The gate of the year

Detail of an Attic black-figure crater, dating to 525-500 B.C., now in the Louvre Museum, Paris. The scene shows, in the centre, Dionysus, holding in his hand a wine cup and in the other hand a long vine branch, surrounded by Maenads and Sileni. Dionysus’s link with grapes and wine, makes him a god associated with agriculture and, more generally, with the fertility of nature. Some of his epithets qualify him, indeed, as a god of trees (Dendrítes), of the flowers (Ánthios) and of the fruits (Kárpios). It is possible, furthermore, to find multiple relationships between Dionysus and earth goddesses: his own mortal mother, Semele, seems to derive her name from that of an ancient Thraco-Phrygian goddess of the earth (Chantraine, 1968, p.996). At Locri, in Magna Graecia, several clay plaques show Dionysus with Persephone, the goddess of vegetation and the Underworld.

[Source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dionysos_thiasos_Louvre_MNE938.jpg]




Tree Symbols

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Detail of an Attic black-figure crater, dating to 525-500 B.C., now in the Louvre Museum, Paris. The scene shows, in the centre, Dionysus, holding in his hand a wine cup and in the other hand a long vine branch, surrounded by Maenads and Sileni. Dionysus’s link with grapes and wine, makes him a god associated with agriculture and, more generally, with the fertility of nature. Some of his epithets qualify him, indeed, as a god of trees (Dendrítes), of the flowers (Ánthios) and of the fruits (Kárpios). It is possible, furthermore, to find multiple relationships between Dionysus and earth goddesses: his own mortal mother, Semele, seems to derive her name from that of an ancient Thraco-Phrygian goddess of the earth (Chantraine, 1968, p.996). At Locri, in Magna Graecia, several clay plaques show Dionysus with Persephone, the goddess of vegetation and the Underworld. [Source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dionysos_thiasos_Louvre_MNE938.jpg]