Part 6: The Roman Republic
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The best remembered mystery is that of Bacchus or Dionysus, also called Zagreus, Sabazius, Adonis, Antheus, Zalmoxis, Pentheus, Pan, Liber Pater, or the Liberator (James 198). The Dionysian mysteries were reserved almost wholly for women, as the physical manifestations of the Maenads (Lyttleton and Foreman 115). Dionysus was a Christ-prototype whose centers of worship extended to every major city in the Middle-East, including Jerusalem. Plutarch indicated that the Jewish feast of Tabernacles was celebrated in His honor: "I think the festival of the Sabbath is not wholly without relation to the festival of Dionysus..."(Knight S.L. 156). The Hebrews themselves made this claim in the first century b.c.e.- that they worshipped Dionysus under his Phrygian name of Zeus Sabazius (Graves 366-8).

This God was the embodiment of the sacred king, sacrificed for His people that they might live. He was the son of Father Heaven and Mother Earth, "... torn to pieces to make a sin offering of his flesh and the wine of his blood..."(Knight SL 156). The legends of His worship reveal a pattern that holds true for every civilization known; "first the king who is killed and eaten to provide the earth and women's wombs with fructifying blood; then a surrogate for the king, a condemned criminal or young man chosen by lot; then an animal substitute for a man; and finally, 'flesh and blood' eaten in the form of bread and wine, the classical sacrament of Dionysus..."(Walker 237). He was born of a virgin Triple-Goddess and was found in a winnowing basket at Eluseus, the place of His "advent". All grain Gods, whose flesh was eaten in the form of bread, appeared as newborn babies in vessels intended for seed corn (Guthrie 161). Dionysus was hailed as King of Kings and God of Gods, while holding His therysus of light (Frazer 451). In His ancient aspect of Marsays (a scapegoat/satyr), he was flayed alive and nailed to a tree, with the sacrificial title of Dendrites, "Young man of the Tree..."(Graves G.M. 107).

The Bacchic rites involved copious amounts of drinking, dancing, rioting, and generally orgastic behavior. This was not viewed with any appreciable tolerance by the men of Rome, who frowned on their women doing any of these things, particularly with each other. After an unusually violent outbreak of revelry in Rome, the Mysteries were officially suppressed by the Senate in 186b.c.e., allegedly because they promoted "lawless and licentious behavior..."(Lyttleton and Foreman 115).

The Eleusinian Mysteries were intimately related to the Dionysic Mysteries. This religion honored Demeter, The Great Mother of Corn. Her Greek name was one of the Mysteries; Meter is Mother and De is the triangle or delta, the female yonic symbol which meant the door of birth, death, and sexual paradise. De is also annotated with Ge, which meant Earth: the Earth Mother (Gaster 302). Demeter was one of the oldest of the Asiatic Triple-Goddesses. She was Kali-Cunti in India. In Her Mother aspect, she was called Despoena-The Mistress, Daeira-The Goddess, The Barley Mother, Pluto-"She who pours out riches on the world from Her breasts"(Graves 159,406 G,M. 61). Demeter's virgin form was that of Kore, the Corn Maiden, who was identified as Her daughter in the abduction myth. As Crone, She was Persephone, the Destroyer; Melania, the Black One; Demeter Chthonia, the Subterranean One; and Erinys, the Avenger. Her oldest shrine was located in Phigalia, and depicted Her with a horse's head (corn spirit) covered with snakes (rebirth), holding a dolphin and a dove, the symbols of womb and yoni, in Her hands (Walker 219). As a death-Goddess, she was similar to the Welsh Cerridwen, another Triple-Goddess, who ate the flesh of the dead and restored them in Her cauldron (Graves GM 30). Her religion was already established at Mycenae in the thirteenth century b.c.e. The Temple of the Mysteries at Eleusis was the center of Her religion. Some of the more memorable initiates included Sophocles, Socrates, Cicero, and Augustus (Lyttleton and Foreman 116).

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