Moody and difficult as he is, Mr. D is the first god whom Percy confronts directly, and I can’t help thinking that’s significant. Mr. D defies expectations. He’s not beautiful or even likeable. He’s the embodiment of divine indifference—a god who barely notices that mortals exist. Percy meets him at a point when he, Percy, doesn’t believe in gods, and yet there’s Mr. D, undeniably real and scary. The wine god is irrefutable evidence of the new truths that Percy must accept: that not only are the Greek gods real and still messing with mortals, but that one of them is his father. Shortly after meeting Mr. D, a confused Percy asks Chiron: “Who . . . who am I?” . . .
“Who are you?” [Chiron] mused. “Well, that’s the question we all want answered, isn’t it?”
It is indeed. The gods want to know because they’ve got a prophecy to contend with, and Percy needs to know because what he discovers at Camp Half-Blood is the key to his identity. That question is really the one that Percy has come to Camp Half-Blood to answer. And the more I look at the myths, the more I believe that of all the gods, Dionysus is the perfect choice to preside over the place where questions like Percy’s get resolved.
What Dionysus Did Before He Ran Camp Half-Blood
To really understand what Riordan does with Dionysus, it helps to look at the myths about the wine god. The most popular version of his story starts with his mother, Semele, who was not a goddess but a princess, the daughter of Cadmus, King of Thebes. Zeus fell in love with the young princess and swore by the River Styx that he would do anything she asked. But falling in love with Zeus never works out well for mortals. When Hera, Zeus’ wife, found out about the romance, she disguised herself as an old woman and persuaded the princess to ask Zeus to prove his love by showing himself to her as he showed himself to Hera, in his undisguised divine form. Zeus, knowing that no mortal could survive such a sight, begged the girl to ask for something else. Semele, already six months pregnant and wanting to know the truth about her child’s father, refused. Bound by his own oath, Zeus showed himself in his true form, an immense, glorious vision blazing with thunder and lightning. I suspect this was the equivalent of looking at a nuclear blast up close. Semele was by some accounts frightened to death; by others, she was incinerated on the spot. What nearly all versions of the myth agree on is that in the moment before she died, the god managed to rescue the child she was carrying. Zeus hid the unborn child by sewing him into his own thigh and only undid the stitches when Dionysus was ready to be born.
One interesting thing about Dionysus’ birth is that, of the twelve great Olympian gods, only Dionysus had a mortal parent. Dionysus, though fully divine, is the only god who started life as a half-blood. Which gives him a rather unique qualification to run the summer camp.
I think it’s fair to say that Dionysus had a difficult childhood. According to one version of his story, Hera, not content with destroying his mother, ordered the Titans to seize the infant. What happened next was not only violent but seriously gross. The Titans tore the baby to pieces then boiled the pieces in a cauldron. A pomegranate tree sprang from the place on the earth where the infant’s blood had fallen, and Rhea, Dionysus’ grandmother,14 somehow brought the child back to life.
Realizing that Olympus was not the safest place for the child, Zeus put Dionysus in the care of King Athamas and his wife Ino, who was one of Semele’s sisters. They hid the young boy in the women’s quarters, where he was disguised as a woman (which may account for some of the descriptions of Dionysus as having a feminine appearance15). This arrangement lasted until Hera found out about it and drove both the king and his wife mad. The king in his madness even killed his eldest son, thinking him a stag.
Zeus then put Hermes on the case. Hermes disguised Dionysus as a young ram and managed to get him safely into the care of the five nymphs who lived on Mount Nysa. They were more successful guardians, raising the young godling in a cave, feeding him on honey. Zeus, grateful to the nymphs, set their images in the sky as stars and called them the Hyades. These are the stars that are believed to bring rain when they are near the horizon. As Edith Hamilton puts it in Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes: So the God of the Vine was born of fire and nursed by rain, the hard burning heat that ripens the grapes and water that keeps the plants alive.
Dionysus managed to survive childhood and apparently even made his first wine on Mount Nysa. According to Robert Graves’s The Greek Myths, soon after Dionysus reached manhood, Hera recognized him as Semele’s son. Never one to give up a grudge, Hera promptly drove Dionysus mad. It was at this point that he began his wanderings, accompanied by his tutor Silenus and an extremely rowdy bunch of followers who terrified nearly everyone they met. These followers include satyrs and the dreaded Maenads, possessed women who worshipped Dionysus and had a nasty habit of getting drunk then dismembering and devouring wild animals or the occasional unfortunate human. Dionysus’ followers were also known to tear apart and eat goats and satyrs, which may be why Mr. D makes Grover so nervous.
Dionysus traveled to Egypt, India, and throughout the Aegean, bringing the vine with him and teaching wine-making. In most of these places he was welcomed and worshipped, which was clearly the safest approach to Dionysus.
Not everyone was thrilled to host such a riotous god. Dionysus returned to his birthplace, Thebes, because he’d heard that the king’s mother, Agave, was denying that Dionysus was the son of Zeus. Essentially, they were dissing him, saying Dionysus wasn’t a god. Even worse, Pentheus, the king,16 vowed to have Dionysus beheaded if he entered Thebes. Dionysus and his followers entered the city anyway, and Pentheus ordered them shackled. But Dionysus is, among other things, a master of illusions, and Pentheus, who was already beginning to lose his mind, wound up shackling a bull. The Maenads escaped the king’s guards and went dancing up a mountain where they tore a calf to pieces. Then Pentheus’ mother and sisters joined the Maenads. When Pentheus tried to stop them, the Maenads, led by Agave, Pentheus’ own mother, tore the king to pieces. She too was caught in the insanity of the wine god’s illusions and believed it was a lion she was killing when she was really murdering her own son. As Percy discovers, the gods have a tendency to take it very personally when they’re opposed.
Pentheus’ attempts to protect his city from the wine god’s influence were understandable but also futile. Anyone who knows anything about the Greek gods would think he should have known better. Yet others made similar mistakes. When Dionysus, disguised as a young girl, invited the three daughters of King Minyas to join his festival, they refused, choosing instead to stay at home and spin wool. Again, Dionysus summoned illusions that destroyed the mind. He drove the daughters of Minyas mad by filling their spinning room with phantom beasts and turning their threads to vines. One sister, in desperation, offered her own son as a sacrifice, and all three sisters in a wine-induced frenzy wound up tearing apart and devouring the boy.
One of the best-known stories about Dionysus, and the source of those visions Percy gets when he first meets Mr. D, tells of how a bunch of sailors mistook Dionysus for a young prince. Thinking he’d be worth quite a ransom, they kidnapped him. But once they got him aboard and tried to tie him up, the ropes fell apart. Only the helmsman realized they’d captured a god, and he pleaded with his shipmates to release the young man. Ignoring him, the captain ordered the crew to set sail. Strangely, though the sails filled with wind, the ship wouldn’t move. Instead, grapevines sprouted from the ship, winding across the rigging and sails; ivy covered the masts; the oars turned into serpents; and red wine streamed across the decks. At this point the captain realized something was wrong. He ordered the helmsman to return to shore. But it was too late. Dionysus turned himself into a lion, and the terrified sailors leapt overboard—where all but the helmsman were changed into dolphins.
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.
When Dionysus Appears
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: Monsters don’t die. . . . They can be killed. But they don’t die. . . .You can dispel them for a while. . . . But they are primal forces.
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.
Okay, So He Doesn’t Wear a Lanyard
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.