Demigods and Monsters by Rick Riordan Page A

excess of drinking, is not a good thing or in any way attractive. But there’s another side to the fruit of the vine. What Riordan doesn’t really address—probably because these books are written for readers under the legal drinking age—are some of the ancient ritual uses of wine. It was in these rituals that Dionysus was known as the god of divine ecstasy, a usually blissful state in which normal limitations disappear and one is united with or open to the divine. And without understanding that aspect of the god, you can’t really understand Dionysus.
    One thing to keep in mind when we talk about the Greek myths is that these were not just a bunch of stories made up to explain natural phenomena like sunrise and thunder to people who didn’t have our current understanding of science. The myths tell the stories of gods whom the people worshipped. The Ancient Greeks built temples to these gods and prayed to them and followed specific rites or rituals, asking the gods to aid and protect them. One of the things I love about the Greek pantheon is that they had specialists. You prayed to Artemis if you wanted a good hunt, to Ares before you went into battle, and to Dionysus if you wanted a healthy orchard or a good crop of grapes. Wine was part of many of these rituals, which shouldn’t surprise anyone. It’s been a sacrament (part of sacred ritual) for millennia and is still part of many ceremonies both in Judaism and Christianity.
    Why wine? It relaxes. It loosens the grip of the ordinary world, the clutter of everyday life: thoughts about what you have to do, where you have to go, what someone said. Wine dissolves inhibitions, freeing people from worry and fear. It makes people feel good
and even empowered. It’s used as part of religious rituals for the very deliberate purpose of preparing the worshipper to forget about the ordinary world for a while and open to the divine powers. Wine is a kind of intermediary, or medium, that allows you to communicate with the deities. When worshippers went to a Dionysian festival they weren’t just letting loose, they were opening themselves to the truths of the gods. This state of intoxication was called divine ecstasy. It was in this state that the messages from the gods—even prophecies—came through. It was also a state of divine inspiration, from which songs or stories or ideas would arise. Inspiration is another word for breath, and creative inspiration was said to be the gods breathing through you.
    Wine was considered to be part of Dionysus, literally. It was believed that if you drank his wine, you took a bit of the god inside you. He was, as Edith Hamilton points out, the only god who existed both outside and inside his worshippers. The Maenads, the most extreme of his devotees, believed that when they drank his wine, they were possessed by him. Dionysus bridged what Michael Grant describes in his book, Myths of the Greek and Romans , as “the sharp gulf between human and divine.”
    There’s a lovely symmetry in the myths of Dionysus. His mother Semele died because she wanted to see a god in his full glory. Her son allows humans to see the gods through him, and even to take the divine inside them. It’s as if he’s still working on his mother’s problem, saying, “Okay, maybe you can’t look at the gods full on, but there is a way you can experience them, and I’ll let you do it.”
    So the underlying assumption in the use of wine as part of religious ritual is that it’s hard to access the gods in our usual distracted state of mind. Or put another way, one of the trickiest things about having religious faith is that most of the time we can’t see the divine. Like Homer, Riordan uses the device of the Mist to explain why mortals are usually so blind to the presence of the gods. Historically, just about every religion has dealt with this problem: What is it that you
have to do to actually