I've Made Almost All Of These At My Home Bar, Get-togethers With Friends... The Chocolate Cake Is A Cheat

I've made almost all of these at my home bar, get-togethers with friends... the Chocolate Cake is a cheat and missing a vital ingredient... the Pineapple Upside Down Cake needs revised... the Baby Guinness works better and tastes better with Kahlua instead of Patron XO... unless you find a very high gravity orange liqueur for the Irish Flag, I recommend going with Irish whiskey instead, tinged orange with a drop of grenadine stirred in... and the Buttery Nipple / Slippery Nipple is done to best effect with a tricky layering effect in a wine glass.

~DL

Dionysos with a soldier's haircut and helmet

ginandjack:

Except. Yaknow Big D wad also a warlord who stormed through India…

Hm.  I don't recall anything suggesting that the Dionysian wanderings in India were martial, aggressive, military, or anything like that -- as I understand it, at its most disruptive, it was a cultural revolution, and in many accounts Dionysus and his retinue do far more absorbing Indian culture and philosophy -- the soma concept, the Eleusinian reincarnation --  than taking it over or imposing anything upon it.

As I understand it, the absence (and in fact outright denial) of that element has always been core to the Dionysian archetype...  Can you refer me to any documentation of Dionysos as a warlord, or in any significant military context?

Spring is upon us. ♥

Greek Mythos does mention this, fairly often.  You just have to read the right texts.

By the by, many rivers are also deities (and/or dragons).  First one to mind is the Welsh Gwyn Ap Nudd, associated with the Irish Nuada Silverhand, both a death god and a river dragon.

Men who died were guided by Hermes, women were guided by Hekate. 

Styx is the River of Hate, so sacred that the gods swear by it. The Cocytus is the River of Lamentation or Wailing.  The Phlegethon is the River of Fire.  The Lethe is the River of Forgetfulness.  The Acheron is the River of Sadness.

The close mortal bank of the Styx is crowded with the souls of the hopeless dead -- those not buried properly, who the boatman Charon ignores.  For those buried well, ferried past the river Styx by Charon, the gates to Hades are guarded by Cerberus, a three-headed dog who allow anyone in but will not let anyone out.  The far shore of the Styx is called Erebus, even more crowded with the waiting dead.  

The kingdom of Hades is crowded, with Hades on his throne and near him the three judges Minos, Rhadamanthus, and Aeacus, who question and sort the souls.

Leaving Erebus, you pass by a great abyss, the chasm that is the opening to Tartaros. This is the place for evil souls and those who have angered the gods, and also a prison for the Titans. It is a place with iron gates and a bronze floor, guarded by Hundred-Handers (the Hekatonchieres known as Kottos, Briareos, and Gyges).  Like Hades and the Rivers, Tartaros is not only a place but a person -- the Titan Tartaros was the father of the monsters Typhon and Echidna.  The Furies or Kindly Ones (also known as Erinyes) -- immortal women named Alecto, Tisiphone, and Megaera -- punish the cruel in Hades, and also sometimes pursue wrongdoers on earth.  There is no sun in Tartaros, the only light coming from a man bound for eternity to a flaming wheel in the sky -- Ixion, the first murderer.

The souls everywhere else, in the vast majority of Hades known as the fields of Asphodel, were neither happy nor sad. Empty. Lukewarm. Faceless, nameless shades. They all eventually have drunk from the River Lethe, which wanders through the place, and makes them forget their names and lives and shapes and faces. They all just stand there, and wait. They wait for all eternity, shifting, wandering, empty.

Those who have been more good than bad go to the Elysian Fields, or Elysium.  Immortal ease, no snow or winter, no rain, warm breezes from the Ocean River... three harvests a year. There is no more beautiful place in the underworld, and it is mostly empty. Or, it was, until the coming of Persephone to the Underworld.

The fields to which Hades came unseen and from which he took Persephone down to his Underworld were called the fields of Eleusis. When Demeter and Hekate found Persephone and ended the Long Winter of the world, the place where they emerged were those same fields. Later, a new set of rites were created in honor of Persephone and Demeter and Dionysus (also known as Libera, Ceres, and Liber) -- mystery rites by which those who are faithful and good can enter into the blessed peace of Elysium after death. These are known as the Eleusinian Mysteries, sacred to Dionysos and Persephone alike.

Phew.

As you can see, there is a lot of depth and complexity to it. Much recommended for further delving.

I… Ok… this shit just got complicated and now I’m not sure I understand it.

Anthesteria's second day: Khoes, the Day of Pitchers, Feast of Swinging

First she offered him her cup, and he filled it with his divine wine. Then He returned to Her the crown of His love, and the two ascended together into the heavens where Her crown is still seen among the stars...

Anthesteria started yesterday with a festival of flowers, a procession from the waters to the city, a Masked Man adored by wild women and satyrs and other, stranger folk.  But today... today it starts to get weird.

It could be the drinking, yes.  The pithoi jars have been opened, the wine has been mixed and blessed, there is no shortage.  Rampant and massive public drunkenness rules the streets, wine flows like water.  Drinking contests are set up, men and women celebrate the swinging rites of Aiôra and set up swings to play upon like children, hanging dolls and masks also to swing from the trees like Erigone of old.  

But what really makes the day of Khoes weird... are the ghosts.

Not the beloved personal dead whose faces we know and love or fear, but the public dead are these ghosts, our Keres.  The spirits of those nameless crowds of people whose lives moved here before ours, whose stories played out and ended, whose pasts fill our community with untold tales and unwhispered names.  They move through us every day, but on this day, maybe with the help of the wine, we FEEL them.  We hear the soundless echoes of their footfalls, their shouting, their laughter, their quiet murmuring talk.  We feel full to bursting with all those who lived in our home, our neighborhood, those who walked our streets, those who gathered in the parks we go to.

And to make it just that little bit weirder, along with the ghosts and the dry dusty whispers of death and time, we feel the stirrings of a powerful sexual tide moving through us, individually and communally.  It binds us generally if not specifically -- each of us has lusted, hungered, longed for touch and heat and passion and release.  Even the ghosts, now cold and untouchable.  The serpent stirs in us, the hot fluids rise, the erotic awareness of bud and flower and stem and root fill every glance at the sacred flowerbeds.  We have drunk the wine, we have felt the wildness rise in us.  We want to dance, and laugh, and kiss, and caress, and fuck, and explode.

Like a fever, it spreads, then reaches a peak as the evening slides languorously into night.  In the most sacred places, the most innermost of temples, the greatest rite is performed, the sacred marriage between the God and the Basalinna, the Sacred Queen.  A man and a woman writhe together and become one -- a priest and priestess -- a maenad and a satyr -- Dionysus and Ariadne.  And the city shudders in the night with prismatic visions of wine-saturated paradise and release.

Liberation.

Eleleu!  Eleleu!  Iou!  Iou!  Hail and welcome the Reveller.

mythology series → the minotaur’s sister ariadne [Ἀριάδνη]

out of the maze revealing secrets we kept on the way who knows who’s right breaking the chains i’m gonna give up my future to fate now i’m alright eventually i saw what was not clear to my eyes for all my life thought i had friends i could confess my fears and my hopes no more tears, no more fights  each one is free to take his own way out you take yours, i’ll take mine out of the maze