Αυξιτης

If you want to eat phallus-shaped bread, drink through phallus-shaped straws from phallus-shaped cups, kiss ceramic phalluses, sit on a phallus-shaped throne and sing dirty Greek songs about the phallus, then you should visit the little Greek town of Tyrnavos each year on “Clean Monday.” The one-day pagan fertility festival in this town of 15,000 [...]

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καλλος

“Beauty is the beginning of terror.” – Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies I

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Ωμαδιος

“The people of Tenedos keep a pregnant cow for Dionysos Anthroporraistos, and while it is giving birth they tend to it like a woman on her child-bed. The new-born calf they put in buskins and then sacrifice. But the man who deals the blow with the axe is pelted with stones by the populace and [...]

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Λευκυανιτης

“In the early days I had a very black-and-white view of everything.” – Cat Stevens

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Σφαλεοτας

Theseus watches the island grow smaller from the deck of his ship. It’s better this way he tells himself. She was too strange and wild to ever make a home for herself in Athens. And even if she could his people would never accept a Cretan as queen over them, no matter how much he [...]

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Ομεστης

“Horror… Horror has a face… and you must make a friend of horror.” – Apocalypse Now

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Χαριδωτης

νῦν ἔθανες καὶ νῦν ἐγένου, τρισόλβιε, ἄματι τῶιδε. εἰπεῖν Φερσεφόναι σ’ ὅτι Βάκχιος αὐτὸς ἔλυσε Now you have died, and now you are born, three times blessed, on this very day. Say to Persephone that it is Bakchios himself that has redeemed you.

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Πετεμπαμεντι

Dionysos in Egypt was given this title meaning “He who is in the West,” with the West understood in its traditional sense as the abode of the deceased and the place where the sun-god Prē conducted his nocturnal journey before being reborn each morning. Although this is usually interpreted as a way of emphasizing the [...]

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Αιγοβολος

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Αστυδρομιος

The corner of Broadway and Olive is a magical spot, though most people just call it Barmuda Triangle since this is where all of the best downtown pubs and clubs are located. Few pause to wonder why that is – it’s not because of zoning laws, I can tell you that much, since we don’t [...]

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Νυκτελιος

“Dionysos is a part of what Gilbert Durand calls ‘night-mode’ — that is, a nocturnal consciousness associated with the moon, moisture, women, sexuality, emotions, the body and the earth… If any given culture receives only Apollonian sunshine, it dries up and dies; conversely, if it receives too much Dionysian moisture, it rots and becomes crazy… [...]

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Δασυλλιος

Give ear to my drunken truths. You can measure a man’s piety by the number of bottles left after a feast. Tobacco is the sacred plant of Dionysos, along with the ivy and the grape-vine. It’s name makes that perfectly clear – Τω Βαχχω, meaning something that belongs to Bacchus. Joshuah Sylvester proved it, so [...]

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Θεοινος

Everything is right. Everything is wrong. I’m too drunk to tell the difference. I have so much wine on my hands and in me. But the more I drink the more I see the flowers and the bull dancing with the pretty, long-haired women atop the mountain. Look, there’s the city spread out beneath us [...]

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Ευαστηρ

“Be always drunken. On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish. But be drunken!” – Baudelaire

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Τυρβηιος

“I’m not angry. When you dance around a fire and you go off in an ecstatic frenzy of spirit and life and then you yell at the gods so you can make your spirit heard – that’s not anger.” – Serj Tankian, Rolling Stone interview “Rebellion against tyrants is obedience to god.” – Benjamin Franklin

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Βρομιος

Every day is Carnival for those who bear the ivy of the boisterous one on their bodies, but with a difference – for we never say farewell to the flesh or let the feast come to and end. Rivers of wine, the king on an ass leading the grand procession through the streets of the [...]

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Λυσιος

I am completely out of control right now, like a dying star plummeting through the wine-dark heavens, like a dancer spinning faster and faster on feet that have started to bleed. It hurts to have the fetters of the mind undone this way, but I cannot stop. I don’t want to stop, even if it [...]

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Ελευθερευς

No ordinary man can love a maenad. It is too much. Too dangerous. He doesn’t have to fear poison or savage teeth in the night. No, there is something worse, something much harder to endure about a relationship like this. And it can destroy him, unless he is strong, unless he can let her go, [...]

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Λυαιος

Κατά τον δαίμονα εαυτού.

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Leader of the mad women

“O Thebes, nursemaid of Semele, put on your ivy crown, flaunt your green yew, flaunt its sweet fruit! Consecrate yourselves to Bacchus, with stems of oak or fir, Dress yourselves in spotted fawn skins, trimmed with white sheep’s wool. As you wave your thyrsus, revere the violence it contains. All the earth will dance at [...]

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