Resurrected Gods

How the Cult of Dionysus Shaped Christianity

Death and rebirth are central themes of Christianity, both in its mythology—the story of Jesus is about coming back from the dead—and in its actual history. Christianity resurrected dead and dying older traditions and carried them forward into the Middle Ages and beyond.

Three major examples—all readily allegorized by death and rebirth—are debt forgiveness, astronomical cycles, and ego death. These are the three main layers of Christian source material.

The experience of ego death feels precisely like a personal death and rebirth. That’s why existing religions in the Mediterranean Basin held god-eating ceremonies with psychedelic compounds like ergot to induce ego death, preceding the bread and the wine of the Christian Eucharist by thousands of years. The experience of ego death and rebirth found a perfect allegory in ancient stories of resurrected gods.

Psychedelic Wine

During the first century AD, Dioscorides served as a physician in the Roman army. He wrote a comprehensive five-volume pharmacopeia listing the healing properties of every substance known to medicine at that time. He called it De materia medica, and the entire fifth volume is dedicated to wine.

Dioscorides suggests mixing wine with ingredients like the highly hallucinogenic mandrake root. He carefully recommends a specific dosage of this poisonous compound that induces a visionary experience without killing the drinker. The fact that so much of his pharmacopeia treats wine as a delivery system for other drugs vividly illustrates how the Greeks and Romans used wine. They drank for reasons other than merely its alcohol content.

Another vivid illustration is the story of the death of Hephaestion, Alexander’s best friend and possible lover. In observance of the Greek tradition, games were held in his honor. One of those games was a wine-drinking contest. According to the Greek historian Diodorus, 41 additional people died from this drinking game. Something in their goblets was clearly much more deadly than just plain wine.

Resurrected Gods

Alexander’s mother, Olympias, was a priestess of the wine god Dionysus. In the Vatican Museum, there are so many mosaics and statues of Dionysus that, on a recent visit, our tour guide felt compelled to explain that Christianity sourced many of its traditions from pre-Christian predecessors. The title card of this essay shows a photo, taken by the author, of one among many examples of Dionysian iconography on display at the Apostolic Palace.

Our tour guide was referring to the story of Dionysus’ resurrection. He was a late addition to the Greek pantheon; the worship of Dionysus started much later than the Mysteries of Eleusis, which anchored the religions of Greece and Rome for thousands of years. However, Dionysus’ mythology eventually merged with Eleusis's, and he became the son of Zeus and Persephone.

There are many variations of Dionysus’ story. He was either accidentally killed by his father, or torn apart by monsters. Zeus then brings him back to life by carrying his corpse within his own body (in this case, Dionysus was the only son physically begotten by Zeus). Or, by having a mortal girl hold it in her womb until the resurrected Dionysus was eventually reborn (in this case, Dionysus was born of a virgin). The story of Jesus, of course, would later draw upon both variations.

These resurrection narratives were of critical importance to the mystery religions of Greece, where Dionysus's death and rebirth served as a model for initiates’ spiritual transformation. The Dionysian mysteries celebrated the cyclical nature of death and resurrection.

“Mourning for Dionysus' death, and joyful celebration of his resurrection,” wrote legendary historians Will and Ariel Durant, “formed the basis of a ritual extremely widespread among the Greeks. In springtime, when the vine was bursting into blossom, Greek women went up into the hills to meet the reborn god. For two days they drank without restraint. And, like our less religious bachanlians, considered him witless who would not lose his wits.”

The Roman Crackdown

The resurrection themes in Dionysian worship became increasingly important during the Hellenistic and Roman periods, when mystery religions focused on personal salvation and immortality gained through divine association with suffering, dying, and resurrected gods.

Just as at Eleusis, the Dionysian proceedings were dominated by women. While the drugs consumed at Eleusis were called kykeon after the Homeric epics, the psychoactive wine consumed during the Dionysia was called pharmakon. Pharmakon could mean remedy, poison, or scapegoat depending on the context.

Instead of Dionysus, the Romans referred to that wine god as Bacchus. In 186 BC, the Roman government cracked down on the wildly popular Bacchic cult. The Roman historian Livy left us with a chilling account of its high priestess, Paculla Annia, and the execution of some 6,000 cultists. According to Livy, the cult functioned as a “state within a state”.

Upstart religions are usually persecuted by existing authorities, who get understandably nervous when their subjects coalesce into functioning bodies external to established political systems. That’s what Livy meant by suggesting the Bacchic cult functioned as a state within a state. Additionally, the experience of “ego death” significantly amplifies the political threat posed by new religions centered around psychoactive drugs.

The ego is the mental conception of the self; it’s how one knows whose mouth to put food in at dinner. Ego death refers to the temporary dissolution of that mental artifact. Much in the way that nervousness about approaching someone at a bar is temporarily disabled by a shot of “liquid courage”. The experience of ego death feels like a death and rebirth of the self. That’s why resurrected gods became symbols for ego-dissolving drugs.

The ego is the only handle by which the authorities can grab us. When people stop identifying as their physical bodies, they can no longer be threatened with prison, torture, or execution. Jesus was so confident that he was NOT his physical body that he consented to a gruesome public execution. The remarkable story of Christ, whether true in the literal sense or not, advertised the limitations of state power as Rome headed into her twilight.

The Gospel of John

While wild grapes are native to Greece, organized viticulture and wine grapes were transplanted there by Semitic Phoenician traders. That’s why the wine god Dionysus was portrayed as a foreigner who arrived from the east. Because the story of Christ was about a resurrected Jew who turned water into wine, it would have been familiar to the millions of Greeks living in the Roman Empire. They would have instantly understood the reference to ego-dissolving drugs.

These drugs had to be alluded to indirectly because of the fraught legal situation surrounding them. After periods of intense persecution—such as the events of 186 BC—Roman authorities eventually adopted versions of Dionysus and Jesus that were acceptable to the state. But in both cases, the path from outlaw cult to state religion was scattered with bodies. The need for discretion explains why multiple resurrected wine gods haunted the Roman Empire.

During the Dionysian festival known as the Thyia, priests would place three empty bronze basins inside a building. The doors of the building were then sealed, with witnesses present. The following morning, the seals would be broken, and the basins would be found filled with wine. Jesus accomplishes the same feat of turning water into wine in the Gospel of John.

The New Testament is a Greek story, written in Greek, but set in Palestine. In addition to borrowing the transformation of water into wine, John also used the language of Greek philosophy to portray Jesus as the embodiment of the Logos, a term used by the Greeks to signify reason, divine order, and the principle that governs the universe. Logos is the Greek word for “word”, and it shows up in the first line of John: "In the beginning was the Word”.

Before the ego-dissolving kykeon of Eleusis and pharmakon of Dionysus became the bread and wine of the Christian Eucharist, they impacted the Greek inventions of democracy, theater, and philosophy. One of history’s greatest philosophers, Plato, was initiated into the Mysteries of Eleusis. His experience there heavily informed his philosophy.

Further Materials

The nativity of Dionysus himself was also something out of this world. In addition to his epiphany as the Holy Child of Persephone at Eleusis, the Greeks had a separate myth about the God of Ecstasy’s strange birth by an ordinary woman named Semele. She was impregnated by Zeus in the form of an eagle, but later incinerated when the King of the Gods showed his true form, killing the mere mortal with his lightning bolt. In order to bring baby Dionysus to term, Zeus decided to sew the fetus up in his thigh, later giving birth to his own son in Anatolia—where Dionysus found his very first female followers. Semele’s own sisters don’t believe a word of the alleged affair with Zeus. Mortals don’t mix with immortals. They think she made the whole thing up, but the wine god won’t stand for it. To save Semele’s good name, the whole plot of Euripides’s The Bacchae tracks the return of this exotic eastern Dionysus to his real motherland, Greece.
The first two lines of the play stress the unusual bond between the wine god and his father in heaven. Dionysus calls himself the “Son of God” or Dios pais (Διὸς παῖς), and refers to his earthly mother as the “young girl” or kore (κόρη), which could also be “maiden” or “virgin.” Yes, mortals do mix with immortals. And as the ultimate hybrid, the God of Ecstasy is the miraculous result, both human and divine. As The Bacchae proceeds, these two sides of Dionysus are in constant tension. He wants to introduce the Greeks to a new sacrament for a new millennium, but he doesn’t want to repeat Zeus’s lightning mishap. So in order to avoid scaring everybody to death with the full force of his godhood, the shape-shifter “exchanges his divine form for a mortal one.” And a funny one at that: a long-haired wizard. He is ridiculed as “effeminate,” with hair “tumbling all the way down his cheeks.” Just like the “luxurious locks” of Dionysus himself, who blurs the boundary between male and female. Only then is the incognito wine god able to uncork his magic potion, initiating the women of Greece into his Mysteries.
Brian Muraresku, The Immortality Key, 2020, page 190

Around 20 BC the conservative historian Livy wrote his dramatic retelling of the scandal, portraying it “as a reaction against the sudden infiltration of too many Greek elements into Roman worship.” The final straw for the Roman senate was the Italian witch, Paculla Annia, the scandalous high priestess of Bacchus in Campania—the heartland of Magna Graecia, home to Naples and Pompeii. In the years leading up to the mass crackdown on the Dionysian Mysteries in 186 BC, Paculla Annia refused to initiate any men over the age of twenty. “Rather than having women in the control of men,” says Dr. Fiachra Mac Góráin, a classicist at University College London, “this cult is putting young, impressionable men under the control of women.” In a staunchly patriarchal society like Rome, that was an act of war. So the authorities made the flood of magical wine slow to a trickle.
Brian Muraresku, The Immortality Key, 2020, page 217

Only late in his career was Dionysus received into Olympus. In Thrace, which gave him as a Greek gift to Greece, he was the god of liquor brewed from Barley and was known as "Sabaseus". In Greece he became a god of wine, the nourisher and guardian of the vine. He began as a goddess of fertility, became a god of intoxication, and ended as a son of god dying to save mankind.
Many figures and legends were mingled to make his myth. The Greeks thought of him as "Zagreus", the horned child, born to Zeus by his daughter Persphone. He was the best beloved of his father and was seated beside him on the throne of heaven. When the jealous Hera incited the titans to kill him, Zeus, to disguise him, changed him into a goat then a bull. In this form, nevertheless, the Titans captured him, cut his body into pieces, and boiled them in a cauldron. Athena, like another Trelawney, saved the heart and carried it to Zeus. Zeus gave it to Semele, who impregnated with it, gave to the god a second birth under the name of Dionysus.
Mourning for Dionysus' death, and joyful celebration of his resurrection, formed the basis of a ritual extremely widespread among the Greeks. In springtime, when the vine was bursting into blossom, Greek women went up into the hills to meet the reborn god. For two days they drank without restraint. And, like our less religious bachanlians, considered him witless who would not lose his wits. They marched in wild procession led by maenads, or mad women, devoted to Dionysus. They listened tensely to the story they knew so well of the suffering, death, and resurrection of their god. And as they drank and danced, they fell into a frenzy in which all bonds were loosed. The height and center of their ceremony was to seize upon a goat, a bull, sometimes a man, seeing in them incarnations of the god. To tear the live victim to pieces in commemoration of Dionysus' dismemberment. Then to drink the blood and eat the flesh in a sacred communion whereby, as they thought, the god would enter them and possess their souls. In that divine enthusiasm they were convinced that they and the god became one in a mystic and triumphant union. They took his name, called themselves after one of his titles, Bacchoi, and knew that now they would never die. Or they termed their state an ecstasis, a going out of their souls to meet and be one with Dionysus. Thus they felt freed from the burden of the flesh, they acquired divine insight, they were able to prophesy, they were gods.
Such was the passionate cult that came down from Thrace into Greece like a medieval epidemic of religion dragging one region after another from the cold and clear Olympians of the state worship into a faith and ritual that satisfied the craving for excitement and release, the longing for enthusiasm and possession, mysticism and mystery.
The priests of Delphi and the rulers of Athens tried to keep the cult at a distance but failed. All they could do was to adopt Dionysus into Olympus, hellenize and humanize him, give him an official festival, and turn the revelry of his worshippers from the mad ecstasy of wine among the hills into the stately processions, the robust songs, and the noble drama of the great Dionysia. For a while they won Dionysus over to Apollo, but in the end Apollo yielded to Dionysus' heir and conqueror Christ.
Will & Ariel Durant, The Life of Greece, 1939, page 306