Dionysus | Bacchus
I’ve long suspected that Dionysus and Bacchus are less pantheon‑bound deities than two hemispheres of the same hallucinatory brain, one Greek‑born and one Roman‑bred—twins in a schizophrenic womb, each vying for supremacy in the blood‑spattered amphitheatre of our collective unconscious. Permit me, then, a brief comparative extravaganza in which I intoxicate you with language as they intoxicate mortals with wine.
Dionysus, the razor‑tongued enfant terrible of Olympus, sprung from Zeus’s thigh in a mythic Caesarean of delirium. He is the saviour of the vine, the strange child of frenzied Maenads who dance on cliff‑edges to the percussion of thyrsus‑tipped dreams. In him you feel the furtive tickle of divine madness, a mercurial flicker that transmutes pastoral vineyards into orgiastic labyrinths. He is at once liberator and corrupter—bestowing ecstasy, then yanking it away with the callous brusqueness of a speed dealer who’s tired of you hitting snooze on your own annihilation.
Bacchus, by contrast, is the Clint Eastwood to Dionysus’s Marlon Brando, a sanitised, girdle‑belted icon of state‑sanctioned revelry. Rome appropriated the god and scrubbed his edges, recasting him into the image of civilized excess. Bacchus presides over the Bacchanalia—festivals of regulated abandon—where revels unfold under watchful magistrates, lest the wine‑soaked populace get any ideas about genuine liberation. His vines crawl across marble atria rather than crumbling grottoes; his rites are civil ceremonies punctuated by toasts rather than matters of Dionysian transgression.
Yet, beneath this veneer of propriety, the same electric menace crackles. Dionysus and Bacchus both threaten to rend the tenets of order: the Greek sees it in the Gorgonian terror of his initiation, the Roman conceals it under the toga’s folds. Both are gods of metamorphosis, yet Dionysus dissolves your ego with the barbaric splendour of a cuckoo in your breast, while Bacchus dispenses morphine‑soft delusions of order—an opiate that lulls you into believing your vice is entirely decorous.
Narratively, then, they are mirror images in a Rorschach of intoxication. Dionysus beckons you to tumble headlong into the void—“Embrace the vines,” he whispers, “and let them cradle you in their thorns.” Bacchus, smiling with a toga‑draped self‑satisfaction, pours a cup and pronounces: “Behold controlled ecstasy, safe for household gods.” One is a knife‑edged epiphany; the other, a velvet‑lined box.
So it seems I find myself ineluctably drawn to both: to Dionysus’s anarchic invitation, for it shatters the brittle scaffolding of the rational self; and to Bacchus’s velvet box, for its seductive promise of managed madness. In their duel, I recognise the paradox of human longing: we crave the vertigo of ungovernable abandon and the balm of social sanction. To worship Dionysus is to court blindness; to worship Bacchus is to romance a glossy simulacrum. And so, goblet in hand, I toast them both—inviting chaos and etiquette to dance their infernal cotillion across my synapses, until the world dissolves into one last, ecstatic draught.
The above reflections are likely the reason I indulged myself in the one club with the two mythological names, stretched over time like some gluttonous, malleable pig with a gut the size of Devon that oozed over rocks like tepid, translucent fat. There was a joyous cruelty to my solitary pilgrimages: the act of entering that dim‑lit vestibule felt like stepping through a screen of mercury into another dimension—one where time was a broken wristwatch ticking irregularly, or perhaps not ticking at all. My denim flares hugged me like a second skin—from the knee up at least—the tail of my shirt brushing the small of my back in loose, psychedelic swirls. Those Black and white Converse platforms—who had made them? Not me. They appeared one night during a journey into psychedelia, and so wore them I did. As they caught the stroboscopic glow of the club’s rope lights, and felt less like footwear than talismans, as though their soles had been dipped in molten midday and cooled by some primordial ocean.
I’d buy my 18th rum and black from the girl behind the bar whose hair was bleached to the colour of moonlight on salt. She appeared in the shallow arched window, and poured with the precision of a mason setting bricks, the cordial settling around the rum like sediment in an oyster shell. The drink tasted of blunt force and velvet—liquid sorrow and triumph in one. I took that glass in hand and strode onto the dance floor, where the speakers spat out ‘Coldblooded’ (James Brown, not Bar-Kays, “Check out this new lick”) in a loop so hypnotic it felt as though the bass was drilling into my frontal lobe, excavating some paleolithic drum core.
Alone, I could lose myself and find myself in the same heaving mass of bodies. There was freedom in anonymity: no observer to catalogue my flailing limbs, no Facebook stoner-snapping pictures to immortalise my haphazard gyrations. Dancing was an act of exorcism. Limbs snapped and curved; torso undulated. Around me, reflections fractured in mirror balls, each shard a fragment of self shimmering in midair.
One night, as I lunged into the next chorus, I felt the first whisper. Not an aural whisper—it was something more tactile, like a creature brushing its antennae across my mind. I paused, drink halfway to mouth, and the music calmed around me: drum breaks decelerated, and the stench of funk unwound into warm, quivering floral notes. I blinked and saw him. He stood beyond the bar, leaned against a steel column, wearing a wreath of grape leaves in his hair. His eyes were a fluid green, all-seeing yet disinterested—like an owl’s. He wore a white tunic, improbably clean, as though freshly laundered in the launderette of the underworld. Around his wrist were bangles of twisted vines, small buds budding into tiny grapes. He looked at me and raised an eyebrow that lifted a galaxy of questions.
“You seem … enthused,” he said, voice like midnight on a hot tin roof.
I staggered, gulping the last of my rum and black. “I—This is my sanctuary.”
He smiled, but it wasn’t friendly. It was ferrocous, like a shark baring rows of ivory. “Sanctuary,” he repeated. “For mortals, yes. But I prefer revelry.”
Before I could ask how he’d gotten in past the bouncer or how he’d exchanged his toga for that wreath, he was beside me, stepping into my light. His presence smelt of fermenting grapes and something darker—feral earth, rich and loamy. My heart hammered like a conga in ecstasy. I knew, with the unsettling certainty of déjà vu, that I was in the company of something not quite human.
“Dionysus?” I blurted. “Or Bacchus?”
He laughed, and the sound rattled like broken wine glasses in a dishwasher. “Ah, the eternal question. Theologies quarrel, philologists pontificate, but I am neither Greek nor Roman—I am both and neither. A god spliced by history, schism in the pantheon. You dance to celebrate me, but you dance alone. Look around.”
I did.
The crowd had resumed its fervour; only their edges were fuzzed, as though someone had taken a Polaroid and left it too long in the sun. Faces bled into one another. Limbs extended where none should exist. The floor rippled beneath my boots, hexagonal tiles turning into mosaic vines.
He placed a hand on my shoulder—warm, insistent. “I fed on your desire for tribal abandon. Each rum and black, each frantic step, was a sacrifice to me. The club itself is my temple.”
I tried to laugh it off. “Tell that to the landlord,” I said, though I felt the humour curdle in my throat.
He stepped back and beckoned. “Come.”
Against any sane instinct, I followed. We moved through the crowd that parted like reeds. The lights dimmed. A single spotlight bloomed on a door at the rear of the club. He opened it. Inside was not a staff room, but a grove of gnarled oaks and lianas that coiled around wrought iron chairs. The air was thick and warm, like the inside of a grape. I could hear cicadas.
“This is where the boundaries blur,” he said, plucking a grape from a vine and popping it into his mouth. The fruit split with a delicate rip, releasing a glint of juice. “Here, history collapses. I am Dionysus, lord of divine mania. I am Bacchus, patron of civilized excess. I am the catastrophe in your cerebral cortex, the insinuation under your tongue.”
My vision spun. I wondered if I’d slipped into a breakdown—or perhaps an upgrade of consciousness. I looked down at my shirt. The paisley swirl, stolen from my mother’s wardrobe, seemed to writhe with eldritch life.
He prodded a vine. The leaves unfurled to reveal faces—Greek maenads contorted in ecstatic dance, Roman senators convulsing in secret bacchanals. The grapes they bore were black as pitch.
“The wine I offer,” he continued, “is not fermented grape. It is liquefied revel in your veins. Drink.” He held out a vessel carved from amethyst.
I hesitated. My rational, creative self—the one that scribbled notes and made collages—screeched in protest, but my body already arched forward. I drank. The liquid was cold fire, molten epiphany. Doors cracked open in my skull. I felt each cell pulse with savage hymns.
When I opened my eyes again, the club had returned—but in reverse. The patrons danced in reverse, rewinding their movements. Glasses flew upward, unsplintered. Drinks unspilled into bottles. The DJ’s needles unthreaded the vinyl. Rope lights retracted, the mirrors coalesced into spheres, then orbited back into mirror balls, and finally merged into a single black orb that shattered like obsidian shards across the ceiling.
I was alone on the floor. The music was gone. The room was silent except for the slick whisper of a last grape falling to the boards.
The wreath‑crowned figure stood before me, fading like a Polaroid deleted in mid‑development. He smiled—a blink and he was gone. In his place lay a single, spotless grape, glowing with internal phosphorus.
I picked it up. It pulsed in my palm like the final heartbeat of the night. I pressed it to my lips.
I awoke in my bed, shirt off, flares discarded in a heap, platforms perched at the foot of the mattress like sentries. My radio alarm clock, jolly and bright, displayed 3:33 AM. I was alone, except for the faintest scent of grape leaves lingering in the air. On my bedside table was that single grape, perfectly round, impossibly plump. I touched it. It felt alive. Across time and myth, I had been both worshipper and sacrifice—and somewhere in that febrile club, I had enacted a ritual older than memory. Dionysus and Bacchus had danced through me, and I had become the vessel, the altar, the unripe fruit of divine delirium.
I swallowed—and the world tilted, forever unbalanced between the Greek and the Roman, the primal and the polite, the madness of the vine and the civility of the cup. And in that dizzy infinitude, I understood that I had never truly been alone on the dance floor. I had been consecrated.