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as Bacchanals dance in their worship
Tacitus, Annals 11.31.2 Messalina meanwhile, more wildly profligate than ever, was celebrating in mid-autumn a representation of the vintage in her new home. The presses were being trodden; the vats...
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your cry, louder than roar of earthquake, shall rouse up living and dead...
Ángelos Sikelianós, Greek Supper for the Dead I spoke, and whether or not they had well understood all I had sought, they sipped of the wine, and I, the last of all, drank to the last drop also, like...
View ArticleFortune Cookie Wisdom #6
Catch on fire with enthusiasm and people will come for miles to watch you burn.
View ArticleSpeaking of fire
One of the most important documents we have within Bacchic Orphism are a series of bone tablets inscribed with enigmatic phrases and symbols. SEG 28.659: Life. Death. Life. Truth. Zagreus. Dionysos....
View ArticleΚαλα Χοές!
Give the children their first taste of wine! Feast with the mad and polluted King! Swing for the Hanged Maidens! Revel throughout your city as the wife of the Sacred King mates with Dionysos in the...
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Dionysos dressed as Herakles dressed as Dionysos
Jacquelyn Collins Clinton, A Late Antique Shrine of Liber Pater at Cosa pages 25-27 All of the above marble sculptures were reused in the late antique shrine. The statuettes probably served...
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οἰνοχόη
Nonnos, Dionysiaka 35.333 After Dionysos was reconciled with Hera in heaven, she wished to give him Hebe’s hand in marriage, had not Zeus our Lord on High ordained that in days to come twelvelabour...
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Ganymeda
Pausanias, Description of Greece 2.13.3 On the Phliasian citadel is a grove of cypress trees and a sanctuary which from ancient times has been held to be peculiarly holy. The earliest Phliasians named...
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even now
Aristotle, Constitution of the Athenians 3.5 Not all the magistrates lived together. The King kept what is now called the Boukoleion near the Prytaneion. The evidence is that even now the mating and...
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they should appease Erigone if they wanted to be free from the affliction
Hyginus, Astronomica 2.2 In the meantime in the district of the Athenians many girls without cause committed suicide by hanging, because Erigone, in dying, had prayed that Athenian girls should meet...
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Breaking the law for the Gods
Despite the influx of hipsters from Brooklyn and Westchester our little town is decidedly lacking in swings. There are some in a couple schools (though not as many as you might imagine) and a gated...
View ArticleTwo ships passing in the night
Anthesteria has so many densely interwoven layers that different things stand out for me each year. One of them this time around was the Black Ship of Dionysos, which is mounted on a wagon and paraded...
View ArticleSome say by water, others by fire
I almost forgot: as an addendum to this post – there is a variant tradition that instead of Parnassos Deukalion and his wife sought refuge on Mount Aetna in Sicily: When the cataclysm which we call the...
View ArticleΚαλα Χύτροι!
Bid your blessed dead a fond farewell, remembering that we hold them always in our hearts! Appease those who drowned in the great flood! Make the porridge of all grains, all seeds and honey for...
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Honoring the smoke
Fuck, I just realized I overlooked something pretty significant in the passage I posted back at the start of the month: Asterios conceived a bastard passion for the strange country, being hard of...
View ArticleStar Flower
This post was already getting a little long (plus I wanted to begin it with fuck and end it with fuckers, so I had to stop where I did to preserve the ring composition) but it’s not just the Greeks,...
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whose stream so often curves back on itself
I may have solved the conundrum mentioned here, regarding the obscure Olbian month-name Kúanepsion. If you recall I hypothesized that it could have been derived from the Nymph Kyanê, who was one of...
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