Camp Gagnon - This God is DARKER Than the Myths

Episode Date: September 30, 2026

Today, we journey through ancient myth, ritual, and tragedy to explore one of Greece’s most chaotic and misunderstood deities: Dionysus. From his miraculous, twice-born origins and the ecstatic madness of his Maenad worshipers to thrilling resistance myths and Euripides’ masterpiece The Bacchae, we examine how the god of wine, theater, and liberation shaped the ancient psyche and still captivates us today. Welcome to History Camp! 🏕️ Shoutout to our sponsor: Perplexity -Start your free trial of Perplexity Computer today at https://pplx.ai/camp and experience the next phase of AI. #ad Want the even WILDER theories? SIGN UP TO THE PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/cw/CampGagnon 👕🧢 Shop CAMP Merch: https://camp-rd.com/collections/ufo 🎟️ 🎫 Comedy Tour Tickets: https://markgagnonlive.com 🎩👽 Daily Dose Of History: https://www.dailytodayinhistory.com Timestamps: 00:00 – Welcome to CAMP 03:07 – Who Is Dionysus 05:21 – Birth of Dionysus 10:57 – Maenad Worshipers of Dionysus 15:55 – Resistance Myths 19:35 – The Bacchae Play 27:31 – Euripides + Audience of Bacchae 29:39 – Meaning Behind The Play 37:13 – Drop Your Thoughts! #foryou #history #dark #mythology Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. This is the ancient Greek. God who sent women dancing up into the mountains, drunk and ecstatic and completely out of their minds. And he's known as the party god, the god of wine and letting loose and having a good time, but that's just one side of him. Because the real story of Dionysus is way darker and way more dangerous than you were ever told. He's the god of intoxication and of ecstasy and of freedom, but also of frenzy and madness and chaos and everything falling apart. He's the god

of blurring the lines, of pushing every boundary, of paradox itself. He's the god, a society tried to lock away, and every time a king or a city or a family tried to ban him or control him or to say, no, not here, not us, he would make that very force come bubbling up inside of them, unleashing their inner beast and destroying everything that they loved. So today we are telling this impossible story, how he was born twice, how he blurred the line between gods and humans. And we're going to ask a very crazy question. What happens when you try to control the chaos inside of you? So sit back, relax, and welcome to History Camp. What's up, dude, and welcome back to History Camp. Happy Wednesday. My name is Mark

Gagnon, and thank you so much for joining me in my tent where every single week we explore the most interesting, fascinating, controversial stories from all history from all time forever. Yes, that is what I do here, is I try to understand everything that's ever, happened and oh boy there's a lot of stuff every time i think i did it i look into a history book and i'm like ah there's a whole five thousand years i didn't cover yet so today we're going to do just that we're going to take a little bite out of one of my favorite topics and that is greek mythology or as the greek say religion now before we jump in i just want to say a few things first i want to thank you yeah dude i want to thank you or girl whoever you are i want to say thanks for being here

and however you identify it doesn't matter to me I just appreciate you clicked on the episode and you're spending time with me right now. Thanks for tuning in. Every time you click or like or comment or anything like that, you help the show grow, you help my dreams come true, you help keep the lights under the tent and you keep the fire burning here at the campsite.

Now, this episode, as well as all of them, but particularly this one isn't possible without the guy to my right. He's the Greek freak himself. He's part of my bizarre fascination slash fetish around Greek mythology and Greek history, and his name is Christos Palladeng. How are you, my friend?

Do you say fetish? No. What? See, Christa, this is why I can't give you a mic, is because you just start going crazy accusing me of all sorts of bizarre things, all right? Look, I need you here because I need you to help with pronunciation.

It's one thing to do research and read these names is another thing to try to explain them off the cuff and not absolutely butcher my Greek pronunciation. This one also is going to get a little freaky. It's going to get a lot freaky. That's what I love about the Greeks is that they find a way to make even religion hot. you guys are the best

I know now if you know anything about Greek mythology you know that the gods generally kind of stand for like one thing there's a whole pantheon of gods this is a polytheistic

understanding of the world and we're talking about specifically ancient Greek modern Greeks are typically Orthodox Christian but back in the day they weren't and they had all different gods for all sorts of different things

so like Poseidon would be the god of the sea aries is the god of war Aphrodite is the goddess of love It's pretty easy, right? You generally kind of know who you're dealing with, and when you pray to one specifically, you kind of know what their domain is. But Dionysus is different because the thing he stands for is the breaking.

Like literally the idea of, let me explain. Here's how the ancient Greeks would describe him. If you walked him to an ancient Greek, you're like, hey, what's up with Dionysus? They would say this. Oh, he's a god. But he's born from a mortal woman. So, you know, he's a grown man, but he's usually done. depicted as kind of being like a soft, beautiful, like borderline, like, feminine guy, very progressive.

But, you know, he's Greek to the bone. Like, he's super Greek, but everyone kind of treats him as like an outsider because of kind of his upbringing where he comes from. And, you know, he drives people crazy, but he also, like, frees them from suffering. So, like, Dionysus, even if you ask people at the time, they'd be like, he's sort of a paradox. And so every time you try to put this Dionysus into a box and be like, oh, he's the, you know, the god of partying, it's going to wind up surprising because there's way more to that. And that's the real key to understanding Dionysus, right? Because Dionysus is the god of the line between things, the brackish area of everything.

And kind of, you know, it's sort of really looking at what happens when the line between things kind of gets blurry. He's the god sort of of paradoxes, if that makes sense. Like, okay, civilization, you understand what that is, right? you're like, okay, that's like a little city. Wilderness, you know what that is. Okay. Humans, you know what that is. Animals, you know where that is.

Male, female, sane, crazy. You understand kind of where these binary sort of exists. Dionysus is in the border of all those things. And his whole thing is sort of like erasing them. So even being born is a boundary problem for Dionysus. So in the usual story, right? Because, you know, remember, in ancient Greek history, there are many different stories and kind of different explanations for every god so just in the most

popular one we can say his mom dionysus's mom is a woman named semile and she's the mortal princess in the city of thebes now that's really important that she is mortal now dionysus's dad is zeus and if you know anything about zeus we did a whole episode on zeus which you should check out zeus is the king of the gods now a very jealous hera tricks Emily into demanding that Zeus show her his true defined form. Now, according to the most popular version of this myth, Zeus, if you watched our episode on Zeus, you know that he's kind of a, he's a piece of work,

as my mother would call him. A real piece of work, this Zeus guy. He's married to a goddess named Hera, right? Which, according to some versions, is a sister. Neither here nor there, okay? This is, we're not going to the southern version, all right? You can believe it if you want. But regardless, Hera and Zeus are together.

Now, Zeus is out here kind of just getting around, okay? And specifically with human mortal women. He loves it. And so his wife, Hera, is very jealous and basically tricks this woman, this mortal woman named Semile, into demanding that Zeus show her his true divine form. She basically goes to Semley and is like, hey, you should ask Zeus to show you his actual divine form and that he's actually a God. And he's not only God, he's the king of gods. and he's really, really important.

And Hara knows that this is going to end terribly. And so, Semmelie goes to this guy that she's kind of seeing. They meet on Hinge and they're talking, not really realizing they're like, oh, he's got a wife back at home. And she basically goes and interrogates him and says, like, hey, Zeus, are you, show me who you really are? Which is a classic, right? Girls always do this.

Like, after a couple dates, they're going to be like, who are you really? Now, unfortunately, for her, Zeus shows her who he really is. and the sight of him is so powerful that it burns her alive on the spot. Now, it's a sad, sad story. But what even is sadder about it is that Semolet is pregnant at the time. So Zeus realizes what he's done, he's like, uh-oh, not only if I, like, killed my mistress and burned her alive, but now her unborn child, that is my child, is about to die. So what he does, he grabs the unborn child out of the ashes of his mistress and soes him,

into his own thigh and then basically carries Dionysus the rest of the way himself, like gestationally. Now, Dionysus winds up being known as the God who was born twice, once from his mother, who then died and is picked up from the ashes, and then once from his own father's body. You can kind of, once again, you can start seeing the threads of the paradox here. He's born of a mortal woman, but also of a God. He's born of a woman's body, but also of a man's body. And at this point, he's not even conscious yet. And he's already crossing the lines between death and life and mother and father.

Now, the more modern Greeks themselves for a long time, they were convinced that the god Dionysus was actually a foreigner. Now, that's kind of like a weird detail, but it is important to the story. And it kind of, they understand Dionysus is someone that showed up later in their history from somewhere out east and that he wasn't really Greek, but they're actually wrong. In the 1950s, scholars finally cracked an ancient script called linear B.

which was the writing of the Mycenaeans, from the Bronze Age Greeks. This is basically like the world of the Trojan War. And on clay tablets, from the Palace of Pylos, as well as from the island of Crete, dating back both of them to roughly like 1,300 BC. There's a name written there, and it's his name. One tablet even recorded him getting an offering of honey right next to Zeus. Now, these clay tablets, by the way, are fascinating. Linear B in particular is crazy and you should take a look at it.

It's not like an ancient sort of Bible. It's actually just sort of like accounting. So back in the day, they would record all sorts of things, right? Things that we record now, like money and donations and debts and like lists and who got paid what. And Dionysus's name appeared as getting an offering as a god. Like literally a regular ancient Greek person paid money and contributed money to Dionysus. And that's how we can confirm today that they knew about him and paid homage to him all. the way back then literally 1,300 BC. And so, yeah, that's seven, eight, nine centuries before

like Athens, as we tend to picture it, before the Greek plays, before Socrates and Plato and Aristotle. So the god that everyone kept calling like this like kind of foreign latecomer that sort of enters into their pantheon much later from the east, that they had actually been worshiping this god on Greek soil for close to a thousand years. And he was one of the oldest gods that they had, which is pretty funny, right? That later Greeks were like, oh, yeah, you know, the whole Dionysus thing. That's probably coming from the East. But it's actually their own and is way older than they thought, which in and of itself is a contradiction.

And it's just once again showing this characteristic of Dionysus kind of ironically and sort of who this God represents. So even though he was ancient and homegrown, his own people thought that he was a foreigner. And in a way, Dionysus is both. So who actually worships a god like this, right? Like if you're thinking about like worship me a god, you're going to worship like the god of the sky, or worship Zeus, he is the most powerful one. Well, Dionysus's most devoted worshippers were generally women. And it's a true thing.

And apparently they terrified everyone. So this is a real element of Greek history. There are these women called Minads. And it literally means the raving ones. And they weren't priestesses like tending like this quiet little temple. according to the myths of the time, they were ordinary women, right? They were just wives or mothers or daughters, but they walked out of their homes. They left their husbands and their kids and their chores. And on every rule that told a woman what she had to be, they just walked out on all of it. And they would go up into the mountains, away from the city, away from men, from all of civilization. And up there, we have accounts that say that they would fall into this ecstatic trance. And they would go up on this mountain. And they would go up on this mountain. And they would go up on this mountain. And they would. they would just go crazy. They would dance all night.

They would let their hair loose. They would wrap themselves in like these animal skins, like these peltz from animals from the region. And they would carry around like these staffs that were like wound with ivy. And apparently wine was a huge part of this celebration too. But it was it was just kind of a frenzy that the Greeks believed came straight from the God Dionysus himself, basically filling them up and taking over their their bodies and kind of switching off their ordinary minds completely. And at the very peak of this party, sort of like, sort of like religious, like frenzy, the rights reportedly climaxed in two things.

So the first is called Sparagmos, which was tearing a live animal apart with your bare hands. And the second is called Omophagia, which was basically eating this animal flesh raw. Now, today, it's kind of like a horror movie. Like, if you just went up there, you'd be like, okay, these women are all like dancing around. They're going crazy. They're tearing an animal apart with their hands and eating the flesh. But to the worshippers of Dionysus, this was communion. Like ripping the creature apart and swallowing it raw was a way of taking the wild,

untamed nature of God and controlling it and subduing it and then actually putting it into your own body. It's like a ritual of becoming for one night as boundless as Dionysus himself. So it sounds crazy, but it's an actual recorded element of Greek history. So put yourself in the sandals of like just a regular Greek dude, right? Just a regular citizen. You're a husband. Maybe you're even a king. And your entire world runs on like very simple rules.

Okay. The household is orderly. The woman takes care of the household. She raises the children. She's like a citizen of the sort of Greek city state that you live in. And we are a reasonable people. And we are not compelled by our passions. We're like borderline stoic.

We're focused on like the rule of law and of philosophy. and the city that we live in keeps the wilderness and like the primitive elements of humanity out. And then all of a sudden this God kind of strolls in and kind of empties your home of your wife and she runs up this mountain to tear apart an animal and dance around like in animal skins and eat the blood and flesh raw.

It's scary and it scared them. And someone was going to try to stop it. And here's what I mean. Hey guys, we're going to take a break really quick because I want to tell you about one of the sponsors of this show. And that's perplexity. Every AI expert seems to recommend a different AI tool. And every time I start a project, I'm asking myself, I'm like, do I use this one for this? Or should I use another? Like, one is better at research, a different, you know, LLM or another AI is better

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computer is completing full projects. Now, let's get back to the show. Greek mythology has a whole category of stories that the scholars call resistance myths. And they're all centered on what happens to people who basically try to reject Dionysus as a god. And the structure goes like this. A king, sometimes even like an entire community of people, they refuse Dionysus. They're like, hey, all the gods are fine except that one. Because that one is scary and brings out the worst in humanity and blends the lines between like this very rigid kind of ordered world that we live in. So as a result, they ban his worship. They mock and ridicule the followers of Dionysus.

And they say essentially, no, we're not doing this. This is like a god of like chaos and we're getting rid of him. And then ironically, the god destroys them. Not with lightning or like the way you might think. But like he basically turns their own buried madness loose in. side of them, which then causes them to annihilate the very thing that they were trying to protect, usually their own family. So take the story, for example, of Lycurgus. This is a king up in Thrace, and this is basically like the wild lands of like the northern parts of Greece. He's the oldest

example of this kind of like resistance myth that we have. And he shows up all the way back in Homer's Iliad, literally in like kind of the earliest versions of Greek literature that we have. And in the story, Lycurgus violently drives Dionysus and his worshippers out of his kingdom. He says, there's no place for this. We are a place of order. We are a place of organization and of government. We're not doing this whole crazy ritual, eating the flesh and going up on the mountain and going into a trance thing. So he basically chases them with like cattle equipment until the young god has to dive into the sea just to escape.

Now, for that, the gods basically come for him. In one version of the story, Dionysus drives like Kyrgyz raving mad. And in that madness, the king grabs an axe to destroy the vines of the God that he hates and he swings it and kills his own son. He literally kills his son, like his young child. And he accidentally kills him, like hacks him to death, unaware of what he's doing. And the story kind of exists as one of these myths about what happens when you try to subdue Dionysus.

Like, look, you can chase him out, but Dionysus is inside of you. and that internal chaos and that frenzy and that anger that like Kyrgyz felt ultimately led to the death of his most precious life, literally his own son. And then there's, of course, the daughters of Meneas. So while every other woman in the city runs off to the mountains to worship, these three sisters refuse. And they stay home and they stay respectable and orderly in Greek. And they're like, hey, we're not going to do this whole crazy ritual thing that they're doing.

So they sit basically kind of doing like proper works of good, obedient woman, and they laugh at like this whole kind of crazy cult up on the mountain. So then, according to the story, the God Dionysus comes to them, right where they're sitting. And in one tradition, he drives them mad inside their own house. And in that madness, they grab their own children and tear them apart. Now, you're probably seeing a pattern in these stories. Every one of them is about someone who tries to hold a line against Dionysus. They try to reject Dionysus and all of his followers against the madness. against the primal instinct against desire.

And every time that God doesn't just punish their disbelief, he punishes their ability to control themselves. He reaches in and finds the exact thing that they're suppressing. Maybe it's their internal rage. It's their own pride. It's their own desire, their own desire for, you know, trying to reject chaos. And he turns it against the people that they love the most.

Which brings us to the version that the Greeks told better than basically anyone else. It's the story of a young king who, was unshakably certain that he could control everything. Visit BetMGM Casino and check out the newest exclusive. The Price is Right Fortune Pick. BetMDM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly, 19 plus to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly.

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This is a play called The Back Eye. Now, we'll get to who wrote it and why in a minute, but for now, just know this is the darkest version of that kind of resistance pattern that we just looked at. And the other ones are dark, don't we wrong? I mean, like tearing apart your own kids, pretty brutal. but this one is somehow worse. So the city is Thebes. This is the same city where Semelay died carrying Dionysus and Zeus came and took Dionysus

and basically like bound him to himself, that whole place. So Thebes has a wound that never fully healed. Now, according to the story, this is because when Semelay died, her own family refused to believe her story. They didn't believe that Zeus was the father. They decided that she just made up the whole thing, that she was sleeping around and you know, had a kid out of wedlock and she was like, no, no, no, I actually slept with Zeus. That's what happened. And it was a way for her to like cover her own tracks. And so her family never

believed her. And basically her death was just like a punishment, like a karma basically for her lie, which means that the city didn't just insult Dionysus. They denied that Dionysus is a god at all. And now he's home to set the story straight, not only to vindicate himself, but also his late mother. Now, in the story, Dionysus walks into Thebes in disguise. He's dressed as just like a regular human being. Remember, he's half mortal, so it makes sense. He's just kind of like this smiling kind of foreign, holy man that's like leading his cult. And now right off the bat, Dionysus walks in and he strikes the woman of Thebes with divine madness.

And as a result, they all fly out of the city, they all sprint out, and they start running up the mountains where they go roaming around as Minads. It's literally these women that go into this sort of like trance-like state. But one of them, his own aunt, literally known as Agave. This is the sister of his dead mother. Now, she's also the mother of the king. And the king is Penteus. He's young and proud and newly in power. And technically, Penteos is Dionysus's cousin, although he has no idea.

And Pithaeus looks at what's happening to his city. Like all the women are gone. There's this strange cult that's spreading in the city. wine and ecstasy and these like foreign rituals are kind of loose in the street and he sees like hey my city's descending into chaos we have a massive like public order problem and we need to fix it this is the crux of the whole story so just stay with me pentheus does not see a god at work he doesn't even consider it for a second he just sees it as like a discipline issue women are acting the way that women aren't supposed to act you have foreigners coming into our city that are spreading all this nonsense and hysteria

and you have emotions and sex and like rituals, like running wild in a place where law and reason are supposed to be in charge. And so his answer is like, hey, we're going to crush it. All of this started when this weird foreigner guy, like this cult leader came in. So we're going to arrest him. We're going to round up the woman and we're going to restore control and order by force. So Penteus basically sends out his guards. They find this Dionysus in disguise and they arrest him and they throw him in prison. And the god Dionysus just walks out.

Remember, he's still a god. The chains just drop off of him. The prison shakes. And Pithaeus' control is exposed as a joke because no cell built by a human being was ever going to hold a god. But Dionysus doesn't walk out and kill him. Instead, he reaches into Penteus' own mind

and finds what the king is ultimately hiding, what he's trying to suppress, even what he's hiding from himself. So according to the story, all of this disgust that Pentheus is kind of building up in his animosity and hatred towards this cult leader, he's actually thinking about the women on the mountain. And it's his own sort of deep subconscious where he's like, what are they doing up there? What are the women really doing?

Are the rumors true? Are they really up there having like this crazy sort of sex party with wine and this kind of like catatonic like frenzy and all this freedom? And deep inside of him, he wants to know. So Dionysus brought out that hidden hunger within the king. basically coaxed out the lust and the madness within him. And Penteus realizes, hey, I need to go spy on these women. So he sneaks up the mountain without getting caught, and he basically disguises himself as one of them,

literally as a woman. It sounds crazy, but this is like the real sort of ancient Greek story. So the king who built his entire identity on controlling women and suppressing the feminine and keeping everyone in their assigned to places that men do this and women do this, well, he ends up wearing a dress and making his hair to be like, womanly and being led by the hand up a mountain, again, as women were supposed to do, and basically goes towards the exact ecstasy and mystery and chaos that he was trying.

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531, 2,600 to speak to an advisor. Free of charge. BetMGEM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming, Ontario. And the thing that he was ultimately fighting the hardest to control has just taken over him. So Penteus creeps onto the mountain, and he's kind of hidden down in the valley, and he can't quite see the women over the trees, so he's like, I need a better look. And the god Dionysus basically offers him one. There's a tall pine tree that's growing there, and Dionysus is really, and Dionysus is really,

reaches up and grabs the very top of it and slowly bends the whole tree down to the ground. And he just basically like a bow, right? And he basically shows the king like, hey, you can go up right on the highest branch. And so the king climbs up and then Dionysus lets go. And according to the story, the tree swings back up and it carries Penthias with it. And it puts him high in the air, above the tree line, out over the clearing. And in plain sight, he can see all the women on the mountain below. And he's able to look at them. And Penthaius thought, oh, I'm getting a best. better look. I'm hidden and I'm able to spy on all the women. But actually, he's exposed. He's put on display because now Dionysus calls out to all of his worshippers, all the women on the mountain,

hey, there's an intruder up on that tree that's come to spy on our sacred ritual. And the women see him under his disguise. They see a man perched in their sacred tree staring at them. And Agave, the king's own mother, Pentheus's own mother is there. And so the woman swarmed the tree and they tear at it and they rip it and they wretch it out of the earth by a of roots and they find him on the ground and they attack him, they claw off his disguise and he's looking at his own mother and he screams, Mom, it's me, I'm your son, I'm King Pantheis, but she's too deep inside the God's madness to hear him. And as the story goes, she doesn't actually see her son. She doesn't even see a man. She sees a lion. She sees a wild animal. So she

leaves the other woman and tearing him apart with their bare hands. His own mother pulls off his head and then Agave lifts up her son's severed head and puts it on the point of her staff, almost like what a hunter would do with a trophy, and she marches back down the mountain into the city in triumph. But in that moment, the God's grip on all these people starts to loosen, and the madness slowly drains out of all of them, drains out of agave. And right there, in the middle of the city in front of everyone, she turns over the trophy in her hands and looks at the face of what she thought was a lion that she actually destroyed and killed and sees him. And there's no scream that can describe that moment of a woman literally looking at her own son, that she killed with her bare hands, the king of the city.

And this is the price that the king, that the entire city that Agave had to pay for refusing the God of their own inner chaos. And that is the method of Dionysus. He never attacks from the outside. He never sends down a thunderbolt. He just reveals how much wildness is hiding underneath inside all of us. and he just lets it out. So that's a crazy story. But where does the story actually come from?

And who wrote it? Well, the play is called the Backeye. And it's the work of an author named Euripides. And he's one of the three great tragedy writers of ancient Athens. But he didn't actually write it in Athens. He wrote it as an old man in his 70s, living in a self-imposed exile way up north in the court of King Archelaus of Macedon. And he actually died up there.

He actually never saw this specific play ever get performed. The play only premiered back in Athens after his death, around 405 BC, and it was staged by a relative, and it was given all the honors that an ancient writer could receive, and he was never even alive to collect it. And that timing is actually really important, because 4 or 5 BC, well, that was like very nearly the end of Athens itself. And for almost 30 years at that point, the city had been locked in a catastrophic war against Sparta. This is known as the Peloponnesian War. And Athens was losing pretty badly. In the very next year in 404 BC, Athens would eventually surrender. The walls would come down and the Athenian empire as we know it would be over. And that's the audience that first sat in the dark and actually

watched Penteus die and saw this whole story play out and saw the power of Dionysus. A city that had spent generations convinced that it could control everything. The Athenians at the time thought, hey, we can control our empire, we can control our enemies, and we can control our own fate just through how smart we are and how dedicated we are to controlling our inner beast and our willpower. And they saw a play, ultimately sort of get manifest in front of them about a proud young ruler who believed the same exact thing and ultimately got destroyed by forces that he was too arrogant to respect. And actually, the whole Greek art form of tragedy, like all the plays and the theater and all of it, it grew directly out of religious festivals held in honor of Dionysus.

So this was, in like a very real way, the god of theater, right? Like the famous Greek tragedy as we know it. Dionysus is the god of all of it in and of itself. But at the end of the day, what does that even mean, right? The back eye doesn't just give us a clean, comfortable, like, here's the moral of the story. Like, always be a good guy. It's easy to say the lesson is like, hey, respect to the gods or, you know, don't be a control freak like Penteus, but it's not really the point, in my opinion, because Dianysus in

this story is monstrous, right? Like, his punishment is completely out of proportion. Like, this one king was like, hey, I don't like that these people are behaving improperly, which is in many ways, like a reasonable feeling. And he preys on a young man's weakness and engineers a mother into butchering her own child, a mother who for all intents and purposes was doing the right thing by the God. By Dionysus, she was a ardent follower. Agave was doing the right thing. And the punishment for this entire sort of disrespect he felt was to make a mother see a lion and then murder her own son, all for revenge of his own reputation and ultimately of his mothers. Because at the end of the day, he wanted to destroy the city of Thebes. He wanted to show them and teach them a lesson and

ultimately punish them for disrespecting him and his mother in her death. Dionysus is not the hero in this whole story. And Penteus, for all of his issues, he isn't simply like the fool or the villain. Like, there's no clean wrap-up. Like, the play just kind of leaves you looking at this horrible tragedy and you're just like, what is the point of all this pain? But the discomfort isn't the flaw in the story. It's sort of the point of these types of tragedies. Now, remember, Dionysus doesn't do clean endings. From the very beginning, this is the god of blurring the lines between things. Like, hey, here's the moral of the story. It's like, well, is there a moral? He kind of exists in the middle of two conclusions. He's the god of paradox, really, above everything else,

born from a mother and of a father. He is ancient, but also foreign. He's the God who frees you to be ultimately who you are, but also destroys you. You have civilization on one side and you have just complete chaos and disorder on the other. And Dionysus is right in the middle with a foot on each side. So of course, the story doesn't resolve neatly. A tidy little ending with like a very clear hero and a very clear villain and a very simple moral for everyone to walk away with. That would be kind of the one thing that Dionysus isn't. And maybe that's why the Greeks loved him so much, because he is sort of the original anti-hero. And honestly, I mean, life is like that too. It doesn't always resolve neatly. We like things to be very clean, right? Oh, this guy in history, he was evil.

And this guy in history, he was actually really good. There's simple cause and effects. There's There's lessons that we can learn about how to live. But anyone who's actually lived through anything knows that things aren't that simple. And that's what this God is all about. Not necessarily to celebrate chaos and not to kind of like ward you away from chaos either. But to look you dead in the eye and tell you the truth that every other God doesn't, that you are not just one thing. You are civilization.

You are orderly. You are proper. But you're also wilderness. And you're also beastly. You also have primal urges inside of you. that you are reasonable, but you're also completely irrational, that you are really good, but also you're really evil. And all of it at the same time is happening inside the same person.

And that the parts of yourself that you're most afraid of don't just disappear because you push them down and suppress them. And oftentimes by suppressing them, you just make them worse. And by blurring the boundaries here, by really pushing those lines, this God Dionysus kind of makes the chaos of life weirdly makes sense. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a brief synopsis as to who the God Dionysus was and still is. I mean, fascinating. Right?

Like, Dionysus is maybe the most interesting God because it's like, it really is the paradox. It's like, it's like, what is it? Rousseau and Hobbes. Like in like the Enlightenment area, you have philosophers that are like, human beings are, you know, like orderly. And like we are higher than other animals and we have like consciousness. and we're able to, you know, sort of see things the way they are. That's sort of like the Russoian sort of way to perceive reality. Like humans are different and distinct and orderly. And then Hobbs is like, now, human beings are wretched and we're internally decrepit and we're

like barely above primates. And, you know, we've done so much to just basically string civilization together as best we can. And then we keep on destroying it based off the Leviathan that lives within us. And it's a really interesting thing because, you know, like the writers or the people that are sort of creating the mythology around Dionysus, assuming it's created, I think it is. They're touching on something so interesting that I think doesn't really appear until much later in, you know, like Western literature. This idea... Visit BetMGM Casino and check out the newest exclusive. The Price is Right Fortune Pick. BetMDM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly. 19 plus to wager. Ontario only. Please play

responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connects Ontario at 1-866-531-22. 600 to speak to an advisor free of charge bet mGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with igaming ontario idea of the anti-hero this idea of like you are good and also bad like that's ultimately with dionysus is trying to capture here like you are super rational and reasonable but also completely stupid at the same time and i think that is like the underlying reality is that we like like i said just a minute ago we'd like to look at history and be like it's this thing is this and this thing is this. Like it's separate and clear. Here's good guys. Here's bad guys. We want the

binary of life. We want the categories that are neat. And Dionysus is the manifestation of all things that aren't and really kind of pushes all things that you're 100% certain on to say like, eh, maybe not. And to me, that's what makes the stories around Dionysus like so interesting. And then, of course, the historical fact of like, oh, people, specifically women were just like gallivanting around, like maybe borderline naked up in the mountains, like, in a drunken, like, frenzy, like letting loose to, like, this utmost freedom that also causes them to, like, destroy themselves. Fascinating. I mean, I understand, you know, King Penteus being like, I want to take a peek.

I want to see what they're doing, right? Like, if you could drop down in history with a time machine, that wouldn't be one of your stops. Like, hey, let me go up on the mountain and just see what's going on. Not to be a creep. I don't want to be a peep and tom, but I just want to see what, are they really tearing animals apart with their bare hands and eating the flesh. That's crazy. How big are these animals? Apparently not big. I mean, who knows? Maybe you get 10 of them? Like real strong Greek women going up on the mountain, 20, 50 of them, ripping apart an entire goat. That's pretty crazy. I know they're using hyperbole

to make their point, but the mom ripping the head of her son and then carrying it down. Crazy. Could you imagine being like a Greek citizen in four or five BC sitting in the theater watching this? like this is the craziest thing I've ever seen. It is poetic that her doing that though breaks the spell. Right. And like it's not that necessarily. It's like walking down the mountain and getting away from the madness of Dionysus and seeing what she had done.

Crazy. I mean, you know, going crazy and like killing your kid and then realizing what you'd done later. Sounds topical. I'm not getting into it. That's not the point of the show. We look through history. Okay.

We don't talk about current events. But as we always say, history does not really. repeat itself, but it does rhyme. That'd be a good way to get out of a court hearing. That would be like not guilty by reason of insanity. Also not guilty by reason of Dionysus. What I did with Dionysus, I don't condone, but you got to understand, I was out of my mind. I feel like a judge, or like a lawyer, an ancient Greek lawyer could use that. Minard in Greek history. Yeah, exactly. Like, hey, I mean, you take philosophy to become a lawyer. You got to take a lot of Greek history classes. I wonder if they could use that. Like, my client is, is innocent.

because she was on the mountain in sheepskin and thought it was a line and turns out, whoops, it was all the people she loved the most. Crazy. Should work. Anyway, what do you guys think? If you're a Greek historian or if you've studied this story, what are your thoughts? Did I miss anything? Please drop a comment below.

If you've never heard this story, what did you think before? No. What did you think before? And then what did you think after? Like, what was your take on Dionysus as a figment of human beings trying to grapple with the chaos that exists inside of them? I mean, for me, it's the way I understand this is like, human beings need a way to square the circle. We need to basically use these ancient Greek

gods to understand reality as we know it. And so there's a famine. It's like, okay, the gods cause this and they have a purpose. They have a reason. We're trying to create order to all the chaos. And this is the most interesting one because it's touching on the thing inside of us that we feel, the chaos, the paradox that exists inside of us, and puts a manifestation and sort of an external kind of catalyst to that chaos. And so just in the same way that you would look at the seas being choppy and you'd be like, ah, it's Poseidon, you're looking at the chaos inside of yourself and you're like, ah, it's Dionysus.

Anyway, I would love to know your take. Please drop a comment below. I read all of them, YouTube, Spotify. Wherever you comment, I will read it. Even if I don't get back to you, I'm sure if someone else will and it'll be productive for the conversation here at the history camp. Now, if you are interested in other elements of Greek history, we've done a ton of episodes on really the whole Greek pantheon and they're all,

fascinating to me and it really tells us, again, don't look at it as like, oh, we're talking about Greek history and what people used to believe. We're talking about how human beings understood themselves. It's really philosophy, if you think about it. It's like their understanding of who we are and how to make sense of the world around us all the way back in, you know, like the thousands BC. So check them out. We got a bunch of episodes. We'll put them in a link somewhere. Also, if you like religious content, like the modern religions, not talking about mythology as it's understood in sort of the, you know, religious paris. I'm talking about like Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, the big four plus all the other ones,

well, we have religion camp. You should check that out. Also, if you like deep diving on crazy sort of modern stuff like conspiracy theories, mysteries, esotericism, occultism, well, great news. We have Camp Gagnon. That's the main channel. We're not only do I do deep dives like this, but I also do straight up interviews with people way smarter than me that are actual experts in the field that know really what they're talking about and they answer all my dumb questions. So you should definitely check that out. Also, we have a secret society. We have our own little cult, so to speak. And that's patreon.com slash campgagnon.

You can get every single episode of this show completely ad-free, zooms every single month with me and the rest of the squad, and also some announcements for in-person real-life events that we're going to be doing that are only available to the patrons and all sorts of other stuff, bonus episodes that never go to the public, all for just $5 a month. Now, if you just like to rock with the history vibes, well, great news, you're in the right place. Thank you so much for tuning in, and I will see you in the future to talk about the past.

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