Personal Mythology: Dionysus, Maenads, continued

Here are some more thoughts I jotted down about Dionysus today, which concludes the first drafts of my personal myth series.

 The common association with Dionysus is with wine. This is usually what most people think when you say "Dionysus" to them. "Ah, the God of wine," they often say, as if this explains anything at all. There is some validity to this association; certainly a state of "divine intoxication" that exists outside of all social boundaries is the entrance-point to his realm. However, though wine was his sacrament in some Grecian traditions, this association is hammered home more firmly in the form of the Roman Bacchus. Dionysus, especially the "proto-Dionysus" forms of Zagreuss, Bromeus, and many other similar outsider divinities originating in the Mediterranean and Asia Minor, all shared sacramental drinks of fermented honey and other grains. This may seem incidental but it isn't. The individual symbols that make up a complex, a God, a Symbol, are all multifaceted, and they are all entrance points into the entire network. Let's look at just a few before making some generalizations about the symbol itself, and turning to personal experience.

    Honey comes up in several places in reference to Dionysus. The pine-cone tipped wands that the bacchante (women of Dionysus) carry drip honey. It can be fermented into a drink, and it is also a curiously effective emulsion for making elixirs with hallucinogenic properties. (There is much argument about to what extent hallucinogens factored into the various historic examples of generally Dionysian rituals.) Honey itself was often considered to originate from a form of fermentation out of death,

"According to Virgil, Aristaois sacrificed four bulls and four cows. He let their bodies lie for nine days; then bees swarmed from their entrails which had become liquid. Here the number four certainly has cosmic significance. It corresponds to the four cardinal points. ... The animal is transformed into a sack containing its own liquids. After four weeks and ten days- roughly forty days, as in the traditional brewing of mead- grapelike clusters of bees fill the hut. ... The natural phenomenon ushering in the great festival for the early rising of Sirius ... an awakening of bees from a dead animal." (Kerenyi, Pg. 41, Dionysus: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life.) 

    Mythologically, honey is the sweetness of life, a nourishing source, which is derived as a result of death and rebirth. It may be facile to point out that alcoholic libations are also called "spirits," especially without an analysis of the etymology of the term, but on its surface it nevertheless seems appropriate. (That it is essentially regurgitated nectar, bee vomit, is also somewhat amusing but seems less mythologically significant. Just like the fact that much can be said about the mythological significance of the moon,but the moon is essentially a large, cold hunk of rock. These two things may or may not have bearing on each other, depending on whether the physical reality has an immediate bearing on the psychological reality of a thing.)
    I also developed a mythological fascination with bees; those familiar with my works will recognize this readily. When I was working on the first draft of Join My Cult!, I randomly happened upon Wax: Or How I Learned Television From The Bees. This is a very bizarre pseudo-documentary that mythologizes bees and beekeeping through a rather schizophrenic lens. I had already been taken in by the image of the hive, many agents acting independently yet, secretly, operating in tandem, but this movie only further pushed me into the realms of absurd lunacy as I continued through that literary experiment. The hive, the honey, and the directional sense of these curious creatures all seemed magical to me, and like the other disparate symbols of Dionysus, have appeared and re-appeared throughout my lives as what seem like separate metaphors until I realize, again and again, that they are all tied together through this central or mono-mythical figure, Dionysus.