The Hymns of Orpheus · 34 of 91

To Bacchus.

XXIX. TO BACCHUS. The FUMIGATION from STORAX. BACCHUS I call, loud-sounding and divine,

Insight

Dionysus is the Orphic god par excellence, more central to Orphic theology than to civic Greek religion. “Two-fold shape” and “thrice begotten” point to the Zagreus myth: the infant Dionysus-Zagreus, son of Zeus and Persephone, was killed and devoured by the Titans, who were then blasted by Zeus’s thunder; from the Titans’ ashes came humanity, carrying both the Titanic (bodily, fallen) element and the Dionysian (divine, original) element. Zeus rescued Dionysus’s heart and reconstituted him as the Dionysus we know. This is the Orphic anthropogonic myth, and it is the closest thing in pre-Christian Mediterranean religion to a doctrine of original sin combined with a divine fragment buried in human nature. The structural resemblance to Christian anthropology is one reason Christian writers found Dionysus so threatening.

Fanatic God, a two-fold shape is thine:

Thy various names and attributes I sing,

O, first-born, thrice begotten, Bacchic king: 4

Rural, ineffable, two-form’d, obscure, 5

Two-horn’d, with ivy crown’d, euion, pure.

Bull-fac’d, and martial, bearer of the vine,

Endu’d with counsel prudent and divine:

Triennial, whom the leaves of vines adorn,

Of Jove and Proserpine, occultly born. 10

Immortal dæmon, hear my suppliant voice,

Give me in blameless plenty to rejoice;

And listen gracious to my mystic pray’r,

Surrounded with thy choir of nurses fair.

Footnotes 155:4 Ver. 4.] O, first-born. See the notes to Hymn v. to Protogonus.