History of Toxicology and Environmental HealthToxicology in Antiquity II
2015, Pages 116–125
Chapter 12 – Entheogens in Ancient Times: Wine and the Rituals of Dionysus
Entheogen
is a neologism used to designate psychoactive substances employed in
culturally sanctioned visionary experiences in ritual or religious
contexts. The primary divine patron of such experience in Classical
antiquity was Dionysus. His manifestation in the civilized ferment of
the grape, which yielded wine, was contrasted with the intoxicants from
other sources that preceded viticulture, such as toxic herbs, mushrooms,
and animal and insect venoms. Emblematic of the contrast was the
opposition between the vine and the ivy. The mountain revels of the
deity’s female devotees, known as maenads or bacchants, honored the
precedents to viticulture in rituals of herb gathering, of which their
staff of empowerment, the thyrsus or the narthex, was symbolic. The
wine, in contrast, was the drink of the symposium, celebrated by men
within the city, with female sexual companions not numbered among the
citizenry. The wine itself mediated between the wild and the cultivated
in that it was doctored with herbal additives.
Keywords
- Alcohol;
- bacchant;
- Bacchus;
- Dionysus;
- entheogen;
- herb gatherers;
- maenad;
- narthex;
- Prometheus;
- satyr;
- symposium;
- theater;
- thyrsus;
- grapevine;
- wine
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