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Dionysus: Myth and Cult
Dionysus — Myth and Cult
Otto’s 1933 monograph (English translation 1965 by Robert B. Palmer) on the god who most resisted rationalist treatment. Dionysus had been omitted from Otto’s earlier The Homeric Gods because, Otto explains in the foreword, “he does not belong to the circle of the true Olympians to which it was dedicated. Now he becomes the subject of a book of his own” (Otto 1965, Foreword). The book’s foreword inverts the prevailing evolutionist method: rather than tracing a development from “the crudity of first beginnings” to “the splendor and dignity of the classical forms of deity,” Otto places “the critical moment of original genius” at the beginning, prior to individual poets and artists.
The book organizes the phenomenology of the god across mask and tragedy, maenadic possession, the bisexuality of the archaic god, vegetative madness and wine, the marriage with Ariadne. The Spring Publications notice — carried in Miller’s New Polytheism — describes it as “a full phenomenology of the god and the Dionysian experience: exultations of pandaemonium, silence and somber madness; mask, tragedy and theater; bisexuality and the child; wine and the juices of vegetative nature; cults with maenads” (Miller 1974).
Otto’s thesis that Dionysus was an early rather than late god of the Greek pantheon — rejected by Nilsson and most contemporaries — was confirmed posthumously by the discovery of di-wo-nu-so-jo on a Linear B fragment at Pylos.