3rd century BC) poet Callimachus perhaps did. But Athena managed to save Dionysus' heart, by which Zeus was able to contrive his rebirth from Semele.Īlthough the extant Orphic sources do not mention the name "Zagreus" in connection with this dismembered Dionysus (or anywhere else), the (c. The pieces were then boiled, roasted and partially eaten, by the Titans. Distracting the infant Dionysus with various toys, including a mirror, the Titans seized Dionysus and tore (or cut) him to pieces. Zeus intended Dionysus to be his successor as ruler of the cosmos, but a jealous Hera incited the Titans to kill the child. He is taken to Mount Ida where (like the infant Zeus) he is guarded by the dancing Curetes.
Zeus had intercourse with Persephone in the form of a serpent, producing Dionysus. As pieced together from various ancient sources, the reconstructed story, usually given by modern scholars, goes as follows. The dismemberment of Dionysus-Zagreus (the sparagmos) is often considered to be the most important myth of Orphism. This Dionysus was a son of Zeus and Persephone who was, as an infant, attacked and dismembered by the Titans, but later reborn as the son of Zeus and Semele. The Zagreus from the Euripides fragment is suggestive of Dionysus, the wine god son of Zeus and Semele, and in fact, although it seems not to occur anywhere in Orphic sources, the name “Zagreus” is elsewhere identified with an Orphic Dionysus, who had a very different tradition from the standard one. Orphic Dionysus Zagreus ĭionysus in a mosaic from the House of Poseidon, Zeugma Mosaic Museum A fragment from Euripides' lost play Cretan Men ( Kretes) has the chorus describe themselves as initiates of Idaean Zeus and celebrants of "night-ranging Zagreus, performing his feasts of raw flesh". 5th century BC), Zagreus seems to be the son of Hades, while in Aeschylus' Egyptians ( Aigyptioi), Zagreus was apparently identified with Hades himself. In a fragment from one of Aeschylus' lost Sisyphus plays (c. Įvidently for Aeschylus, Zagreus was, in fact, an underworld god. Perhaps here meaning the highest god of the underworld. Mistress Earth, and Zagreus highest of all the gods. The earliest is in a single quoted line from the (6th century BC?) epic Alcmeonis:
The early mentions of Zagreus, which occur only in fragments from lost works, connect Zagreus with the Greek underworld. "We may justifiably ask," observes Kerenyi, "why was this great mythical hunter, who in Greece became a mysterious god of the underworld, a capturer of wild animals and not a killer?" Kerényi links the figure of Zagreus with archaic Dionysiac rites in which small animals were torn limb from limb and their flesh devoured raw, "not as an emanation of the Greek Dionysian religion, but rather as a migration or survival of a prehistoric rite". As interpreted by Karl Kerényi based on a Hesychian gloss, the Ionian Greek word for a hunter who catches living animals is called zagreus, and the word zagre signifies a "pit for the capture of live animals".
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