vi. The son of God born to the virgin, bringing the counter-gift to bread: wine.

xxviii. And wine, the cure of sorrow

xl. The god had made his fountains flow for them, they washed the blood from their hands.

xl. Without wine we shall not know how to forget our small selves - and that will be the end of love, and every other pleasure for us, mortals.

The Vine

Like the glories which arise from a primal world renewed, music, dance, and prophecy - these three paragons - emerge like blessed miracles from Dionysiac madness. But there is a sacred plant in which this madness itself rises out of the earth in the form of an elixir which intoxicates. This is the vine.

This miraculous plant, which has been the inspiration for thousands of profound thoughts, has been considered in all ages the loveliest gift of Dionysus and his epiphany in nature. Even if we did not know it, we would be forced to see that wine carries within it the wonders and secrets, the boundless wild nature of the god. The moment the belief in Dionysus became alive, the devout could learn from wine and could get an ever deeper awareness of who he really was. After all, pleasure and pain and all the antithesis of Dionysus are locked up in the deep excitation with which he seizes the soul.

Wine, as Plutarch says so nicely, frees the soul of subservience, fear, and insincerity; it teaches men how to be truthful and candid with one another. It reveals that which was hidden. Wine and truth have long been associated in proverbs. Indeed, it must have been a god who was familiar with suffering who endowed man with such a comforter and deliverer. It is said that wine was given to mankind after the great flood as divine assistance. And finally, in the same drink which has within it the power to free, to comfort, and to bring bliss, there slumbers also the madness of the god of horror.

Thus, of all that earth produces, the vine mirrors best the god's two faces and reveals most clearly his miraculous nature - both his endearing and his terrible wildness. It was doubtless always recognized as such, ever since one knew of him and of wine.

But the Greek of antiquity was caught up by the total seriousness of the truth that here pleasure and pain, enlightenment and destruction, the lovable and the horrible lived in close intimacy. It is this unity of the paradoxical which appeared in Dionysiac ecstasy with staggering force.