Dionysus, the master of the vine, was the Greek god of wine and intoxication, passion and fertility, who brought clarity, wisdom, and freedom to the world through music, dance, and drama. He had the capability to create a state of extreme ecstatic feeling in the heart that could detach his followers of their inborn inhibitions and make them free from the constraints of society. Although he is often depicted with the symbolic grapes and wine, the symbols of Dionysus also include a snake and a phallus. His divine wand, known as the Thyrsus, wound with ivy and dripping with honey, serves as both a beneficent wand and a weapon used to destroy those who dare to stand to oppose his cult and the freedoms he represents. The earlier images of Dionysus depict him as a bearded and robed mature male, holding his Thyrsus, a fennel staff tipped with a pine-cone. However, during the later period, he was shown as beardless, sensuous, naked, or semi-naked effeminate youth. The cult of Dionysus is a cult of the souls. Performance art and drama were central to his religion, and its festivals were the initial driving force behind the development of theatre.

Widely worshipped in Greece, Dionysus was adapted from religious traditions of non-Greek people in the greater Mediterranean world, and more than any other deity of the Olympian pantheon, the status of Dionysus in Greece society indicate the depths of religious fusion in ancient Greece. However, although he was one of the twelve Olympians, his unusual birth and upbringing marked him as an outsider. The Romans worshipped him as Bacchus, as the god of wine, intoxication, and relaxation.

Dionysus was believed to have been born from the union of Zeus and Persephone, the daughter of Demeter and consort of Hades, who lived half her life in the Underworld. However, when Hera came to know about the matter, the enraged and jealous goddess sent the Titans to kill the baby. But somehow, Zeus saved the unborn Dionysus by sewing him into his thigh, and a few months later, Dionysus was born from Zeus’s thigh. In another version of the story, Zeus seduced and impregnated Semele, the beautiful princess of Thebes, and the daughter of the goddess Harmonia and the mortal Cadmus. However, when Hera caught wind of the affair, she played a dirty trick and pursued Semele to ask Zeus to appear before her in his true form. As no mortal can withstand the sight of a god, Semele died instantly, as she saw Zeus in his true form.

Regardless of the mother’s identity or the nature of the near-death, the myths remained consistent that Zeus managed to rescue the unborn Dionysus by sewing him into his thigh. As he was known to have been born twice, Dionysus was sometimes referred to as dimetor, or Twice Born. Nevertheless, after his birth, Dionysus was taken to Silenus, and the rain nymphs of Mount Nysa raised him, hidden from Hera’s wrath. When he grew up, Dionysus ascended Mount Olympus after a long journey and became the last-arriving of the twelve Olympians.

Dionysus had sex and children with many women, both mortal and divine. The most important among his affairs were his relationship with Aphrodite, the goddess of sensual love and beauty, and Ariadne, the princess of Crete and daughter of the legendary King Minos. One day, while Dionysus was strolling along a shore, he was abducted by some pirates as they mistook him for a prince. Dionysus did nothing to stop them and allowed the ship to set sail, only to transform the masts of the vessel into crawling grapevines that dripped with sweet wine, intoxicating the crew. He then transformed himself into a lion and devoured the entire crew save the helmsman, who steered Dionysus to the island of Naxos.

He found Ariadne on the island, who was brought there by the mortal hero Theseus, who sailed for Athens with Ariadne to keep his promise to marry her after he had slain the Minotaur. However, during a short break on the island of Naxos, he treacherously left her and sailed away while she was sleeping on the deserted beach. Dionysus fell in love with Ariadne and soon married her. When she died, he set her crown into the heavens, creating the Corona constellation in her memory.

Aphrodite, the goddess of sensual love and beauty, possessed a magic girdle that made her an irresistible object of desire for everyone. She loved to make love and slept with the youngest of the gods, Dionysus. However, it earned the wrath of Hera, who disapproved of her freeways, deformed their child Priapus, made him incredibly ugly, and endowed him with an enormous genital. His other lovers include Circe, the goddess of magic and charm, and Aura, the goddess of the breeze and daughter of Lelantos, with whom he had Iacchus, a god of ritual.

Dionysus was one of the most popular of Greek deities, and his cult was observed through a variety of festivals. It is said that to worship Dionysus was to experience Dionysus. Festivals known as the Dionysian Mysteries were celebrated through a combination of heavy intoxication and the trances of religious ecstasy. Fueled by wine, music, and dance, the Dionysian Mysteries brought worshipers together in frenzied, orgiastic celebrations that freed them from all the social inhibitions, and it was said that Dionysus himself would often appear among the throngs. The yearly festival dedicated to Dionysus used to take place around the Spring Equinox and was scheduled perfectly to align with the final stages of the fermentation process when making wine. It is believed that Dionysus was reborn at that time of the year.