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“He is twofold then - a Doppelganger; like Persephone, he belongs to two worlds, and has much in common with her, and a full share of those dark possibilities which, even apart from the story of the rape, belong to her. He is a chthonian god, and, like all the children of the earth, has an element of sadness; like Hades himself, he is hollow and devouring, an eater of man’s flesh - sarcophagus - the grave which consumed unaware the ivory-white shoulder of Pelops. And you have no sooner caught a glimpse of this image, than a certain perceptible shadow comes creeping over the whole story; for, in effect, we have seen glimpses of the sorrowing Dionysus all along. Part of the interest of the Theban legend of his birth is that he comes out of the marriage of a god with a mortal woman; and from the first, like mortal heroes, he falls within the sphere of human chances. At first, indeed, the melancholy settles round the person of his mother, dead in childbirth, and ignorant of the glory of her son; in shame, according to Euripides; punished, as her own sisters allege, for impiety. The death of Semele is a sort of ideal or type of this particular claim on human pity, as the descent of Persephone into Hades, of all human pity over the early death of women. Accordingly, his triumph being now consummated, he descends into Hades, though the unfamothable Alcyonian lake, according to the most central version of the legend, to bring her up from thence […] As in Delphi the winter months were sacred to him, so in Athens his feasts all fall within the four months on this and that side of the shortest day; as Persephone spends those four months - a third part of the year - in Hades. Son or brother of Persephone he actually becomes at last, in confused, half-developed tradition; and even has his place, with his dark sister, in the Eleusinian mysteries, as Iacchus.”

pagan, spiritual and religion blinkies part 2

This is an interesting scene for many reasons:

I think there should be a modern retelling of The Bacchae as a cosmic horror story, actually. Where Thebes is some isolated little town in Bumfuck Nowhere where right ‘bout twenty, twenty-five years ago, the sheriff’s daughter disappeared, and the mystery of that has hung thick and heavy over the town ever since.