ZEITGEIST: THE MOVIE

As the god of the vine, Dionysus is depicted in ancient texts as traveling around teaching
agriculture, as well as doing various miracles, such as in Homer‘s The Iliad, dating to the 9 th
century BCE, and in The Bacchae of Euripides, the famous Greek playwright who lived around
480 to 406 BCE. In addition, Dionysus‘s miracle of changing water to wine is also recounted in
pre-Christian times by Diodorus (Library of History, 3.66.3). 171
Epithets: In Bible Myths and Their Parallels in Other Religions, Doane asserts, ―Bacchus, the offspring of
Jupiter and Semele was called the ‗Savior,‘ ...he was called the ‗Only Begotten Son.‘‖ 172 The title of
―savior‖ or Soter was applied to many Greek and other gods prior to the Christian era. 173
Regarding Dionysus‘s many divine epithets, Murdock states:
In an Orphic hymn, Phanes-Dionysus is styled by the Greek title Protogonos or ―first-born‖ of
Zeus, also translated at times as ―only-begotten son,‖ although the term Monogenes would be
more appropriately rendered as the latter.
As concerns the epithet ―King of Kings,‖ noted anthropologist Sir James G. Frazer tells us that the
Neoplatonist Proclus (5 th cent. AD/CE) related:
Dionysus was the last king of the gods appointed by Zeus. For his father set him on the
kingly throne, and placed in his hand the scepter, and made him king of all the gods of
the world.
In the case of Dionysus/Bacchus being labeled the ―Alpha and Omega,‖ here is one instance
where not knowing foreign languages would make the sources difficult to access, as we are told
in French by Rev. Isaac de Beausobre that there is an ancient inscription in which
Dionysus/Bacchus says, ―I am the Alpha and Omega.‖ 174
The title ―King of Kings‖ and other epithets may reflect Dionysus‘s kinship with Osiris: During the late 18 th
to early 19 th dynasties (c. 1300 BCE), Osiris‘s epithets included, ―the king of eternity, the lord of
everlastingness, who traverseth millions of years in the duration of his life, the firstborn son of the womb
of Nut, begotten of Seb, the prince of gods and men, the god of gods, the king of kings, the lord of lords,
the prince of princes, the governor of the world whose existence is for everlasting.‖ 175
Death/Resurrection: Dionysus‘s death and resurrection were well-known mythical motifs in antiquity.
The various myths concerning these motifs are recounted by Frazer:
According to one version, which represented Dionysus as a son of Zeus and Demeter, his mother
pieced together his mangled limbs and made him young again. In others it is simply said that
shortly after his burial he rose from the dead and ascended up to heaven...
Turning from the myth to the ritual, we find that the Cretans celebrated a biennial festival at which
the passion of Dionysus was represented in every detail... Where the resurrection formed part of
the myth, it also was acted at the rites, and it even appears that a general doctrine of
resurrection, or at least of immortality, was inculcated on the worshippers; for Plutarch, writing to
console his wife on the death of their infant daughter, comforts her with the thought of the
immortality of the soul as taught by tradition and revealed in the mysteries of Dionysus. A
different form of the myth of the death and resurrection of Dionysus is that he descended into
Hades to bring up his mother Semele from the dead. 176
In this same regard, Sir Arthur Weigall relates:
Dionysos, whose father, as in the Christian story, was ―God‖ but whose mother was a mortal
woman [Semele], was represented in the East as a bearded young man of dignified appearance,
171 Murdock, RZC, 18.
172 Doane, 193.
173 It should be noted that what is deemed the ―Christian era‖ is not the same as the ―common era,‖ because there
are to this day places where Christianity has not been heard of; hence, they remain pre-Christian.
174 Murdock, RZC, 18.
175 Budge, EBD (1967), liii.
176 Frazer, GB, 452.