Demigods and Monsters (9 page)

You can't read the stories of Dionysus without noticing a few distinct patterns. One is the way that ivy and grapevines tend to spring up, trapping those who have angered him. This is a device that Riordan uses in
The Titan's Curse
, when Mr. D finally condescends to help Percy and his friends. But there are other mythic patterns, such as Dionysus' fondness for turning himself and/or humans into wild beasts, which I think speaks to the fact that humans
are
animals. For all our civilization, we're primates, and a certain primal savagery lingers beneath whatever morality and sophistication we acquire, a savagery that often surfaces in connection with intoxication. We do
our best to suppress this wildness and keep it in check—that's why every civilization has laws—but it never entirely vanishes. It shows up in our crime rates and in our thirst for violent entertainment. Our species loves watching spectacles in which actors or animated characters routinely hurt and kill each other. The Ancient Greeks believed that such spectacles—for them, plays—purged these instincts. Watching the enactment of Dionysus' story was supposed to be a
catharsis
, something that would cleanse the audience of its own violent urges.

Another pattern in Dionysus' myths is the use of mind-breaking illusions. Though the wine god is capable of creating earthquakes, thunder, and lightning—all of which he does in
The Bacchae—
his weapon of choice is to bend reality in the most horrific ways possible. A more minor pattern revolves around the god's need for respect. In the myths Dionysus, the last god to join the Olympians and the only halfling among them, repeatedly insists that others recognize his divinity. This is something else that Riordan has picked up. Mr. D is always demanding proper respect from Percy, something that Percy is loath to give.

Perhaps the most dramatic and disturbing pattern in the Dionysian myths is the one in which parents go mad and tear apart and eat their young. This particular kind of insanity seems to echo the awful events of Dionysus' own childhood: being torn apart by the Titans and then all the madness that Hera caused. In a way, this is not so far from contemporary psychology that tells us that abusive childhoods can result in damaged adults. But it's also a very clear-eyed vision of the power of drink at its worst, when intoxication becomes simply toxic. I know quite a few people who grew up with alcoholic parents, and though the kids weren't literally torn apart, many of them went through a kind of emotional shredder, caught in the uncontrolled madness that alcoholism brings. When the influence of Dionysus is at its worst, people lose their sanity. Even the powerful natural instincts to love and protect one's own children dissolve in the drink.

By the time he gets to Camp Half-Blood, Percy has already had a close-up view of just how ugly and insane alcoholism can be. Smelly Gabe is a lousy human being and an abusive husband. Understandably, Percy, like those unfortunate mortals in the myths, wants nothing to do with Mr. D, and like those mortals, he underestimates him.

Fortunately, when Percy meets Dionysus, the wine god is on a kind of divine probation, not allowed to indulge in his beloved wine and doing his best not to anger Zeus again. Mr. D is a Dionysus with restraints, a highly unusual condition for the god who was also known as Lysios, the loosener. Sardonic and unhelpful as he may be, this is a kinder, gentler Dionysus than the one we see in the myths. The fact that he is trying to stay on Zeus' good side may be the only reason that Percy manages to get away with as much as he does.

Or perhaps there's an unacknowledged kinship between them. Dionysus and Percy's adventures have something in common. The stories of Dionysus might even have been an inspiration for part of what Percy undergoes. Like Percy, Dionysus made the long, difficult journey to the Underworld to rescue his mother. And like Percy, he bargained with Hades. Dionysus agreed to send Hades that which he himself loved best in Semele's place. What Dionysus most loved were ivy, grapevines, and myrtle, and he wound up giving Hades myrtle in exchange for his mother's life. He then brought his mother out of the Underworld and up to Mount Olympus. There he changed her name to Thyone, which allowed her to somehow remain among the immortals without Hera attacking her again.

The reason this myth is important is because it's tied into another one of Dionysus' many aspects. He's a god of death and rebirth. That story about him being torn apart, boiled, and reborn? Many scholars believe it's a metaphor for the process of wine-making in which the grapes are torn from the vine, smashed, and then processed into wine. Others say it's a metaphor for the grapevine itself, which is cut back to a bare trunk after the autumn harvest, and yet returns to life every spring, covering itself with green leaves and sweet grapes. In
either case, it's a basic pattern found in many mythologies, a belief in the immortality of the soul: Something is destroyed and from that destruction something new is born. The phoenix, for example, is a mythological creature that embodies that cycle.

Through Dionysus the Ancient Greeks acknowledged that humans are not wholly rational creatures. They understood that even wild, frenzied madness may be part of our nature, and they made a sacred, ritual space for those frightening impulses, channeling them into the worship of a god. But the Maenads' rites, with their crazed dancing and bloody sacrifices, were not the only way to worship Dionysus. Every spring when the grapevines began to return to life, there was a great celebration, a five-day festival dedicated to Dionysus. Despite all the madness that followed him, Dionysus was greatly loved. For centuries he was the most popular god, and this may be because he was also the god of joy, which in itself is a pretty neat thing: To the Greeks joy was sacred, a gift that could only come from the divine. His annual festival—it was believed that the god showed up and took part every year—was essentially a great party where everyone was welcome. Dionysus was the most democratic of the gods. Anyone, even the poor, could take part in his rites. (This was very different from the rites of the goddess Demeter, for example, which were only open to a select group.)

While the Dionysian festivals always involved drinking wine, they were not occasions for madness or dismemberment. Instead, the festivals celebrated Dionysus as the god of theater, a source of artistic inspiration. Plays were presented, and it was believed that the playwrights, actors, and even the audience served the god by partaking in the sacred event of the play. Beyond that, it was believed that without Dionysus all of the sacred songs—all of the ways you praise and speak to the gods—would be forgotten.

The Dionysian spirit at its worst was cruel, uncontrollably violent, and flat-out insane. At its best it inspired art, joy, celebration, and a reverence for nature and the beauty of the wild. Dionysus was the life force: rowdy, chaotic, and irrepressible. Actually, one of Riordan's descriptions of the monsters is a perfect fit for Dionysus too:

Dionysus is a primal force and though he was killed, he never really died. He can be kept down for periods, but he always resurfaces. When I was in college, one of my professors described America in the 1960s as a place and time when the Dionysian force returned—the long hair; the wildness of the music, the bands, and their fans; the explosion of color (pop art, tie-dye, and hippie garb); the political chaos; and, of course, the widespread use of psychedelic drugs.

When the 1960s began, the accepted image of the way things
should be
was neat, orderly, and squeaky clean.
¹⁷
Rock, rap, hip hop, metal, reggaeton—all of the loud, exciting stuff—none of it existed then. Most of what was on the radio was tame and boring by today's standards. And then things started to shift. Radically. My guess is that Dionysus showed up and flowed straight through the musicians—the blues singers, Elvis Presley,
¹⁸
the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and countless bands that followed.

Many people were scared by what happened in the sixties, and, yes, drugs and alcohol claimed many victims. That part of Dionysus
has never changed. But there was also a phenomenal opening to new ways of thinking, new forms of art, and new ways of seeing. Which is where we come back to Mr. D and Camp Half-Blood.

Traditionally, when Dionysus appears, the old rules—and all things that bind or restrict—are loosened. There's a new, intoxicating freedom in the air. Mr. D without his wine is hardly intoxicating, but I think his disinterest gives the campers a necessary freedom that allows them to develop into heroes. He isn't very protective and he isn't controlling. The kids are not kept dependent in any way. Mr. D allows them to take serious risks and make near-fatal mistakes. In fact, if what he says is to be believed, more often than not he's hoping they'll fail. But heroes can't be coddled. You can't expect kids to go on quests and survive monsters if they don't know how to rely on their own resources. Mr. D is running an odd kind of boot camp in which he's sort of the reverse of a drill sergeant, basically saying: “Do what you want and what you can. That's the training you need.”

And yet when Percy, whom he seems to loathe, needs him most, Mr. D comes through. In
The Titan's Curse
, against all expectation Mr. D not only saves the heroes from certain death, but calls Percy by his rightful name. I'm still not sure why he does it. Is it because Percy finally humbles himself and asks for help? Or is it a response to the Manticore, who taunts Percy by saying that the half-gods don't have any “real” help? It seems possible Mr. D isn't about to let a monster diss him, and that he enjoys proving both the Manticore and Percy wrong. Or perhaps Mr. D is just doing his job and he's a better guardian than Percy gives him credit for. After all, almost as soon as the Manticore and his henchmen are taken care of, Mr. D focuses on Thalia. He knows she nearly accepted the Manticore's offer and he chides her for it, making it clear that he too knows how tempting power can be.

There's also the fact that though he seems to have no respect for kids or mortals, Mr. D is curiously fair. When Grover first brings Percy to camp and Percy is nearly killed by the Minotaur, Mr. D, who heads the Council of Cloven Elders, refrains from passing judgment on Grover. He gives him another chance. Twice Percy confronts Mr. D, even calling him a jerk and furiously demanding to know why he doesn't help. Mr. D could kill Percy instantaneously, and yet he spares him. Though Mr. D may enjoy playing with Percy's head—he's sarcastic and insulting—he refrains from actually doing harm. This may be due to his punishment or to some condition we don't yet know about. Or it may be that Mr. D isn't quite as callous as he seems.

There's an interesting scene at the end of
The Titan's Curse
, where Percy and his friends are on Mount Olympus facing the judgment of the gods. Percy pleads for his life and the lives of Annabeth, Thalia, Grover, and the Ophiotaurus. In the argument that follows—whether the heroes should be destroyed or honored—Mr. D aligns himself with Ares and Athena as one of three gods who abstain from the vote. He points out quite reasonably that Percy may be the godling in the Oracle's prophecy, the one who will destroy them all. Ares' decision to abstain seems to stem from the fact that Percy's made an enemy of him, but Mr. D, surprisingly, seems far more aligned with Athena. He isn't being vengeful or mad. Instead, he seems calm, clear-sighted, and of all things, reasonably cautious.

For most of
The Battle of the Labyrinth,
Dionysus is offstage. When Percy initially returns to Camp Half-Blood he's delighted to find that Mr. D is away recruiting other gods for the coming battle with the Titans. True to form, Mr. D doesn't show up until necessary, at the very end when Grover is trying to persuade the Council of Cloven Elders that he found Pan and that the great god is truly gone. Except for Chiron, the council isn't having any of it—until Mr. D appears, this time wearing a suit and truly sober. He's grieving for his son Castor and he brings bad news: the minor gods are siding with
the Titans against the Olympians. Still, despite being in a particularly bad mood, he tells Silenus that Grover is right and when the council vote is tied, he dissolves the council, settling the matter once and for all. This isn't truly surprising; for all the madness, illusion, and intoxication, Dionysus has always been clear-sighted and strangely honest. It makes sense that he, a god of the wild, would sense the truth about Pan and know that Grover fulfilled his search.

What is surprising is that Mr. D then invites Percy to take a walk with him and admits that Percy and Annabeth saved the camp. When they reach the amphitheater, Percy finds that Mr. D has healed Chris Rodriguez, the half-blood, who went insane in the labyrinth. Being a god who causes madness, Dionysus is also able to heal it. Percy can't quite believe that the wine god is actually being nice. A sardonic Mr. D assures him that he oozes niceness. As if to prove it, he delivers a very uncharacteristic message: “a kind act can sometimes be powerful as a sword.” And for the first time he tells Percy a bit of his own history as a mortal, how he was mocked for being a mere winemaker and yet became an Olympian. So what gives? Is Mr. D actually encouraging Percy, the camper who so deeply annoys him? I think we can only take Dionysus at his word, and believe that he's offering Percy, and the rest of us, a genuine bit of hope—that acts of kindness matter, and that we may all have the potential to be greater than others think.

One of the things I find so intriguing about Greek mythology is that the Greeks saw the positive and the negative in everything. They embraced opposites. I doubt it would have occurred to them to have a divine figure who was purely good and compassionate, like the Buddha or Jesus Christ. The Greek gods always seemed to have dual natures. They were all capable of tremendous good and tremendous harm. They were dangerous gods, whose natures may have been much closer to our own human nature than we'd like to admit. Dionysus is neither good nor bad but spans the entire spectrum of behavior. As one of the Greek gods, he represents an ancient way of
looking at things: that all of Creation, cruel and kind, orderly and chaotic, destructive and creative, is part of the divine.