Masks of Dionysos: Getting to Know the God Through His Heroes and Heroines (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781974669332)

Who are the Dionysian Dead?

To begin with, they are not like the ordinary dead. They never went to the house of Haides. They don't hunger. At least not for the things that the dead are normally hungry for: blood and holocaust meat and honey and milk and oil and shiny baubles and the other things that it is pious and proper to offer the deceased.

You see, the Dionysian Dead have been revived through union with their Lord; they draw sustenance from the wine that flows eternally. They burn like the fiery stars of black heaven. They want for nothing - except beauty.

They are strange ones, these dead of Dionysos. Warrior kings and mad-women and clowns and spider-bit prophets from the desert; transvestites, snake-hipped maniac poets and priestesses with blood-stained hands. All the ones who stopped being entirely human well before they stopped breathing.

Come meet these Heroes and Heroines, and through them gain a deeper understanding of that most complex and contradictory of Gods, Dionysos. From Ariadne and Orpheus to Friedrich Nietzsche and Jim Morrison, they span the realms of history and mythology, and have danced with the God from antiquity right through the modern day. And now they have been accorded an honored place in the Starry Bull tradition of Bacchic Orphism.