Shiva and Dionysus: Two sides of the same coin?

Richard Seaford, professor of Ancient Greek at the University of Exeter, England addressed a small group in Mumbai last week to talk about his ongoing research on two figures -- one from ancient Greece and another from ancient India -- Dionysus and Shiva. Both he said were part of henotheistic cultures. Most of us are familiar with monotheism where there is one Divine and polytheism where there are many gods. Henotheism lies between the two extremes. It describes a civilisation where people don't deny the existence of many deities but believe that one is more important than the other. Ancient India was probably a sum of many henotheistic tribes where some believed Shiva was the supreme deity, others felt it was Vishnu or one of his 'avataras' and so on. 

Shiva and Dionysus represent the unity of opposites which leads to a dissolution of boundaries between binaries such as male-female (Ardhanarishwara), human-animal (Shiva and Dionysus are mentioned as having taken the form of a bull in the ancient texts) and life-death. Shiva is creator-destroyer, an imagery we are familiar with and Dionysus, Professor Seaford said, has been compared with Hades (the Greek god of the underworld) in the ancient texts. 

Binaries according to Claude Levi Strauss convey how the human mind operates. A recent course that I did with University of Pennsylvania (via www.coursera.org) had some excellent lectures on the subject where Peter Struck, Associate Professor of Classical Studies with University of Pennsylvania said Strauss showed us how the human mind is structured in pairs of opposites. "All the other more complex forms of understanding that we have are the result of extra binaries layered on top of binaries. So for example, some folks will say, well not everything is black and white. There are lots of shades of grey. But every single shade of grey is made up of certain amounts of black and certain amounts of white." Binary language he said can code a lot of information. 

Binaries help us partially decode the thought and understand the culture which spawned the myth. Let us for a moment stick with the human-animal binary. Dionysus also known as Bacchus was originally a Thracian god. According to Bertrand Russel (A History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russel: Unwin Paperbacks, 1984) Thracians were agriculturists and they had fertility cults and a god who promoted fertility who was known as Bacchus. Bacchus had the shape of a man or a bull -- it was never clear if it was one or either or both.  

It gets more interesting. Russel says: "When they (Thracians) discovered how to make beer, they thought intoxication divine and gave honour to Bacchus." Sounds familiar? Apart from the similarities between Shiva and Dionysus-Bacchus, the significance of intoxication and therefore an intoxicant is an intersection point between the Greeks and Indians. 'Soma' was the divine drink and its preparation was elaborate and ritualistic in ancient India where, like the Greeks, the spirit was accorded the status of the divine. Also devotees of Shiva and Dionysus had rituals which involved drunken revelry -- beer and then wine for the Greeks and various forms of weed and bhang in India. I must make it clear here that we are not talking of who influenced whom or whether they were influenced by another source but simply tracing the common thread that runs through civilisations.

To get back to the Shiva-Dionysus comparison, there are many other similarities -- the phallic symbol is important in the worship of both and so is their attraction to women devotees -- which I shall try and list on this blog (soon, I promise) but both represent a period of human development that was exploring the various facets of divinity.