Bacchus is an imported god. Not only was Bacchus (under the name Dionysus) influential in the golden age of Greece and Rome he regained a great deal of popularity during the High Renaissance in Neo-Platonic and humanist artwork as a symbol of pleasure and celebration and holds an important place in modern philosophy, culture, language and literature. The reason for his continued popularity can potentially be attributed to what he represents, festival, revelry and indulgence that borders on hedonism. Personally, I like to refer to this phenomenon as ‘influential ecstasy’.
There is a lot of duality to be seen when inspecting depictions of Bacchus. Often he is jovial, tipsy and merry but there are many instances where he and his followers demonstrate blinding wrath and even mindless violence on more than one occasion. This contrast is further established as he often seems to stand somewhere between god and man, male and female, death, and life. Identified as a male god, but always surrounded by his followers, the Maenads or ‘mad women’.
One of the remaining pieces of antiquity that depicts Bacchus in the Greek incarnation of Dionysus is a vase that was made in Athens around 440 BCE. It shows the god Dionysus amidst a revel, surrounded by his mad women and by Satyrs. In Greek mythology these revels are infamous parties where followers of the wine god would conduct sexual and religious rites in the woods and drink wine until they passed out. The attendees of these revels allegedly hoped to experience ‘the ecstasy of insanity’. These events were rituals conducted in worship of madness and alcohol. Bacchus’ maenads are shown raving and insane, tearing people apart in honor of Bacchus. Not only was he god of wine, fertility, alcohol and crops but Bacchus embodied both the joy and despair of the human condition.
In Michaelangelo’s Bacchus we see the god naked holding a chalice, the lines of his body depicting ‘jovial inebriation’. Sculptors and painters in the Renaissance were fond of nudity, not only inspired by features typical of the classics, but also because they believed that depicting Gods in the ‘purest’ form of humanity brought them as close to us as possible. At the risk of generalisation, this entire time period during the middle ages was devoted to subtle hedonism. Western culture resorted to mimicking ancient civilizations as best they could, trying to rebuild what they believed to be a more evolved culture.
Another of the renaissance artworks that provides us insight into the overall fascination with Bacchus specifically is an oil painting by artist Nicolas Poussin, completed somewhere near the conclusion of the sixteenth century, so right at the beginning of the Baroque period of art. Named A Bacchanalian Revel Before A Term. The partiers in the painting are shown in the throes of joy and religious ecstasy. A description that springs to mind is ‘divulvation’. A breaking down of the social order and all forms of acceptability.
Through centuries, humankind has been trying to claw their way towards a facsimile of divinity. Our myth and history are a direct representation of our desire to, in some way, be permanent in the footnotes of history. We design our worship around our culture and none is such a good example as Bacchus. Merriment, revelry and mania, the representation of a mortal turned divine who retained his mortality in some way through his indulgence. As if the indulgence and joy was maybe what made him human in the first place. Humanity has a very telling pattern of tying our culture to worship and religion to our sense of identity. Mircea Eliade’s History of Religious Ideas, argues in its final chapter that Bacchus may be the only divinity truly worth human worship as he enjoys life, ecstasy and freedom above all else
