Theseia - Tumblr Posts

So it's the Dionysian festival known as the Theseia, honoring Theseus.  I don't know about the rest of you Dionysians, or the rest of you in general, but I have to say that it's more than a little hard for me to really get into honoring this guy.  Theseus always seemed to me like that absurdly muscled, inanely confident, self-absorbed charmed-life guys we've all known a few of in our lives -- the narcissistic quarterback class president, the one wracked with flaws and failures and insufficiencies that no one in the world seems able to see, and in fact they all adore and worship him for them.  But he's a strong part of the Dionysian mythos and tradition, and all these years of counting myself a part of the Propompoi, I've had to reconcile myself however uneasily to that fact.

I put it up to the embrace of shadow, the dance and balance, akin to the close twinlike relationship of exchange and replacement between Dionysus and Apollo at Delphi.  I've spent many a Theseia delving, trying to find something in hero-boy that's worth a Dionysian festival, or a festival at all.  But I've never fully managed it.

So, failing all else, here's to Theseus -- that shallow primping jock, that buffoon in love with his own quads and biceps and deltoids, that over-hyped hero who dumped the woman who loved him and saved him, ditching her on some remote island because he'd lost interest.  Here's to the pumped-up man-boys who make the rest of us look good, once they've been fathomed for what they are.  Here's to the little ego part of man finally realizing his insufficiency upon his disastrous return (the white minotaur chuckles at the appropriateness of the term "disastrous") and establishing the Oskophoria to honor the God.  Here's to the wild divine forces that bend even and especially the prettiest and proudest of men.

Jean-Baptiste Regnault, Theseus and Ariadne, 18th century