in the real world, although it is evident that the gaming community missed me to the point of filling my postbox completely with 1000 emails, making it impossible for any one else to contact me by email until now.

Nonetheless, for any one visiting THIS site who noted that a veil of silence descended at the start of April, I felt I should make a small announcement of my return home. I have had many adventures, some far more pleasant than others. I would prefer to draw a permanent veil over medical pain and suffering and so on and focus on positive experiences.

As I was forced by circumstance to neglect my game guide work during the month of April, I now have some pressing deadlines to meet. Despite that, I intend to create a new ancient history website. Inter alia, the ancient Etruscan site of Tarquinia, sites in Carthage, Malta and Pompeii will be discussed. Here is the link to the page:

Freyashawk's Guide to the Ancient World

I will begin with Pompeii.

The wonders of the ancient world are undeniable and from earliest childhood always commanded my heart, mind and soul. A far more difficult lesson, however, has been the lesson of physical disability and too often, the failures of the power of my own 'mind over matter'. What I have seen during the past month has renewed my faith in the indominable power of the human spirit in a refusal to admit even the possibility of defeat or helplessness. This past month, I have seen more than one individual in his/her 80s and 90s who, forced to proceed everywhere with an oxygen tank as a permanent companion, nonetheless continued to LIVE and TRAVEL. At a far younger age, I am ashamed that I ever doubted my own willpower and determination to overcome every obstacle and handicap! Details to follow...