So we came to the Hyperborean lands of snow and ice, and of course they were not uninhabited at all, but were home to a race of tall fair-skinned golden-haired folk. We coasted there awhile, until the unending darkness of the winter drove even long-enduring Odysseus to despair; then we turned west and found an island not quite as bleak and snowy, where we made a landing and visited with its people, who were dark and stocky but did not look at all like us, and traveled far inland to a place where they had their temple, one that was not in any way like the temples of Hellas: it was just a double ring of huge lofty stones, with equally huge crosspieces laid atop them as lintels.
The people of the island were very proud of this temple, which must have been built by giants or magicians. At first they would not let us look on while they celebrated their rites there, but then I played my lyre for them and sang, and told of the secret things in a way that showed them that all gods are the same god, and when they saw that my music obeyed the laws of the harmony of the universe they let us take part in their ceremony. It was a very strange one indeed. I will not speak of it except to say that it left me with a feeling of deep fulfillment, seeing as I did that the eternal truths held sway even here at the end of the earth.
And afterward? We sailed out into the ocean again and would have gone southward until the stars we knew had slipped below the horizon and we entered the fabled fiery territories beyond the rim of the world. But storms came up and our vessel was whirled round and round until it seemed we would be carried to the bottom; and although we survived it, brave Odysseus at last was unable to make his men carry us any farther, and perhaps, though he would never have admitted it, he had come finally to the end of his own hunger for exploration. So we turned back and searched for the entrance to our own sea, a sea that we Hellenes think is great in size but now seemed to us small and almost comical after the one on whose breast we had been traveling so long, and to Hellas we returned. Of Odysseus I heard nothing more. I think he died in his own bed in Ithaca, all his questing finally at an end. My own death, which, as I knew, awaited me in Thrace, was not nearly so peaceful.
15
Since earliest times, as I have said, the people of Thrace have worshipped the god Dionysus. Now you must know that Dionysus is an aspect of the One God, as Apollo is also, and thundering Zeus, and Poseidon of the trident and dark Hades and white-armed Hera and Aphrodite and Athena and all the rest; and they are all divine in their own ways, but each of us must choose that aspect of divinity which speaks to his own mind and soul, and make that the focus of our worship. Or, rather, each of us is chosen by some aspect of divinity. I had from birth belonged to Apollo; but my Ciconian people belonged to Dionysus, that roaring god, that god of blood and wine and fire.
Now the worship of Dionysus is valuable up to a point, as the worship of any god is valuable. Through his Mysteries it was possible to find that gateway into the deeper reality that is the goal of all worship. I myself had sung songs of the birth of Dionysus, Zeus’s son by Persephone, whom Zeus had meant one day to be his own successor. I told how in the early days of the world the Titans, those old sulking overthrown gods, the rebellious children of Uranus, grew jealous of the upstart child’s glory and fell upon him and tore him apart, and even fed on the flesh of his sundered limbs, though Athena was able to rescue his heart, from which Zeus caused Dionysus to be born again. Zeus in fury destroyed the Titans then with a thunderbolt, and from their ashes the race of mortal men arose. All this was a story of the eternal cycle of death and rebirth that underlies all existence. Dionysus the immortal god who dies, Dionysus the resurrected, was the spirit of life against which the forces of death unceasingly contend. One sings of such stories, not because they are the literal truth, but because they cast the light of truth over the deep realities of the world.
But, over the years, the Dionysiac cult of my people had grown wilder and bloodier, until its frenzy reached such a crazed pitch that it obscured rather than revealed those truths that all of us strive to comprehend, and truth became imprisoned in that obscurity. It was my task in Thrace to untwist the chains that had come to tie the hidden soul of harmony.
In our land the chief worshippers of the resurrected god were women, who called themselves Bacchantes, for Bacchus was one of Dionsyus’ innumerable names, but they also were known as maenads, or raving ones, to those who took them to be madwomen. Certainly their way of giving praise to their god was a ferocious one. Clad in goatskins and bedecking their hair with snakes, they raged wild-eyed through the countryside with painted faces, playing harsh music on shrill flutes, beating on drums and cymbals and jangling tambourines, waving pine torches aloft, uttering piercing bloodcurdling shrieks, ripping apart whatever lay in their path. Their minds were blurred by wine and the fumes of incense, and in their ecstasies they bade farewell entirely to reason and rampaged like an uncheckable force. At the climax of their rites they would fall upon a bull, which they believed to be the incarnation of their Dionysus, and tear the beast asunder with their hands, devouring its raw flesh by way of attaining union with the god.
Often did I see our maenads trooping back afterward from the forest, their cheeks and forearms smeared horribly with the blood of the sacrificed bull. They were already growing calmer, their passions spent, but still were half lost in a transport of holy fervor. The leader of these Bacchantes was named Hesione, my own kinswoman, the daughter of my father’s brother. Her perpetual companion was scarlet-haired Phorixo, a woman who stood nearly as tall as any man, and with them often was soft-faced Carya, younger than the other two, a practitioner of the healing arts. In the daily life of the city these women were, all three, tender and loving wives and mothers, adept in the skills of the household, and, as I have said, Carya was also one who could knowledgeably minister to those in pain. But they were devotees of Dionysus as well, and when the fit was on them they were frightening to behold, wholly caught up in the mad rampages by which they honored their god.
“Look at these,” I would say to Hesione, showing her the portraits of Dionysus and Apollo that stood in our temple. “Can you not see that one is the mirror image of the other? These gods are one and the same, Hesione.”
“They are nothing like each other,” she would reply.
“Each represents one aspect of the whole,” I told her then. “Dionysus is fiery energy; Apollo is calmness and sanity. Our goal should be to unite the two in one.”
“And have you done that? You ignore Dionysus entirely. You are merely Apollo’s creature. And you anger Dionysus greatly, Orpheus, through your neglect of him.”
“No,” I said. “Not so. In my music I worship him as deeply as you do. My music contains both Apollo and Dionysus, or it would not have the power to move the soul.”
She could not be swayed. Her voice was crisp with scorn. “Your music comes entirely from Apollo, whatever you may say. It lacks the fire of Dionysus.” And she laughed. “Come with us, some day, to the mountainside, and hear the sounds of our flutes and cymbals and drums, and then you will learn what true music is.”