Dionysos Quotes

“He is the hunter, yet also the hunted - and he is dead, yet also alive; these cycles of opposition were the driving force behind his cult rites. Dionysos offers us the joyous freedom of choice, yet he is also the toxicity that we ourselves administer by our erroneous decisions; he is Dionysos Bromios, ‘the roarer’ and loud-shouting god of pandemonium; ‘yet silence and stillness often fell upon those who were possessed by him’.[viii] Often symbolic of extreme and contrasting states of being, he embodies the primal emotions that drive us and makes us who we are.”
― Vikki Bramshaw, Dionysos: Exciter to Frenzy

“the Dionysian philosophy suggests that it impossible to develop spiritually without also embracing the realities of life – for Dionysos is a god of substance. The ancient Greeks had two different words for our word, ‘life’: the first was bios which referred to the literal, mortal existence of an individual, and the other was zöe which referred to the ‘spirit’ of life. This ethos was reflected at the core of Dionysian religion, which recognised both the reality of existence and also a profound spiritual awareness. Dionysos is sometimes described as “other-worldly without being world-denying” [vi] the Dionysian cult brought religion and the corporeal into one without negating the importance or viability of either; arguably, perhaps something that is missing in many spiritual and religious paths available today.”
― Vikki Bramshaw, Dionysos: Exciter to Frenzy

“Sabazios is a very specific god in his own right who became conflated with Zagreus, the local horned deity of Crete. Certainly there appears to have been a presence of a Dionysian current in Minoan Crete before the arrival of Sabazios, particularly in terms of tauromorphic (bull-formed) imagery; and in the epic Dionysiaca the poet Nonnus describes this Zagreus as the ‘former Dionysos’, suggesting that Zagreus represented the Dionysian current before the Mycenaean Greeks took over Minoan Crete.”
― Vikki Bramshaw, Dionysos: Exciter to Frenzy

“Like water, the gods are ever changing, ever moving, influenced by the people around them and we cannot define them; and they slip through our fingers if we try to contain them. The ancients saw things this way too - the majority of pre-Abrahamic religions were open to recognising their own gods in the gods of other cultures, and quite often two deities were synchronized for cultural or political reasons. These unified deities of the same current brought with them cultural diversity from their homelands.”
― Vikki Bramshaw, Dionysos: Exciter to Frenzy