What does Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, want from humans?

(originally answered at Quora.com)

What does Dionysus, 
the Greek god of wine, 
want from humans?


Since he has been divided(1) for the sake of reunion(2),

(3)

 


(4)

and, as they say,

 

“when at the bottom, the only way is up”,(5)

 

(6)

 

the lesson that Dionysus came to teach us is that we remember our divine origin.

 

“Plato in the Cratylus says of this divinity “that he is the giver of wine; and that οιονος wine may most justly be denominated οιονους because it is accustomed to deprive those of intellect who possessed it before” Proclus on the Theology of Plato, Book VII, Chapter XXXIII

 

 Hence, let’s get sober.

 

Notes:

 

1 - DIvided, i.e., dismembered by the Titans.

 

 

2- Reunion, or perhaps, reassembly, creation, of sorts, of Dionysus’ body, since Mankind is created by Zeus from the ashes of the TItans who ate him.

"This dismemberment of Dionysus Zagreus (the sparagmos), taken together with an assumed Orphic anthropogony, in which human beings arose from the ashes of the Titans (who had been struck by Zeus with his thunderbolt in punishment for the dismembering), is sometimes called the "Zagreus myth"" Zagreus

3- “King Pentheus of Thebes is torn limb from limb by the crazed Maenads of the god Dionysus. The two central figures, draped in panther skins and holding the king's body, are the sisters Agave (mother of Pentheus) and Autonoe. A third Maenad holds the king's severed foot. One of Dionysus' Satyrs oversees the sparagmos (ritual dismemberment).” THEOI GREEK MYTHOLOGY

 

4- The Big Bang

 

5- “We are not to speak this way, then, of the afterlife, lest we make people timid. But Socrates speaks exactly this way of the Cave. The Cave, like Hades, is an underworld, and, like Hades, its inhabitants have only a shadow of real life. But the Cave is, so to speak, true Hades, the Hades of which it might truly be said that even servitude outside it is better than autonomy within it. And the difference is important, because we are the inhabitants in the Cave, living our lives according to sensible goods, which are mere shadows in comparison with the intelligible goods that make possible order, mathematics, and virtue. We should be pitied as the Greeks pitied the heroic dead. But unlike the heroic dead, there is a path for us out of this underworld. We only have to stand up, turn around, and walk toward the Good.” from the blog post "Life in This Present Hades"

 

6- “In this depiction, we see Demeter, on the precipice of hell, stepping her foot over the edge as she follows her the captured Persephone into the depths.” 
https://themagnetictheatre.org/blog/kore

"The soul," says he, "descends Corically, or after the manner of Proserpine, into generation, but is distributed into generation Dionysiacally; and she is bound in body Prometheically, and Titanically: she frees herself therefore from its bonds by exercising the strength of Hercules; but she is collected into one through the assistance of Apollo and the Saviour Minerva, by philosophizing in a manner truly cathartic." Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries

 

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