tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3407624264627208128.post4505680548373631905..comments2024-01-26T21:38:25.924-08:00Comments on Duane's PoeTree: Jack Harvey writesDuanesPoeTreehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17053093400086634552noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3407624264627208128.post-54738080726690323812020-01-13T15:24:45.368-08:002020-01-13T15:24:45.368-08:00Cadmus, the founder of Thebes, abdicated in favor ...Cadmus, the founder of Thebes, abdicated in favor of his grandson Pentheus. The new king banned the worship of Dionysus and tried to jail him. The god was the son of his aunt Semele and Zeus. When Zeus made her pregnant his jealous wife Hera caused her death by having her see Zeus in his full glory, but Athena saved the heart of the fetus, which Zeus sealed in his thigh until Dionysus was born. As "the god that comes," he became the deity of wine, fertility, ritual madness, and religious ecstasy. In the Dionysia festivals his female followers, the maenads, reenacted his infant death and rebirth by pulling apart live animals and eating them raw, thus producing "enthusiasm" (letting a god enter the practitioner's body or becoming one one with him). Disguised as a woman, Dionysus lured Pentheus to observe a ritual orgy, but the king was killed and dismembered by his mother and aunts. His mother, the first to attack him, tore off an arm and his head.<br /><br />Dionysus made Charops king of the Thracians and instructed him in his mysteries; the rule and the rights then passed to Charops' son Oeagrus, who taught them to his own son Orpheus, who traveled to Egypt and revised the Dionysian rites into the Orphic mysteries. According to Pausanias, he "attained to great influence as being thought to have invented the mysteries of the gods, and purification from unholy deeds, and cures for diseases and means of turning away the wrath of the gods." He played the lyre so wonderfully that he could enchant trees and rocks and tame wild animals; rivers would turn in their course in order to follow him. Soon after his marriage to Eurydice she died from a viper bite, and he followed her to the underworld in order to retrieve her. His playing moved Hades to allow Eurydice to leave with him, on condition that he would not look at her until they completed their journey out. Unfortunately, as he left the darkness he looked back at his bride and she vanished. In his despair, Orpheus became a hermit. Pausanias then claimed that the maenads "laid plots against his life, because he persuaded their husbands to accompany him on his wanderings.... When they had primed themselves with wine," they tore him apart. But even after they threw his head into the Hebrus river, it continued to call for his lost love. His mother Calliope and the other Muses eventually buried it on Lesbos, the home of the great poetess Sappho. (However, Pausanias also reported that "some say that Orpheus died from being struck by lightning by the god because he taught men in the mysteries things they had not before heard of.")DuanesPoeTreehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17053093400086634552noreply@blogger.com