For He is my other Divine love. And here at The Hallows, today is the day we celebrate His harvest.
It is October and the vineyard smells sweet—too sweet—and oh so ripe. Amber and scarlet is just beginning to blaze in the leaves of trees. The decayed-honey scent of fallen foliage is in the air. Sugar-dusted grape clusters dangle from the vines in our grape arbor. At the time when night just outweighs day and the world has entered its slow roll toward the darkness, the empurpled grapes are finally ready for harvest.
All of our Pagan beloved ones—Bacchants for a day—ply their sweet labor among our vines. Oh yes, we shall make wine.
Our Wine Mistress, Priestess of the Hydrometer, fusses. The children giggle as they rip grapes from the stem, toss them into the barrel (and at each other), and run screaming around the yard in a fine, Bacchic frenzy. The adults drink last year’s vintage as they work. They joke and gossip with each other. Then, we begin The Crush. As the grapes are stomped into juice beneath our purified, bare feet, we sing. We invoke Dionysos, the God of the Vine, the Bull-Horned One, the Mad, Honey-Sweet God of Divine Intoxication.
As we crush His purple flesh, our song is as sad and sweet as October itself. Once all have danced upon the grapes, we strain the fresh juice into the “must bucket.” There, the God’s holy blood will ferment into His own Divine wine, making our kitchen smell like grape-y bread for two delicious, heady weeks.
But tonight…tonight, when the grapes have just been picked and crushed and the juice secreted away in the must bucket, we shall dance. We shall dance, entranced—drums thundering—in the sweet thrall of the God, breathing the breath of the Wine Muses and loving, loving, loving the mad, human beauty of every single one of our friends.
I missed posting the last couple of weeks. Life, the Universe, Everything…and the Fall EQ Festival. This year was dedicated to one of my two Beloved Ones, Dionysos, so I had to be there. It was a very fine Festival and Divine Madness was had by all. Anyway, in His honor, and Hers, I’d like to show you how, in antiquity, these two Divine Ones came together…as They do even today in my heart.
Now, at first glance, the Greek God of Ecstatic Intoxication & Wine doesn’t seem to have much to do with our Egyptian Lady of Magic & Power, Isis. After all, He’s the Sex, Drugs & Rock-n-Roll God and She’s, well, She’s a bit more serious.
Ah, but wait. All is not as it seems. (All is almost never as it seems.) There are, in fact, quite solid connections between my two Divine Ones. In ancient times, you see, Dionysos was identified with Osiris, the Beloved of Isis. More on that in a moment.
First, I’d like to tell you how Dionysos came into my personal spiritual picture.
I had been vowed to Isis for many years, but long had felt the need to see the Divine with a masculine face as well as a feminine one. Naturally, the first place I looked was to Osiris. So I meditated with Him, I did ritual with Him, I thought and pondered on Him. I found Him wonderful and powerful and beautiful. But He didn’t grab my soul and shout, “Mine!” Or even whisper it. Or anything. The relationship just wasn’t…quite…right.
Fast forward a few years. A friend had been called to resurrect the Oracle of Delphi (or Oracle of Portland, if you want to be a stickler about it) and had enlisted a group of friends to help take the ritual roles. We worked the Oracle once a summer for six or seven years, I think. During that time, I played a variety of ritual roles, from Pythia to serving priestess. Sometime during the process, I decided I wanted to play Dionysos. No reason a woman couldn’t play this androgynous God!
A thyad, entranced
And there wasn’t. And that is how Dionysos first got His panther claws into me. And I wasn’t the only one. My own beloved husband had also played Dionysos, with the same result. Others in that ritual cast soon found themselves called to Bakchic frenzy and we created a thiasos, a Greek name for a spiritual group or circle. The Meliophis thiasos still survives today, along with another group spawned from it.
So that’s how Dionysos claimed one Isis priestess. But perhaps that’s not so unusual. You may recall that Plutarch wrote his essay “On Isis and Osiris” to a priestess friend of his, Clea or Klea. He writes to her about Isis and Osiris for Klea is a priestess of Isis. She is also the leader of the thyades at Delphi. Thyad is another name for maenad, the Divinely mad priestesses of Dionysos. So Plutarch’s friend, Klea, is both a devotee of Isis and of Dionysos. Plutarch writes to her:
“That Osiris is identical with Dionysus who could more fittingly know than yourself, Clea? For you are at the head of the inspired maidens of Delphi, and have been consecrated by your father and mother in the holy rites of Osiris.”
So at least by Plutarch’s time, the identification of Dionysos with Osiris is so complete that the priest can say They are “identical” and know that his confidant will find it readily apparent.
See? Osiris, Lord of Wine—even today!
Plutarch goes on to note that the procession for the Apis bull looks very much like a Dionysian procession, thus both Osiris and Dionysos are Gods connected with the bull. Both Gods are torn to pieces—Dionysos by the Titans and Osiris by Set. Both Gods are resurrected afterwards; Dionysos by being born again of Semele and Osiris by being magically born again after Isis reassembles Him. Both Gods are Lords of Moisture, both are associated with trees. One of the sacred plants of Dionysos, ivy, is called by the Egyptians, “the plant of Osiris.”
Read Plutarch for yourself and you’ll see that he goes on at some length about the Dionysos-Osiris connection. Including the wine connection, of course.
Osiris is known as Lord of Wine as early as the Pyramid Texts and His identity as such only grew as time passed. In a magical papyrus from the second century CE, the “blood of Osiris,” clearly wine, is poured into a wine cup, and is to be given to a woman as part of an erotic spell:
“Give it, the blood of Osiris, that he gave to Isis to make her feel love in her heart for him night and day at any time, there not being time of deficiency.”
No doubt, the association of Osiris with wine is the reason that one story tells us that Isis became pregnant with Horus by eating grapes. Isis Herself is also given the epithet Mistress of Wine and Beer.
The sacred image of Dionysos from the Temple of Isis in Pompeii.
In addition to Her marriage to the Lord of Wine, Isis has Her own associations with the vine and with Dionysos. The Greeks considered the sacred star of Isis, Sirius, to be the bringer of wine since its late-summer rising coincided with the beginning of the grape harvest season. Ancient writers also speculated on a variety of Isis-Dionysos connections. One said that Dionysos is the son of Zeus and Isis. Another called Isis the daughter of Prometheus and said that She lived with Dionysos. Herodotus recorded the tradition that Apollo and Artemis are the children of Dionysos and Isis. The Ptolemaic rulers Auletes and his daughter, Cleopatra VII, identified themselves with Dionysos and Isis respectively, calling themselves “the new Dionysos” and “the new Isis.” In the Temple of Isis in Pompeii, sacred images of both Isis and Dionysos stood before the worshippers. And, of course, both Isis and Dionysos are Mystery Deities for both have suffered and so can have sympathy for human beings in our individual sufferings.
And so you see, the connection between Isis and Dionysos is not so far-fetched after all. May you indeed be blessed by Her magic and Divinely entranced in His ecstasy.
I’m taking this weekend off from the blog, for this weekend there is a festival at our house: the Hallows Grape Stomp & Bacchanalia. And so I offer these thoughts on the harvest, early this year, as we have had a very hot summer.
Today I serve not Isis, but Dionysos. For He is my other Divine love. And today we celebrate His harvest…
It is sweet, sad September. Amber and scarlet just beginning on the leaves of trees. The decayed-honey scent of fallen foliage. Sugar-dusted grape clusters dangling from the vines in our grape arbor. In this golden month, at the time when day equals night and the world enters its slow roll toward the darkness, the empurpled grapes are finally ready for harvest.
All of our Pagan beloved ones—Bacchants for a day—ply their sweet labor among our vines. Oh yes, we shall make wine.
Our Virgo Wine Mistress, Priestess of the Hydrometer, fusses. The children giggle as they rip grapes from the stem, toss them into the barrel (and at each other), and run screaming around the yard in a fine, Bacchic frenzy. The adults drink last year’s vintage as they work. They joke and gossip with each other. Then, we begin The Crush. As the grapes are stomped into juice beneath our purified, bare feet, we sing. We invoke Dionysos, the God of the Vine, the Bull-Horned One, the Mad, Honey-Sweet God of Divine Intoxication.
As we crush His purple flesh, our song is as sad and sweet as September itself. Once all have danced upon the grapes, we strain the fresh juice into the “must bucket.” There, the God’s holy blood will ferment into His own Divine wine, making our kitchen smell like grape-y bread for two delicious, heady weeks.
But tonight…tonight, the grapes have just been picked and crushed and the juice secreted away in the must bucket; and so, we dance. We dance, entranced—drums thundering—in the sweet thrall of the God, breathing the breath of the Wine Muses and loving, loving, loving the mad, human beauty of every single one of our friends.
