Sacred Mysteries: God made man – the myth of Dionysus

Melvyn Bragg and his guests were talking this week about The Bacchae, that extraordinary play by Euripides concerning Dionysus, the god of wine, who punishes King Pentheus by arranging for him to be torn apart by his own mother in a frenzy.

What is this all about? The playwright does not tell us in an analytical way. He is a dramatist after all, whose play was staged in a religious context, though religion was not so anatomised by theology in the 5th century BC as we are accustomed to.

Left undiscussed by the In Our Time team was the question of parallels between the Dionysus of the play and the Jesus of the Gospels.

Dionysus has for his father Zeus, not just the top god, but (if any being in Greek religion is) God, the father of all. Dionysus’ name was reckoned to be derivative of Zeus, which in the genitive is Dios.

In the play, the blind seer Tiresias says of this god of wine: “Yea, being God, the blood of him is set / Before the Gods in sacrifice, that we / For his sake may be blest.” That is the translation by Gilbert Murray.

When Pentheus, the King of Thebes, takes captive Dionysus (whose divinity is at the time hidden) there is a scene reminiscent of the appearance of Jesus before Pilate. Jesus is reserved and dignified. Dionysus is defiant and ambiguous before Pentheus.

Like Jesus, Dionysus is bound. Dionysus’ head is not crowned with thorns but his locks are shorn. Then he is bound to a manger in a stable. The Greek word phatne is the same used in the Gospel according to St Luke, where the child Jesus is bound in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger. It was a commonplace of exegesis that the swaddling clothes stood for Jesus’s bonds before his crucifixion. As for the manger, St Augustine, in a sermon on the Nativity, declared: “Placed in a manger, he became our food.” An earthquake frees Dionysus from his prison. After the death of Jesus, an earthquake was felt, and he rose again from the dead.

I don’t mean that the Gospels derive from Euripides. World myths overlap, and the life of Jesus is seen as a myth come true. In any case, differences between the Dionysus myth and the history of Jesus are bigger than the similarities.

In the play Dionysus does not die, but Pentheus. If one is hunting analogues, Pentheus dies after being raised on a tree, as Jesus did. But the Theban king’s death punished him and his mother, who killed him.

Dionysus punishes those who do not believe in him. But his rites are terrible: his frenzied woman followers tear apart cattle and men.

Wine plays utterly different roles in Dionysiac myths and in Jewish religion. Dionysius is the champion of wine that inspires by intoxication. The Jews were long familiar with wine as a wholesome thing. The psalm says that God provides “wine that maketh glad the heart of man, and oil to make his face to shine, and bread which strengtheneth man’s heart”. Hebrew mythology takes account of inebriation when Noah gets drunk; one of his sons piously covers his nakedness.

The nearest thing to soothsaying Tiresias in the Old Testament is probably Balaam, employed by King Balak of Moab to curse the Israelites and prophesy against them. He angers the king by blessing the Israelites and prophesying, in a trance but with seeing eyes, a vanquisher of Moab: “I shall see him, but not now: I shall behold him, but not nigh: there shall come a Star out of Jacob, and a Sceptre shall rise out of Israel.” He has no choice but to prophesy in terms given by the one in charge of all prophecies and their fulfilment.