Moonflower Farm Occasional Dispatches Seven: A Dithyramb for this Mayday 2022

Plutarch — in a text called “On the ει at Delphi” — reports that Apollo, the deity moderns associate with Delphi, was not the only one worshiped there, but shared the temple with an older occupant, Dionysus — Apollo being worshiped nine months of the year and Dionysus three.  Plutarch observes that while Apollo is always depicted the same way, as a virile young man in the prime of life, Dionysus is represented in a huge variety of forms:  a young man, an old man; a bull, a snake, a thunderbolt; a flowering bush, a grapevine; in infancy, in death.  And very often, in some combination of those two conditions, for just as the archaic form of Dionysus, Zagreus, was torn from his mother’s womb and dismembered by the Titans, and his still beating heart was cradled in his father Zeus’s thigh — they say “thigh”, but everybody knows it means balls, Zeus kept his son’s heart in his balls for nine months of gestation, until he burst forth in a second birth —  which is why (they say) songs in praise of Dionysus are called dithyrambs, “songs of the double door”. Just so in Euripides’ Bacchae Pentheus, arch-rationalist ruler and denier of holy madness, dresses in drag in order to spy on the rites — and we recall that in the immortal words of Ru Paul, we are born naked and we die naked, and all the rest is drag — and is torn asunder by his own wife and mother, who mistake him for a wild beast — or so they say anyway. And indeed Orpheus, variously seen as avatar, enemy, and prophet of Dionysus, having lost Eurydice to the underworld by his backward-glancing lack of faith, was unable to shut up about it until maenads tore him in turn and scattered the pieces; in his case it was the head, not the heart that was preserved, even in death singing on the waters, a song we can hear to this day in the humming of bees.  Dionysus thus is somehow a divinity who is incarnated in those who deny his divinity — though this incarnation is their doom (and ours?).

Anyway, Plutarch explains that Dionysus is worshiped for three months of the year to Apollo’s nine because the ratio of the ordering of the world to its conflagration is held by the Delphic priests to be three to one.

So, that’s what I’ve been thinking about this Spring;  ordering and conflagration, hearts and heads, birth and death and drag; my mother died a few months ago, my wife will soon be pregnant; and I’d like us all to raise a glass in the words of Dylan Thomas, to “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower drives [our] green age”.