Dionysus: Life Lived Lavishly
It has been said that the drawback of immortality is that it renders one indifferent to life's richness. A century-long life is often blessed and beautiful. An existence extending into eternity would, in contrast, prove ultimately boring and burdensome. We don't know who said this statement or even how that person would actually know anything about immortality. We do know that if immortality isn't all it's cracked up to be, the wine god Dionysus has found ways to make the best of it. Unlike the other Olympians who are by nature aloof and rarely condescend to mingle with mortals, Dionysus delights in human company. Whereas the other more austere Olympians confine themselves to the rarefied recesses of the boundless blue, Dionysus dances wildly, laughs heartily and drinks excessively among us. One is more likely to find Dionysus and his throng of frenzied worshippers parading through forest groves and across verdant meadows than high above the cloudless climes. Not only is endless life not an intolerable drudgery to this youngest of all gods, he harbors such a fierce passion for life that he wants nothing more than to impart that sense of ecstatic living onto the rest of us. To understand this zest for living and his affinity for mortals, we must know of his origins which, even by mythological standards, were appallingly violent. Dionysus' story begins, as many stories do, with Zeus in a lustful pursuit. In this instance, he had taken a fancy to Persephone, the daughter of Demeter. (Yes, the same Persephone who became Hades' queen, though not by her choice.) He assumed the form of a snake which approached Persephone. Merely by lying on her lap was Zeus able to conceive a child which, when born, was monstrous. Its head bore a goat's horns and a nest of serpents. The horrified Persephone abandoned the infant at once. Hera, knowing the child to have been yet another son conceived by her philandering husband, grabbed the boy, named Zagreus, and handed him over to the Titans. The terrified infant tried to alter his shape many times in order to escape his captors, but to no avail. They dismembered his body, boiled the pieces and ate each fragment, except the heart which they tossed aside. They had seen it pulsing normally despite having been cooked and they were too frightened to consume it. Athena somehow managed to retrieve the heart, which she promptly presented to Zeus. Zeus swallowed the heart whole just before he conceived a child on Semele, the one mortal woman with whom Zeus had actually fallen in love. Zagreus' heart became part of the infant who would become Dionysus. We quickly recall that Semele was as much in love with Zeus as he was with her. Hera, in the guise of a crone, pretended to befriend Semele and persuaded her to make Zeus swear by the River Styx to fulfill any request she made. "After he makes that vow, have him show himself in his true form," the crone said. "If he truly loves you as he says, he shall do so." Zeus did, indeed, swear by the River Styx to grant any wish. When Semele asked him to show himself in his true form, Zeus had to comply. He became a thundercloud which incinerated Semele. Just prior to Semele's death, Zeus reached inside her womb and retrieved the baby. Zeus placed the child in his thigh for two months to complete the gestational period. The child was then born again, but this time was divinely beautiful. Zeus named him Dionysus, meaning "twice born." One would think that being born once as a monstrosity, only to be torn apart, boiled and eaten before becoming another infant that was just barely saved from an all consuming fire would have been sufficient. Alas, Dionysus' trials had only just begun. Zeus gave the baby Dionysus to Hermes and instructed him to bring the infant to Semele's sister Ino. Ino and her husband, King Athamas of Orchomenus, received the child glady and consented to raise him along with their own children. Having been told of Hera's wrath, they dressed Dionysus as a girl. This subterfuge failed to deceive Hera, who quickly found the young boy despite the disguise. She cast an insanity spell on Ino and Athamas that caused them to perceive their children as animals. Athamas chased his eldest son through the palace courtyard and ran him through. Ino mistook their other son as a hare and boiled him. They both then pursued Dionysus with the intent of skinning him alive. Fortunately, Zeus intervened. He gave Dionysus shelter and then healed Ino and Athamas' insanity. Yet, on realizing what they had done to their sons, they both leapt into the sea and drowned themselves. Realizing that Hera was not easy to fool, Zeus transformed Dionysus into a goat and handed him over to the nymphs of Mount Nysa. That time the ruse worked. In goat form, Dionysus eluded Hera's detection. The nymphs raised him in their cave, which was sumptuously furnished and redolent of the finest fragrances. They all adored Dionysus and treated him with the utmost kindness. When Dionysus reached maturity, he returned to human form and, in deepest gratitude, transformed the nymphs into the maenads, the first of Dionysus' frenzied and perpetually blissful worshippers. Aware that he had achieved godhead despite his mortal mother, Dionysus traveled the land eager to find other followers. In this effort he proved reckless for Hera, who still harbored a deep hatred for Zeus' illegitimate son, found him. She rendered him insensible with another insanity spell. Under the influence of this induced psychosis, Dionysus wandered aimlessly through the land until he reached Phrygia, where he encountered Cybele, a Phrygian fertility goddess. Cybele conducted a purification ritual that cured the young god of his madness. She then taught him how to spread his religion through the land and how to behave in a manner appropriate to his exalted position. He certainly learned about the former, though one could say he never mastered the aspect about behavior befitting a god. He and his followers traveled together, often dancing, screaming, singing and living without the least constraint. They fed from the land's bounty and drank wine, the elixir derived from fermented grapes that Dionysus, himself, invented. It was said that he offered this drink to his worshippers to dispel their inhibitions and elevate them into a state of unbridled ecstasy. Though his divinity endowed him with ageless immortality, his worshippers were mortal and their lives were, by comparison, brief and often coarsened by sickness, labor and pain. He wanted those who followed him to experience a life lavishly lived: abounding in an ecstasy that was once the sole preserve of the gods. Having been born of a mortal mother and protected from Hera by mountain nymphs, Dionysus developed a much greater partiality for Earthly beings than gods. Even after his apotheosis, when he became one of the twelve Olympians, he retained his abiding love for mortals. He descended into the Underworld and delivered his mother to Olympus. He felt in love with the mortal Ariadne, whom Theseus had abandoned on the island of Naxos after she told him the secret about how to escape from the Cretan labyrinth. He gave king Midas the gift of a golden touch after he had given shelter to one of Dionysus' lost followers. In fact, Dionysus descended quite often to Earth merely to be in the presence of his mortal admirers, who, due to the surfeit of wine he offered them, were legion. The mortals found not only his elixirs inspiring. They were drawn to him most by his unslakable passion for existence, one that was likely born of the knowledge that he came precariously close to never having existed in the first place. Apart from becoming vengeful and embittered by these experiences, Dionysus emerged from them like an alloy of untarnishable metals. No persecution could perturb him out of his blissful state. He winked playfully and smiled broadly at all adversities. While the other gods were always poised majestically on their lofty thrones, Dionysus had one leg over his Earth-bound chair while bunches of succulent grapes mostly concealed the other. No matter what travails beset him, Dionysus remained determined to be even more alive today than he was yesterday, but not nearly as much as he will be tomorrow. And, if that was how it would be forever, immortality was just fine with him.
THE SOUTHWORTH PLANETARIUM
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THE DAILY ASTRONOMER
Thursday, August 6, 2020
Remote Planetarium 77: Galactic Overview
When we return on August 31, we will begin our series of lessons pertaining to galactic astronomy. Consider today's lesson to be a precursor to this sequence. We begin simply with the sight of the Milky Way in the night sky:
Clearly visible only in the darkest sky, the Milky Way resembles a faintly luminescent cloud extending between both horizons. In the Greco-Roman mythological tradition, it was identified with milk spilt by the goddess Hera as she nursed the infant Heracles. Heracles bit down during nursing, which caused Hera to scatter the milk across the sky. It also did little to endear Heracles to Hera. The word galaxy derives from the Greek word "galaxias," meaning "milky." Today we know this ivory glow is not milk but, instead, is the collective glow of myriad stars along the plane of our home galaxy, the Milky Way (or Via Lactea.)
Below one will see an artistic image of the galaxy as seen both edge on and along the entire plane. The Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy, meaning that its center is bar shaped and spiral arms protrude out from it and form a series of curls:
The Sun is located in the Orion-Cygnus Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy. It is about 2/3 out from the nucleus, a distance equalling nearly 26,000 light years. Only within the last century have astronomers truly fathomed the sheer size and scale of our Milky Way Galaxy. We now know that:
- The Milky Way Galaxy is about 100,000 light years in diameter. That means that a light beam traveling at 186,290 miles per second would require 100,000 years to move from one end of the galaxy to the other. The Galaxy is only a few thousand light years thick along the spiral arms, the thickness of which varies with increasing distance away from the nucleus.
- The Milky Way Galaxy contains about 300 - 400 billion stars!
- By scale, if the Milky Way Galaxy were reduced to the size of the North American continent, our solar system would fit inside a coffee cup and Earth would only be visible in a microscope.
- Most of the matter contained within the galaxy is "dark matter," defined as matter that doesn't emit radiation that we can directly observe. Astronomers know about dark matter through the gravitational influence it exerts on visible matter.
- A supermassive black hole resides within the galactic nucleus. According to recent estimates, that black hole is about four million times more massive than the Sun. (It is likely that most galaxies contain a central supermassive black hole.)
As enormous as our galaxy truly is, even when compared to the Sun, it is like a mote when compared to the Local Supercluster to which it belongs. When we return, we will explore the galaxy in much greater detail, including its vast dust lanes, globular clusters, and star streams. We will also learn about the galaxy's fate and formation. It turns out that as much as we currently know about the galaxy, so much remains to be discovered.
NGC 6744: a galaxy that closely resembles the Milky Way. This galaxy is
approximately 30 million light years away in the southern constellation Pavo.