A couple of days ago, I gave a talk on my 2022 book, Dance, Love & Ecstasy- The Modern Cult of Dionysos-Bacchus, for the Last Tuesday Society, in their ‘Absinthe Parlour,’ at the Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, Fine Art & UnNatural History, which is to be found on Mare Street in Hackney, east London. This was probably the best (and most curious) venue in which I’ve ever spoken- and I’m counting here the one-day training course I once presented in a night club in Connah’s Quay, Flintshire; the attendees seated on padded seats in booths, me far away across the dance floor where the DJ should have been…
The venue was certainly suitable to our Bacchic/ Dionysian theme, what with the absinthe at the bar and the erotic artworks in the toilets. I spoke about our understanding of Dionysos/ Bacchus since the mid-nineteenth century and how figures such as Nietzsche and Aleister Crowley have shaped our perceptions of the divinity. It struck me, too, how much they and all the poets and painters of Victorian times and since have depended upon the account of the bacchanalia by the Roman historian Livy- an account that was very deliberately biased, tendentious and lurid. He wanted to create as a bad an image as possible of the shocking goings-on at bacchanals that had occurred two hundred years earlier, and he went to town on the sex, drugs and tambourines aspects of Dionysian worship. Our culture has very much relied on his version of events ever since.
After completing the talk, I regretted missing the opportunity to contrast the paintings by Titian (head of the page) and by Lovis Corinth, from 1913 (see below). Both deal with the same incident, but it’s fascinating to see how its representation has changed over three centuries or so. Ariadne had been abandoned by Theseus on the island of Naxos after she had helped him kill the minotaur. He ungratefully sailed off, stranding her, but then Bacchus/ Dionysos suddenly arrived to rescue her. Both pictures have core elements in common: the company (thiasos) of frenzied maenads who follow the young god; the chariot pulled by pards, vine leaves, percussion, the thyrsos staff topped by a pine cone which is a key phallic symbol of the deity. The big contrast, of course, is Ariadne- shown by Titian in a posture of melodramatic surprise- but in Corinth’s case collapsed and apparently unconscious, though whether that is through grief, shock, drink, drugs or something else is less apparent. The demure princess of Titian’s canvas is replaced by a woman who, in her overwhelmed condition, is barely decent- almost transformed into a pornographic pose.
Lovis Corinth, Ariadne auf Naxos
What struck me in particular was how what we make of the mythology can now be quite untethered from the story itself. We use these characters (almost inevitably) to tell our own myths and address our own concerns- and in many of the modern representations of the Dionysian myth, what attracts us is not the god himself so much as the female entourage and subsidiary figures. I’ve posted previously about paintings of maenads and bacchantes; Ariadne too has proved to be a fascinating figure in her own right. Witness the painting by John William Waterhouse below. Here’s the princess, listless and depressed on Naxos after her desertion. It’s very blatantly a study of young female beauty, contrasted with the ferocious gorgeousness of the wild leopards, and Ariadne takes centre stage. But then- the leopards are heralds of the arrival of Bacchus, so although the love rat Theseus may be sailing away in the background, we know that salvation is already near at hand. Waterhouse wasn’t interested in either of the men, though- he wanted to paint the girl…
Waterhouse, Ariadne
Even more at a tangent from tradition is the version of Ariadne and Bacchus written by Pierre Louys. As part of his collection Le crepuscule des nymphes (Twilight of the Nymphs) he retold the story in an utterly new form. The maenads were known for tearing apart wild animals and hapless males who crossed their path; in Louys’ version, it is Ariadne who is ripped limb from limb by the bacchantes. Rather than marrying Dionysos and living happily ever after, she is sent to the underworld with shocking and unexpected violence. It’s a radical revisioning of the story that brings out some of the more ancient and bloody aspects that we may find in Euripides’ Bacchae but which the more recent focus on maenads as ecstatic dancers tends to elide. It is, arguably, another reminder how rich mythology can prove, providing a constant mine of images and themes that we can rework as we need.
The composer and First World War poet Ivor Gurney wrote a little lament for Pan as the god of nature that reflects a common sense, at the close of the Great War, that much of the hope and revived interest in the Greek deity that had suffused British culture in late Victorian and Edwardian times had dissipated. In addition, the poem is as likely to reflect Gurney’s own sense of despair and professional frustration and failure in the early 1920s, as the depression that was to hospitalise him for the remainder of his life descended.
“What was dear to Pan is dear to him no more,
He answers prayers never- nor ever appears-
And so sore a loss is this to his lovers
They play never, the sweet reed sounds no more
In the oak coppice- or the Severn poplar shade
Silver hearted… softly wailing at eve,
The silent country folk no more bring gifts
They delighted in- nor the new pipe greenly made.”
Gurney, What was dear to Pan
I think there is an echo too of a common conceit in Gurney’s verse, that the Cotswold Hills of Gloucestershire, once the site of many Roman villas, still bore traces of those ancient Roman settlers- although plainly in this case the incursions of the modern world were driving them away. Pan himself is affirmed as a beloved deity of farming folk, associated with music and green vegetation. The mood, though, is wistful, evocative of abandonment and loss.
Not all poets were convinced that Christianity and mechanical farming, transport (and warfare) had banished the Great God. The poet Edmund Gosse (1849-1928) wrote the poem Old and New to celebrate that very displacement of the old deities by Jesus, but (in my opinion anyway) he made the older ways sound like a lot more fun…
“Come, Hesper, and ye Gods of mighty waters,
Ye nymphs and Dryades,
Come, all the choir of white Pierian daughters,
And girls of lakes and seas,
Evoe! and Evoe lo! crying,
Fill all the earth and air ; Evoe Io!
And the hanging woods, replying,
Shall shout the echo there!
All day in breathless swoon or heavy slumber.
We lay among the flowers.
But now the stars break forth in countless number
To watch the dewy hours ;
And now lacchus, beautiful and glowing,
Adown the hill-side comes,
With tabrets shaken high, and trumpets blowing,
And resonance of drums.
The leopard-skin is round his smooth white shoulders,
The vine-branch round his hair ;
The eyes that rouse delight in maid-beholders,
Are glittering, glowworm-fair ;
The king of all the provinces of pleasure,
Lord of a wide domain,
He comes and brings delight that knows no measure,
A full Saturnian reign.
O take me, Maenads, to your foxskin-chorus.
Pink-lipped like volute-shells,
For I must follow where your chant sonorous
Roars down the forest-dells ;
The sacred frenzy rends my throat and bosom,
I shout, and whirl where He,
Our vine-god, tosses like some pale blood-blossom,
Borne on a windy sea.
Around the car, with streaming hair and frantic,
The Maenads and wild gods.
And shaggy fauns and wood-girls corybantic
Toss high the ivy-rods ;
Brown limbs with white limbs hotly intertwining
Whirl in a maddening dance.
Till, when at last Orion is declining,
We slip into a trance.
The satyr’s heart is faintly, faintly beating ;
The white-lipped nymph is mute ;
lacchus up the western slope is fleeting,
Uncheered by horn or lute ;
Hushed, hushed are all the shouting and the singing,
The rapture, the delight,
For out into the cold grey air upspringing,
The morning-star shines bright.”
Gosse, Old & New
Gosse’s verse is crammed with classical references. Hesper is Hesperus, the planet Venus in the evening and son of the dawn goddess Eos (or Aurora). The Pierides were the nine royal sisters who competed with the Muses song contest and, when they were defeated, were turned into birds. Iacchus is another name for Dionysos, and those ecstatic, frenzied sea nymphs, dryads and bacchae we’ve also met before. Evoe Io is the traditional cry of the maenads and bacchantes, an exclamation of joy addressed to and naming the divinities Dionysos and Isis. It was also used in poetry by Aleister Crowley, who more seriously desired to invoke Bacchus.
Gosse wanted to argue that the Dionysian revels had been suppressed and displaced (driven off by the ‘Morning Star,’ by whom he meant Jesus- whom he addressed in the second part of this poem, entitled A.D.). However, as I have demonstrated before, other poets did not want to abandon those dreams of freedom and unrestrained expression, so that- even after several millennia- we’re not yet fully prepared to accept that the Great God Pan and his entourage are truly dead.
In his short story, An Ascent of the Venusberg, written in 1903, the author Pierre Louys explored the possibility of encountering the goddess of love in the contemporary world.
The Venusberg, as I have previously described, is a mountain in Germany near Eisenach in Thuringia, now called the Hörselberg. The peak is the focus of folklore and myth, being immortalised in the story of Tannhäuser by Wagner, Aubrey Beardsley, William Morris, Swinburne and- even- Aleister Crowley.
In Louys’ version of the story, a Frenchman is visiting Eisenach after attending performances of Wagner at Bayreuth. From his hotel room, he can see the Venusberg, which- due to his “sinful disposition”- looks to him “exactly like the swelling breast of a woman… It quivered; positively seemed to be alive at certain hours of the evening… [giving the impression] that Thuringia, like a goddess reclining… was letting the blood rise, in her passion, to the summit of her bare breast.”
He decides to climb the mountain one day. There is a small hostelry at the summit, where he has a meal; one of the two sisters running the place has an “obliging disposition” and makes it clear that sex is available too on top of the peak. The tourist settles instead for directions to the Venushöhle, the Grotto of Venus. It is only a short walk away, but she warns him of the madman to be found there.
The grotto of the goddess looks exactly as one might anticipate: “it was small, in the form of a vertical ellipse crowned with slender brown brambles.” The madman is also present, warning the visitor not to enter because “Venus dwells there herself in the flesh with her millions of nymphs about her.” This scarcely discourages the Frenchman, so the madman begins to rant. It seems he was once a godly and pure young man; even though he married, he renounced the temptations of the world and he and his wife lived together in a “state of grace” (or so they thought). He has learned, though, that this attempt at austere self-denial was utterly wrongheaded: it was “a lie, each day, to the law of life.” Now it is too late- he is old and still a virgin: “Woe to all virgins! For the love they have rejected all their short lives will justly torture them in the infinity of the wrath to come!”
The man sits on the mountain peak daily to commune with Aphrodite, because every evening “the Goddess sings a sweet song… she calls to me from afar, she draws me to her.” Eventually, he will perish by falling down into the Venushöhle and thence into the furnace in which the chaste are punished.
The pair wait and then “a breath of perfumes bore to our ears the languishing echo of a Voice…”- and the story ends abruptly. We can only assume that, as this is told as a reminiscence, this “sinful” young man met with no punishment from the goddess.
There are many aspects of this little account typical of Louys. He treats the ancient pagan deities as still alive and actively present in the modern world. Secondly, sex and sexuality are to the fore- though for very obvious reasons, given the subject matter. Thirdly, the author took pleasure (as he often did) in inverting and reversing the tenets of Christianity. The Venusberg is the gateway to hell, but punishment here is for the “niggards of the flesh” those who have lived “solitary lives in revolt against the great divine law.” Hell is a place full of “thousands of millions of naked women dancing,” placed there to torment those who denied themselves the pleasures of their bodies during their lives. In the philosophy of Venus (and Louys) carnal delight is good and virtuous and abstinence is unnatural. The writer had said the same six years previously in Aphrodite, when he described how “virginity displeases [the goddess].” Here he expanded on the idea, stating more clearly the principle that underlay so much of his work.
See my Louys bibliography and details of my various publications on the poet, as well as details of my book on the goddess herself.
Oscar Wilde is one of the most important writers of modern verse making use of classical themes. Robert Graves, in the next generation of poets, explored the symbolic power of the ancient gods and goddesses, whilst Algernon Swinburne and Pierre Louys were very effective in recapturing the potency of the Greek and Roman myths for the people of those times. Wilde, however, was one of the few writers who was able to bring contemporary reality and relevance to the stories and figures of classical times. Aleister Crowley, once again in the succeeding generation, was another who felt the enduring vitality of the deities.
Much of Wilde’s poetic work drew upon ancient works and ideas. Here, I want to review how he reacted to the Great God Pan. His poem Santa Decca, written in the mid-1870s, sets out the views that he held for many years: that we are expected to believe that the Christian faith has displaced the old myths with its divine truth, but that Wilde had his doubts and fervently hoped that something of the ancient world and its magic might persist and might thrive again:
“The Gods are dead: no longer do we bring To grey-eyed Pallas crowns of olive-leaves! Demeter’s child no more hath tithe of sheaves, And in the noon the careless shepherds sing, For Pan is dead, and all the wantoning By secret glade and devious haunt is o’er: Young Hylas seeks the water-springs no more; Great Pan is dead, and Mary’s son is King.
And yet-perchance in this sea tranced isle, Chewing the bitter fruit of memory, Some God lies hidden in the asphodel. Ah Love! if such there be, then it were well For us to fly his anger: nay, but see, The leaves are stirring: let us watch awhile.”
Likewise, in Ravenna, composed in 1878, Wilde again expressed his wish that he could find divinity in the natural world (and this despite the fact, as we have just seen, that he fears Great Pan will be angry for his centuries of neglect):
“I wandered through the wood in wild delight… O waving trees, O forest liberty! Within your haunts at least a man is free,
And half forgets the weary world of strife: The blood flows hotter, and a sense of life Wakes i’ the quickening veins, while once again The woods are filled with gods we fancied slain. Long time I watched, and surely hoped to see Some goat-foot Pan make merry minstrelsy Amid the reeds! some startled Dryad-maid In girlish flight! or lurking in the glade, The soft brown limbs, the wanton treacherous face Of woodland god!”
Wilde knows that patience and faith will be required but, even so, the sense is that the poet feels more connected to his physical self, and to the environment around him- more alive and intensely aware of his corporeal nature- through communion with the ancient gods, who were themselves expressions of the power of vegetal and animal life. He feels more in touch with the natural world and, by so doing, Pan and the nymphs become more immediate and real to him. They are tangibly present, not mere stories to read in books. In his 1890 poem, The Burden of Ithys, this contemporary proximity of the gods comes to the fore. Pan and his retinue are present in the countryside just outside Oxford:
“But sweeter far if silver-sandalled foot Of some long-hidden God should ever tread The Nuneham meadows, if with reeded flute Pressed to his lips some Faun might raise his head By the green water-flags, ah! sweet indeed…”
Wilde imagined Pan chasing the nymph Syrinx through “the reeds that fringe our winding Thames,” bringing “memories/ Of faun-loved Heliconian glades and blue nymph-haunted seas” and of “Oreads peeping through the leaves of silent moon-lit trees.” In the valleys of the nearby Cumner Hills, and in Bagley Wood, he believes that “Some Mænad girl with vine-leaves on her breast/ Will filch the beechnuts from the sleeping Pans” and that, beside the River Thames-
“the brown Satyrs in a jolly crew Trample the loosestrife down along the shore, And where their hornèd master sits in state Bring strawberries and bloomy plums upon a wicker crate!”
Pan would “plash and paddle groping for some reed/ To lure from her blue cave that Naiad maid/ Who for such piping listens half in joy and half afraid.” That “wantoning” that Wilde alluded to in Santa Decca, the deity’s unashamed expression of his animal instincts, might be expressed again, just a short walk away from the heart of academia. Sadly, though, the poet realises that all these visions have been just a dream and that the realities of the present day are intruding- a rabbit gambols along the tow-path, he hears voices from a canal boat at Sandford lock and the bells of Oxford’s churches reach him, reminding him it’s time to return to his college.
The conclusion of the Burden of Ithys drags him back from reverie to real life, but Wilde’s fervent wish to be able to commune still with Pan continued into the next decade, as his poem Pan, a Double Villanelle (c.1893) demonstrates:
“O goat-foot God of Arcady! This modern world is grey and old, And what remains to us of thee?
No more the shepherd lads in glee Throw apples at thy wattled fold, O goat-foot God of Arcady!
Nor through the laurels can one see Thy soft brown limbs, thy beard of gold, And what remains to us of thee?
And dull and dead our Thames would be, For here the winds are chill and cold, O goat-foot God of Arcady!
Then keep the tomb of Helice, Thine olive-woods, thy vine-clad wold, And what remains to us of thee?
Though many an unsung elegy Sleeps in the reeds our rivers hold, O goat-foot God of Arcady! Ah, what remains to us of thee?
Ah, leave the hills of Arcady, Thy satyrs and their wanton play, This modern world hath need of thee.
No nymph or Faun indeed have we, For Faun and nymph are old and grey, Ah, leave the hills of Arcady!
This is the land where liberty Lit grave-browed Milton on his way, This modern world hath need of thee!
A land of ancient chivalry Where gentle Sidney saw the day, Ah, leave the hills of Arcady!
This fierce sea-lion of the sea, This England lacks some stronger lay, This modern world hath need of thee!
Then blow some trumpet loud and free, And give thine oaten pipe away, Ah, leave the hills of Arcady! This modern world hath need of thee!”
The poem Pan is something of a reversion to the mixture of resigned realism and romantic hope that we saw in Santa Decca. He wanted to believe, but he was struggling to sustain this in his heart, rather than as just an intellectual and artistic exercise. Sadly, a roughly contemporary verse, Canzonet, suggests that sober doubts were winning out:
“I have no store Of gryphon-guarded gold; Now, as before, Bare is the shepherd’s fold. Rubies nor pearls Have I to gem thy throat; Yet woodland girls Have loved the shepherd’s note.
Then pluck a reed And bid me sing to thee, For I would feed Thine ears with melody, Who art more fair Than fairest fleur-de-lys, More sweet and rare Than sweetest ambergris.
What dost thou fear? Young Hyacinth is slain, Pan is not here, And will not come again. No hornèd Faun Treads down the yellow leas, No God at dawn Steals through the olive trees.
Hylas is dead, Nor will he e’er divine Those little red Rose-petalled lips of thine. On the high hill No ivory dryads play, Silver and still Sinks the sad autumn day.”
With a weary acceptance, Wilde reverts to the first stanza of Santa Decca: Pan is gone and Hylas is dead. Despite the vigour and the romance of the classical deities, Wilde proved unable to sustain his almost single-handed efforts to revive ancient pantheism. Perhaps it’s worthwhile contrasting this aesthetic aspiration to the experience and practice of Crowley. Within the communal structure of Thelema and integrated with a much wider magical and philosophical practice, he succeeded where Wilde did not. Crowley translated something that was, essentially, literary, artistic and solitary, into a pragmatic and shared experience. Io Pan!
Narcisse Virgile Diaz de la Pena, Nymphs and Satyrs
I’ve already alluded to this numerous times here, but I thought it was worthwhile bringing out the point in a dedicated posting. Satyrs have two preoccupations according to most accounts- they like drinking and revelry, and- pretty much as a necessary consequence of this- they like chasing and seducing nymphs.
The satyrs by no means always force themselves on the nymphs. Many of the latter enjoy playing hard to get, it appears, the thrill of the chase being part of the stimulation for both parties. The German artist Gerda Wegener in the plate Satyr and Nymph, from the Pleasures of Eros (1917), gave us the most explicit representation of the fornication in the forests, whilst Georges Redon has given us a saucy, jokey version..
Dirk Ravesteyn, Venus and a Satyr
William Etty’s Nymph and Satyr is a painting that embodies these more tender interactions. The pair embrace lovingly, their foreheads lightly touching in a gesture of loving union. The nymph is only a slender girl with rosy cheeks, her pale flesh offset by the sun-tanned torso of her lover. The French painter Louis Priou also reminded us that these couplings could very well result in domestic bliss: in The Satyr’s Family a faun and his nymph bride are founded sitting contentedly together in a clearing enjoying their child’s efforts to learn to play the pipes.
William Etty, Nymph and Satyr
A bit of rough sex likewise seems to be tolerated, as in poet Ruben Dario’s description of how “the satyr fornicates… and the mouth of the faun bites the nipple.” All the same, no means no- but satyrs aren’t good listeners, as poet Josephine Peabody captured in the uncomprehending words of a chorus of satyrs addressing Syrinx as she flees Pan:
“The foolish maiden that would flee from Love With shaggy ears! Is it his wild, bright eyes, wild locks above, The maiden fears?”
Pan Idyll
The initial reaction of nymphs to Pan and the other woodland creatures seems consistently to be alarm: “didst thou know the god/ from but the imprint of whose cloven feet/ the shrieking dryad sought her leafy goal?”
Alexander Cabanel
Plenty of artists have depicted this less pleasant side of the satyr character. Alexandre Cabanel in 1860 painted a Nymph and Satyr in just such an apparent struggle: he has grabbed her and is trying to restrain her flailing arms; she looks away as she desperately tries to free herself from his grip.
Bonnard, L’Apres midi d’un faun
Far more ambiguous is Paul Cezanne’s Battle of Love of 1880- is it a gang rape of four nymphs by satyrs or just a lively orgy? The same is the case in Pierre Bonnard’s L’Apres midi d’un faun, which sees a nymph and a satyr sat upon a log. Whilst he may be in the process of kissing her neck, her flailing limbs indicate that the encounter is plainly an assault.
Tassaert, Nymph and Faun
The French artist Octave Tassaert in 1860 pursued this theme to its most unpleasant conclusion. His Nymph and Faun shows the girl awakening from a rest by a pool to find that her wrists have been bound behind her back and that she is now under the control of a leering faun whose intentions can only be malign. Even less palatable is Max Slevogt’s Faun and Girl, an image of pure sexual violence in which the satyr holds the nymph down with his hands around her throat.
Slevogt, Faun and Girl
Annibale Carracci, Satyr and Shepherd
We should also remind ourselves here, perhaps, that Pan and his priapic band might be as ready to pursue and seduce a shepherd boy as a cow girl or a nymph. Aleister Crowley depicted this in no uncertain terms- and with his typical histrionic style- in The Garden of Janus. He depicts himself kissing a goat and being molested “like a satyr ravishing a lamb.” As Schiller had written, “No pleasure shamed the gods of that young race.”
Today, perhaps, we are less at ease with our carnal natures. This may be reflected in the Spanish Symbolist painting, The Abyss (1906), by Baldomer Gili I Roig. Naked women are shown indulging themselves wildly with satyrs, but in the foreground, there is a trench into which several of the women have fallen and become trapped. One is trying to get a companion to pull her out; others lie asleep or dead along the bottom of the ditch.
Gili i Roig, The Abyss
For more information, see my Great God Pan (Green Magic, 2021).
I have referred before to the curious history of the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry (OWC), a radical and pacifist alternative to the Boy Scouts established in England in 1916. The movement was established by Quaker geologist Ernest Westlake, but it very quickly diverged from those roots and became a vehicle for a sort of Dionysian revival in the country (albeit briefly).
Partly this was Westlake’s doing. He purchased a camping site in the New Forest and established a permanent camp for the movement there, where boys and girls could learn personal development through self-reliance and co-operation. In the aftermath of the First World War, the aim was to “regain Paradise- a state of harmony with all creation,” which would be done by showing members a new way of living. Westlake quite soon began to depart from Quaker convention- he declared “our movement is a Dionysos movement,” which was striving against “the cul de sac of intellectualised religion.” Obviously, the experience counted for more than any doctrine in Westlake’s thinking.
Westlake died in a car accident in 1922 but his influence persisted, especially when his collected writings were published by his son and the OWC in 1927 as The Place of Dionysus. The path ahead that he’d sketched out was pursued with devotion by his successor, Harry Byngham, a man so committed to Westlake’s ideas that he adopted Dion as his middle name.
I’ve reviewed the contents of The Place of Dionysus and the detailed development of the OWC in my recent book on Dionysos, Dance, Love and Ecstasy. A few statements from Byngham will suggest the direction he took:
“Our Dionysian morality is not ‘safety first’, but ‘vitality first.'”
“The Order “should be proud to regard itself as the erect penis of the… nation or civilisation of which it is a part.”
Byngham wanted OWC members to get as close to nature as possible, something that he felt could be achieved through nude bathing, eugenics, sexual experimentation and nudism. The Order adopted the Dionysian thyrsos as its visual symbol, the phallic ivy-wreathed wand topped with a pine cone. Byngham started a journal, The Pine Cone, which featured poetry written by Aleister Crowley‘s former collaborator and lover, Victor Neuburg.
The Order’s woodcraft schools promoted sex reform and sex education, with relaxed attitudes towards cohabitation, open marriages, bisexuality and homosexuality. One dance teacher used to perform nude for her students and Byngham and his girlfriend entertained some journalists with some expressive naked dancing too. It need hardly be said that very few of these radical ideas and practices sat well with the Quaker roots of the Order and Byngham was sacked within only a couple of years.
Nevertheless, the Order survives as an alternative to scouting and its influence seems to have rippled wider. Byngham moved to Sussex and continued to worship a trinity of Pan, Artemis and Dionysus (an idea initially formulated by Westlake). Meanwhile, back in the New Forest, Gerald Gardner, was formulating British Wicca. He was certainly influenced by Byngham’s thinking, and there is some evidence that they may have met. A number of ceremonial practices and rituals that had been used by Byngham ended up in Wicca, without doubt, so that it seems that this wasn’t just a curious dead-end of cultural history at all.
The Book of Thoth: A Short Essay on the Tarot of the Egyptians is the title of an edition of British magician Aleister Crowley’s esoteric journal The Equinox (volume III, number 5, 1944). The issue is entirely given over to a description the philosophy and practical use of Crowley’s Thoth Tarot, a deck of tarot cards formulated by him and co-designed and painted by the artist Lady Frieda Harris. The Thoth Tarot has become one of the best-selling and most popular tarot decks in the world and The Book has now been reprinted as a freestanding publication.
The Equinox analysis of the Thoth Tarot is divided into four parts, which deal successively with the theory of the tarot and then, successively, the different classes of card. Crowley worked on the project for several years towards the end of his life and made several significant alterations, compared to other existing tarot decks, based upon his Book of the Law (1904) and later writings. The mage also provided an appendix on the use of the tarot in divination and another demonstrating the links with the kabbala and the I Ching. This reflects the fact that the deck features images and ideas incorporated by Crowley from many disparate sources, including various other occult systems and philosophies. I’m absolutely no tarot expert, so I’ll terminate my discussion of of the deck at this point and turn to another aspect of Crowley’s book. There’s plenty of very detailed analysis of the tarot deck to be found online if you want to pursue that side.
I’ve already discussed Crowley and the Greek gods, so my particular interest here is the importance of Dionysos/Bacchus in his scheme. Crowley treated him as the primary deity, as he sets out in the Book of Thoth. What also comes out strongly from Crowley’s writings is his deep concern with the dual sexual nature (diphues) of Dionysos. This reflects Crowley’s own highly sensual and bisexual character. He was also fascinated by the nature of Dionysos’ father, Zeus, in that god’s cross-dressing and hermaphrodite forms (called Zeus Arrhenothelus) whilst Crowley’s very early poem, The Tale of Archais (1898), features a young man who prays to Aphrodite to be turned into a beautiful girl so that he can lure Zeus’ attention away from his lover, the girl called Archais. Crowley adopted the ‘female role’ in his sex magic operations and had a female alter ego called Alys. He wanted his epitaph to be “half a woman made with half a god.”
Crowley elaborated on all these ideas in the Book of Thoth, when describing the Fool card of the tarot. Such an androgyne figure seems to have symbolised a primordial perfection, the synthesis of opposites and the union of heaven and earth. Crowley, however, took this idea much further. He wrote:
“In dealing with Zeus [Arrhenothelus], one is immediately confronted with this deliberate confusion of the masculine and the feminine… It is only in Zeus Arrhenothelus that one gets the true hermaphroditic nature of the symbol in unified form. This is a very important fact… because images of this god recur again and again in alchemy. It is hardly possible to describe this lucidly… [but] the ultimate sense seems to be that the original god is both male and female, which is, of course, the essential doctrine of the Qabalah; and the thing most difficult to understand about the later, debased, Old Testament tradition is that it represents Tetragrammaton as masculine, in spite of the two feminine components…”
Crowley then moved on to examine several of Zeus’ divine sons, bringing out the hermaphrodite or bisexual nature of those gods:
“Dionysus Zagreus/ Bacchus Diphues: It is convenient to treat the two gods as one… [Concerning] Bacchus Diphues… the ecstasy characteristic of the god is more magical than mystical… The legend of Bacchus is, first of all, that he was Diphues, double-natured, and this appears to mean more bisexual than hermaphroditic. His madness is also a phase of his intoxication, for he is pre-eminently the god of the vine [note the bunch of grapes in the tarot card illustrated]. He goes dancing through Asia, surrounded by various companions, all insane with enthusiasm; they carry staffs headed with pine cones and entwined with ivy; they also clash cymbals, and in some legends are furnished with swords, or twined about with serpents. All the half-gods of the forest are the male companions of the Maenad women… In the legend of his journey through Asia, he is said to have ridden on an ass, which connects him with Priapus, who is said to have been his son by Aphrodite… In the worship of Bacchus there was a representative of the god, and he was chosen for his quality as a young and virile, but effeminate man.”
The Book of Thoth, written during the last years of Crowley’s life, is a dense distillation of his considerable occult and mythological learning. The text is densely packed with allusions and references and it can stray far from the immediate subject in making links with other areas of arcane knowledge. For now, though, it’s enough to note how Crowley’s wide ranging analysis encompassed queer sexuality, sensuality, intoxication and mystical experience, all within the compass of the Dionysian rites.
Victor Benjamin Neuburg (1883-1940) was an English poet and writer who was very interested in theosophy and the occult. He is probably best remembered for his association with the magician Aleister Crowley; later in life, he also promoted the very early poetry of Dylan Thomas.
In 1906 he first came into contact with Crowley whilst he was still a student at Cambridge. Neuburg was writing poetry and was also a member of the university’s Pan Society, so the two men had shared literary and pagan interests. Crowley admired Neuburg’s poetry, some of which he had already published in the Agnostic Journal and the Freethinker. Neuburg was in awe of Crowley when he came to speak on mysticism at the Pan Society; Crowley quickly identified a potential disciple and helper.
Neuburg was soon initiated into Crowley’s magical order, the A. A. (or Silver Star) and became a partner in his magical operations. He also became Crowley’s sexual partner, engaging in sex magick with his older companion during a trip the pair made to North Africa in the summer of 1908- and thereby opening Crowley’s eyes to the power of this particular technique. Neuburg also performed spiritual dances at some of Crowley’s ceremonies. For example, Neuburg was central to the popular ‘Rites of Eleusis’ which Crowley staged to large paying audiences over two months in London in late 1910. The pair eventually fell out in about 1914; Neuburg may have suffered a nervous breakdown. After the First World war, he settled in Sussex and became a poet and publisher. For the remainder of his life, Neuburg seemed to avoid and even fear Crowley, whereas the latter always mocked and scorned his one-time pupil.
The younger Crowley
Neuburg’s books of poetry include The Green Garland (1908), The Triumph of Pan (1910) and Swift Wings and Songs of the Groves (both 1921). Despite his alienation from Crowley, he continued throughout his life to show a committed interest in the revival of the cults of the ancient Egyptian and Greek gods- as his very close links with the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry demonstrate.
For example, Neuburg wrote songs of praise to Osiris, Panthea (the universal mother of nature), Isis and to Diana and Apollo. His poem Thelema (named after Crowley’s ‘religion’ of that name) describes chasing a fawn. The Gnome is in fact about an evil and bloodthirsty troll who is offered human sacrifice. This verse seems to link with others with a more ancient, British feel, such as The Barrowand Druids.
Aphrodite featured strongly in Neuburg’s work. His Lament for Adonis describes the grief of the ‘Cyprian,’ the ‘Cytherean’ or Venus for her dead mortal lover. The Vigil of Venus is a translation of a Latin poem that I have featured in a previous posting and in my book on Aphrodite; it describes a temple ceremony in which young girls are presented before they are married:
“At dawn shall release from their robes of aether the virgin nipples/ Revealing the purple blush of the blossom; on the/ morrow Dione’s order ripples,/ That virgins shall wed with roses all dewy, roses/ with Cyprian blood reflamed…”
In Cretan Epithalmiums (wedding songs) Venus is, of course, called upon, to send her doves with their “amorous bills” and “early thrills.” The Hymn to Astarte looks to one of Aphrodite’s more ancient manifestations, addressing her as the “sickle of midwifery” and “lady of reverie.” She brings fertility in the fields and flocks, she makes women pregnant and helps in labour; she commands the sea, her “holy foam.”
The cults of Dionysos/ Bacchus and Pan are also invoked. The slyly-titled 1910 poem I.N.R.I. (Insit Naturae Regina Isis– ‘Isis, the Queen of Nature’) combines Pan with Venus: “I have left the groves of Pan that I might gaze upon thee/ Gaze upon the Virgin that was before Time begotten/ Mother of Chronos and the old Gods before him…” She is the “most secret goddess” and (in good Goth terms) “the bride of the Darkness.”
The Night Song to Bacchus was included in the 1921 collection Songs of the Groves. It imagines Bacchus, along with Pan and Silenus, passing through a wood at night. The god sings of “his mission and of the impending ecstasy of the Earth.” The song runs over several pages, so I’ll cite just a few stanzas here:
“Ring me a wreath, O Bacchantes mine, While the tigers’ teeth Are closing on the vine…
All stars are mine! Bacchantes hear! Mine is your wine, With the kiss behind the ear.
The red flame of vision, From the lees of wine, Is mine! Is Elysian! Is mine! is mine!
Ho! For the bacchanalia Whereat to boast and bouse…
I was the new god Of wine and ecstasy Now I am the true God Of the Great Sea.
So down through the woods, Dionysus came; All the multitudes, Bowed at his name.”
As we can see, Neuburg managed to fit in references to the god’s thyrsus (staff), tambourines, cymbals and to the Roman equivalent, the god Liber. The poem’s Bacchus promises his followers pleasure- plentiful drink, song, love and sex; all they must do is to be open and accept him.
The Triumph of Pan is another long poem. The god Pan inspires the poet, his soul has “broken the bounds of sensual life,” making him “a sinewy token of Pan’s most ardent strife.” Now he seeks “the hidden grove/ Where Pan plays to the trees/ The nymphs, the fauns, the breeze/ The sick satyr with his syren-song/ Makes the world ache with longing.” The verse is suggestive of the sensual nature of the Panic revels “obscene in passion” and fired by the Pagan spring- as well as by “wine, fresh from the Bacchic vats.” “Pan! Pan! Pan! All the world shall be mingled in one wild burning ecstasy.”
Very much like Crowley, Neuburg didn’t make much distinction between the Greek gods of nature- wild Pan and more domesticated Dionysos and Bacchus were all the same in his songs. His verse may not be truly great (although arguably it’s a bit better than Crowley’s which tended to indulge rather too much on archaic diction) but it’s passionate and committed, conveying a sense of the surviving vigour of the pagan gods.
For more on Neuburg and Crowley’s work see the 100th Monkey Press. For more on Pan Dionysos and on Aphrodite, see my own books.
I’m currently researching a new book and my reading has led me back to the work of Aleister Crowley, which I touched on briefly in my examination of the Great God Pan. Then, I focussed solely upon his poetry; my recent research has taken me deeper into his many other writings, and has revealed to me how extensively he drew upon the ancient Greek myths.
Crowley’s religion of Thelema was blended from ideas borrowed freely from the tarot, astrology, yoga, alchemy, Hinduism, Taoism, Qabalah, the I Ching, Gnosticism, Christianity, Rosicrucianism and the ancient religions of Greece, Rome and Egypt. The inevitable result is that Crowley’s ultimate conclusions- and the magickal practices and ceremonies based upon these- are highly idiosyncratic and complex. In his many books, he often moves from one discipline or mythology to another without warning so that- as he recognised- it can be hard to keep up without the level of deep study that he himself had invested. To a degree, this is further compounded by the fact that he will use multiple names for the same divinities- Dionysos may also be called Bacchus or Iacchus; he may refer to both Venus and Aphrodite or to Pan, Aegipan, Capricorn, the phallus, Priapus and the Devil.
Nevertheless, and although Crowley will refer to the Egyptian deities quite often, his main pantheon is drawn from the classical myths of Greece and Rome. The ultimate aim, in all his work, was to rediscover and re-awaken the great nature gods of the pagan past- by whom he meant, primarily, Pan and Dionysos-Bacchus. This was to be done through ceremonies and ‘workings’ (opera) that relied upon Bacchus, Aphrodite and Apollo- in other words, wine, women and song. A combination of drugs (alcohol, but plenty of other intoxicants too), music and dance and sex magick, would help the celebrant transcend themselves and make contact with the ‘godhead.’ Generally, it appears, this ultimate god is to be identified with Pan- hence Crowley’s declaration in The World’s Tragedy (1908) that he wanted to “seduce the boys of England” and get them to join him in the renewed worship of Pan, thereby bringing about “the new heaven and the new earth.”
His ceremonies were diverse in the pantheon they would try to invoke, all the same. For example, over seven weeks in October and November 1911, Crowley, with the help of Victor Neuberg as dancer and his lover Leila Waddell as musician, publicly celebrated the ‘Rites of Eleusis’ at the Caxton Hall in Westminster, London. Neuburg, before his involvement with Crowley, had been a member of Cambridge University’s Pan Society and had published a volume of poetry titled The Triumph of Pan. In advance publicity for the Rites, Crowley declared “We are the poets! We are the children of the wood and stream, of mist and mountain, of sun and wind! We are the Greeks! And to us the rites of Eleusis should open the doors to Heaven and we shall enter in and see God face to face.” His aim was to contact “the spirit of the Infinite All, great Pan” which would be achieved by means of “dance in the moonlight before Dionysus, and delight under the stars with Aphrodite.” Over each of the seven weeks of the performance, a rite for a different classical god was celebrated, these being Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sol, Venus, Mercury and Luna. Within these rites other gods were prominent, for example, Isis was central to the rite of Venus, and Pan to the rite of Luna. A year earlier, Crowley had staged other rites at which Neuburg had performed the “dance of Syrinx and Pan in honour of our lady Artemis.”
For Crowley, Pan was “the Aegipan, the All;” the goat god was also the “All devourer, the all begetter” (Magick in Theory and Practice, 1927, 36; Confessions, 603). In his 1935 text, One Star in Sight- A Glimpse of the Structure and System of the Great White Brotherhood (that is, Crowley’s magical organisation called the A A or Silver Star) Crowley declared “Do what thou wilt! For every man And every woman is a star! Pan is not dead; he liveth Pan! Break down the bar!”
Crowley frequently used the so-called ‘Vir’ gesture. This may be familiar from the well-known 1910 photograph of ‘the Beast’ wearing his ‘tea-cosy’ magician’s hat (properly, his head-dress of Horus), staring intently at the camera, both hands raised on either side of his head, fists clenched and thumbs protruding (see head of page). This symbolised the horns of a ram, the phallus and, hence, Pan/ Bacchus.
Pan was a real and continual presence for Crowley. He was invoked regularly in his rituals and in his poetry; the Hymn to Pan which I featured in the book The Great God Pan was, Crowley had to admit, “the most powerful enchantment ever written.” Recounting how he wrote the Book of Lies in 1913, he ecstatically described how he felt “the perfume of Pan pervading, the taste of him utterly filling my mouth, so the tongue breaks forth into weird and monstrous speech. The embrace of him is intense in every centre of pain and pleasure… An end to loneliness as to all, Pan! Pan! Io, Pan!”
As will be apparent from the foregoing, Crowley’s conception of Pan was highly sensual and sexual. It’s pretty well known that Crowley practiced sex magick and that he regarded gay sex as being especially powerful. He discovered this in North Africa when he had intercourse with his collaborator Victor Neuburg, dedicating the act to Pan and subsequently realising that sex could operate as a powerful sacrament- “The orgies of Bacchus and Pan are no less sacramental than the masses of Jesus” he declared. In his Magical Diary of 1923, Crowley recorded that, between September 1914 and 1918 he had engaged in 309 workings of sexual magic, of which 40 were in praise or thanksgiving to the Lord Pan, 22 were to fascinate mistresses etc, 17 to acquire sex force and attractiveness and 8 to attract a new mistress (as this record may imply, he often used prostitutes for these opera). At the Abbey of Thelema on Sicily, where he lived in the early 1920s, Crowley decorated the walls with murals of his own design. One depicted a man being penetrated by Pan, his ejaculate falling onto the body of his ‘Scarlet Woman’- his sexual and magical partner.
Charles Gleyre, Venus Pandemos, 1852
The goddesses, such as Artemis and Aphrodite, “the fond goddess of love,” were not forgotten in all of this either. They were invoked both in poetry and in ritual, most especially Aphrodite, for Crowley’s “method of Aphrodite” was simply another term for his ‘sex magick.’
Over and above its occult potential, there’s no denying that Crowley enjoyed sex a great deal. Writing under the pseudonym George Archibald Bishop, he published White Stains in 1898; this is a collection of pornographic- if not obscene- verse, describing a variety of sexual tastes. The Preface pretends to review Bishop’s literary career: “he grows fierce in the mysteries of Sapphism and the cult of Venus Aversa[anal sex] with women; later of the same forms of vice with men, all mingled with wild talk of religious dogma and a general exaltation of Priapism…” One of the poems in the collection, dedicated to the Jolie Marion, lovingly and lustfully praises her body- “the passionate mound/ White and, for Venus’ temple, round…” The poem Necrophilia continues such a theme, comparing the smell of a lover’s decaying body to “Venus, born/ Of entrails foaming like the sea.” There is a love poem addressed to a Hermaphrodite (which I discuss in my posting on Swinburne’s poem on the same subject) and lastly, there is Ode to Venus Callipyge (the goddess with the big bum), the chorus of which addresses the goddess as:
“Daughter of Lust by the foam of the sea! Mother of flame! Sister of shame! Tiger that Sin nor her son cannot tame! Worship to thee! Glory to thee! Venus Callipyge, mother of me.”
The Ode continues, praising the power of this Venus:
“Which of the gods is like thee, our queen? Venus Callipyge, nameless, nude, Thou with the knowledge of all indued Secrets of life…
Who has such pleasures and pains for hire? Who can awake such a mortal fire In the veins of a man, that deathly days Have robbed of the masteries of desire?”
The paean concludes:
“Thou art the fair, the wise, the divine, Thou art our mother, our goddess, our life, Thou art our passion, our sorrow, our strife, Thou, on whose forehead no lights ever shine, Thou, our Redeemer, our mistress, our wife, Thou, barren sister of deathlier brine, Venus Callipyge, mother of mine!”
In the A A magazine, Equinox (vol.3 no.1 for 1919), Crowley’s poem The Sevenfold Sacrament even imagined an erotic encounter with the goddess of love:
“Zeus his dangerous daughter, Aphrodite, from the water Risen all shining, her soft arms Open, all her spells and charms Melted to one lure divine Of her red mouth pressed to mine…”
Rightly, perhaps, Crowley recalled that the goddess could be terrible as well as loving- in Abysmos from White Stains he described how the “Fearful, nude Venus grins.”
More notably still (if this is possible), in the Liber Agape, his magical sex guide, Crowley advised that, during intercourse, the woman should chant an invocation to Venus (in Latin). Even in English, this might have proved a difficult and distracting thing: “O Venus, risen from the sea/ Come thou daughter of the Father/ Listen to the bland songs of the penis, I pray/ Let it be no sin to us to have buggered the vile arse/ But let the vagina always be hot with my love.” Then again, maybe the words would stick in the mind…
Crowley’s interpretation and application of the ancient deities could be highly individual, but he certainly gave them new vigour and visibility. Any discussion of their role in the culture of the twentieth century and beyond cannot now ignore Aleister Crowley’s influence.
The tenacity of the Greek gods is impressive. Although we might imagine that nearly two thousand years of Christianity might have eradicated them, they have never gone away. Many writers have celebrated their displacement and fall into irrelevance, but they have doggedly refused to be vanquished or vanish and, in fact, they have been staging a steady revival for the last one hundred and fifty years- at least.
John Milton, in his 1629 ode, On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity, interestingly compared the new born Jesus to “the mighty Pan,” who had descended to live with the people of earth. Here he played on the two meanings of the name- the goat god and the Greek sense of ‘pan’ as everything/ universal (as, of course, in pandemic). Despite this nod to the Greek deity, Milton was clear that Jesus had come to displace Pan and all his ilk: “the Oracles are dumb,” “the Nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn,” and “mooned Ashtaroth, Heav’n’s queen and mother both, Now sits not girt with tapers’ holy shine.” There is a famous late classical story of a seafarer hearing a voice declaring that “the Great God Pan is dead” that captures this sense of an era ending.
Some two hundred and fifty years later, Elizabeth Barrett Browning celebrated the same triumph in her poem The Dead Pan, which alludes to the classical legend:
“Gods of Hellas, gods of Hellas, Can ye listen in your silence? Can your mystic voices tell us Where ye hide? In floating islands, With a wind that evermore Keeps you out of sight of shore? Pan, Pan is dead…
Bacchus, Bacchus! on the panther He swoons,—bound with his own vines! And his Mænads slowly saunter, Head aside, among the pines, While they murmur dreamingly,— ‘Evohe—ah—evohe—! Ah, Pan is dead.’
Aphrodite! dead and driven As thy native foam, thou art; With the cestus long done heaving On the white calm of thy heart! Ai Adonis! At that shriek, Not a tear runs down her cheek— Pan, Pan is dead.”
Browning enumerated and addressed each of the gods, as well as naiads, dryads, oreads and erotes: their time had passed, they had been dethroned once the true king of Zion had arrived.
But, even as Browning wrote in 1844, the hegemony of the church was beginning to be challenged. Already, at the start of the nineteenth century, Shelley and Leigh Hunt had set up pagan altars in Marlow and celebrated Greek deities. In 1872 Nietzsche published his Birth of Tragedy, in which he called for a return to the ecstatic worship of Dionysos as a means of escaping the sterility of the church and the rationality of science. By the end of the century- as I have described in previous posts- people were consciously and deliberately looking for spiritual alternatives in their lives, turning once again to Pan and Dionysos to find meaning and joy.
For example, in 1909 American poet Madison Julius Cawein wrote a verse affirming the ongoing power of Pan and others supernatural forces:
“But I had seen That Pan still lives and all his train, Whatever men say: they remain The unseen forces; they that mean Nature; its awe and majesty, That symbolize mythology.”
Wood Myths (1909)
These trends have only gathered pace since. Strangely, then, the ancient gods of Greece are not mere cold statues of marbles in museums and galleries, but are for many vital and inspiring: Pan, Aphrodite and Dionysos have all been brought alive again in the work of writers, thinkers, artists and musicians such as Aleister Crowley, Kenneth Graham, Salvador Dali, Robert Louis Stevenson, Lord Dunsany, Walter de la Mare and many others. As Nietzsche described, these ancient deities can still offer modern people access to an understanding of the ecstasies and the tragedies of life; their promise is of paradise now rather than paradise postponed. This was the attraction of the ancient mysteries- and they remain just as powerful today for many. It was in this knowledge that, over the last year, I researched my investigations of the meaning of Pan and Aphrodite in the modern world.
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