#thyrsus

Design for Dionysus, protagonist of my rpg project, Katabasis. And his main weapon, the thyrsus.

Little Fox is mine & Lesja is @urbanprole's.

Note: the clock is Lesja's familiar spirit, a little electronica spirit named Oontz Oontz that Lesja accidentally rescued during a plot years ago.

“While the vine with its clusters was the most characteristic manifestation of Dionysus, he was also a god of trees in general. Thus we are told that almost all the Greeks sacrificed to ‘Dionysus of the tree.’ In Boeotia one of his titles was ‘Dionysus in the tree.’ His image was often merely an upright post, without arms, but draped in a mantle, with a bearded mask to represent the head, and with leafy boughs projecting from the head or body to shew the nature of the deity….

Dionysus in Boeotia, from Daremberg & Saglio’s Dictionnaire des antiquités grecques et romaines, vol. I, pt. 1 (1873, p. 626).

(Source: Charles Daremberg & Edmond Saglio, Public Domain, Internet Archive)

“At Magnesia on the Maeander an image of Dionysus is said to have been found in a plane-tree, which had been broken by the wind. He was the patron of cultivated trees; prayers were offered to him that he would make the trees grow; and he was especially honoured by husbandmen, chiefly fruit-growers, who set up an image of him, in the shape of a natural tree-stump, in their orchards. He was said to have discovered all tree-fruits, amongst which apples and figs are particularly mentioned; and he was referred to as ‘well-fruited,’ ‘he of the green fruit,’ and ‘making the fruit to grow.’ One of his titles was ‘teeming’ or ‘bursting’ (as of sap or blossoms); and there was a Flowery Dionysus in Attica and at Patrae in Achaia. The Athenians sacrificed to him for the prosperity of the fruits of the land. Amongst the trees particularly sacred to him, in addition to the vine, was the pine-tree. The Delphic oracle commanded the Corinthians to worship a particular pine-tree ‘equally with the god,’ so they made two images of Dionysus out of it, with red faces and gilt bodies. In art a wand, tipped with a pine-cone, is commonly carried by the god or his worshippers. 

A thyrsus-wielding maenad dangles temptation before a satyr (while trodding on his snake) in the Roman-era Mosaic of the Seasons from Palermo (now found in the Museo archeologico regionale di Palermo). 

(Source: Giovanni Dall'Orto, Attribution, via Wikimedia Commons)

“Again, the ivy and the fig-tree were especially associated with him. In the Attic township of Acharnae there was a Dionysus Ivy; at Lacedaemon there was a Fig Dionysus; and in Naxos, where figs were called meilicha, there was a Dionysus Meilichios, the face of whose image was made of fig-wood.”