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.
Why Is Wine Such a Big Deal?
Wine, in and of itself, is also neither good nor bad. Riordan makes it clear that alcoholism, or an excess of drinking, is not a good thing or in any way attractive. But there’s another side to the fruit of the vine. What Riordan doesn’t really address—probably because these books are written for readers under the legal drinking age—are some of the ancient ritual uses of wine. It was in these rituals that Dionysus was known as the god of divine ecstasy, a usually blissful state in which normal limitations disappear and one is united with or open to the divine. And without understanding that aspect of the god, you can’t really understand Dionysus.
One thing to keep in mind when we talk about the Greek myths is that these were not just a bunch of stories made up to explain natural phenomena like sunrise and thunder to people who didn’t have our current understanding of science. The myths tell the stories of gods whom the people worshipped. The Ancient Greeks built temples to these gods and prayed to them and followed specific rites or rituals, asking the gods to aid and protect them. One of the things I love about the Greek pantheon is that they had specialists. You prayed to Artemis if you wanted a good hunt, to Ares before you went into battle, and to Dionysus if you wanted a healthy orchard or a good crop of grapes. Wine was part of many of these rituals, which shouldn’t surprise anyone. It’s been a sacrament (part of sacred ritual) for millennia and is still part of many ceremonies both in Judaism and Christianity.
Why wine? It relaxes. It loosens the grip of the ordinary world, the clutter of everyday life: thoughts about what you have to do, where you have to go, what someone said. Wine dissolves inhibitions, freeing people from worry and fear. It makes people feel good and even empowered. It’s used as part of religious rituals for the very deliberate purpose of preparing the worshipper to forget about the ordinary world for a while and open to the divine powers. Wine is a kind of intermediary, or medium, that allows you to communicate with the deities. When worshippers went to a Dionysian festival they weren’t just letting loose, they were opening themselves to the truths of the gods. This state of intoxication was called divine ecstasy. It was in this state that the messages from the gods—even prophecies—came through. It was also a state of divine inspiration, from which songs or stories or ideas would arise. Inspiration is another word for breath, and creative inspiration was said to be the gods breathing through you.
Wine was considered to be part of Dionysus, literally. It was believed that if you drank his wine, you took a bit of the god inside you. He was, as Edith Hamilton points out, the only god who existed both outside and inside his worshippers. The Maenads, the most extreme of his devotees, believed that when they drank his wine, they were possessed by him. Dionysus bridged what Michael Grant describes in his book, Myths of the Greek and Romans, as “the sharp gulf between human and divine.”
There’s a lovely symmetry in the myths of Dionysus. His mother Semele died because she wanted to see a god in his full glory. Her son allows humans to see the gods through him, and even to take the divine inside them. It’s as if he’s still working on his mother’s problem, saying, “Okay, maybe you can’t look at the gods full on, but there is a way you can experience them, and I’ll let you do it.”
So the underlying assumption in the use of wine as part of religious ritual is that it’s hard to access the gods in our usual distracted state of mind. Or put another way, one of the trickiest things about having religious faith is that most of the time we can’t see the divine. Like Homer, Riordan uses the device of the Mist to explain why mortals are usually so blind to the presence of the gods. Historically, just about every religion has dealt with this problem: What is it that you have to do to actually experience the divine? There are nearly as many answers as there are religions. Some faiths say that prayer alone is the way. Others transcend—go beyond—the everyday state of mind through entering a kind of trance. This can be done through meditat
ion, chanting, drumming, dancing, singing, fasting, yogic practices, and the use of psychoactive drugs. Alcohol, of course, is one of these drugs.
But there’s another idea about how we can access the divine that has to do with place. As the writer Alain Daniélou explains in his book Gods of Love and Ecstasy: The Traditions of Shiva and Dionysus: There are places where the visible and invisible worlds are very close to each other. . . . They are a sort of door, through which it is a little easier to pass from one world to another.
I think Camp Half-Blood is one of these sacred places, which is why Dionysus, the god whose rites allow people to communicate with the deities, is the perfect god to run it. He’s the gatekeeper, the one who lets mortals in to meet the gods, whose presence ensures that that the boundaries between the divine and the mundane remain in place, and who admits the half-bloods to experience their own semi-divine inheritance. When Percy leaves Camp Half-Blood without permission in The Titan’s Curse, it’s Mr. D who comes after him. In his own self-centered way, Mr. D is completely aware of who enters and leaves the camp. With his strange indifference, Mr. D allows the kids the freedom to shrug off their old confining identities—for example, Percy as a problem student with ADHD—and find their new true identities as half-gods and heroes. It’s in Camp Half-Blood that the Mist vanishes and one can see the supernatural. Creatures such as the centaurs and satyrs reveal themselves in their true forms. Here, even monsters, like the Minotaur, appear. It’s the place where the kids meet the divine (Mr. D himself, for starters) and realize that they each have the gods inside them. And it’s Dionysus, the god of all growing things, who allows the half-gods to fully grow into themselves. In Camp Half-Blood, the campers don’t have to drink or enter a trance in order to partake of the wine god’s blessings. They merely have to be in his baffling and amazing presence. Rick Riordan’s portrayal of Mr. D pulls off a bit of magic that I think even the gods would envy. He’s given us Dionysus without his wine and yet with all of his power and mystery. God of the vine, fertility, wildness, drama, and joy. Master of madness, magic, and illusion. The gatekeeper who gives mortals entry to the divine.
Great Books on Greek Myth
Daniélou, Alain. Gods of Love and Ecstasy: The Traditions of Shiva and Dionysu s. First published in French as Shiva et Dionysus 1979. Reprint of 1982 translation, Vermont: Inner Traditions, 1992.
Grant, Michael. Myths of the Greeks and Romans. 1962, Reprint, New York: A Meridian/Penguin Book 1995.
Hamilton, Edith. Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes. 1940. Reprint, New York: A Meridian/Penguin Book 1989.
Ellen Steiber lives in Tucson, Arizona, where she writes and edits books. She has always loved mythology and thinks that there’s a good chance that the Greek gods are still around. While she was writing this essay, Iris appeared in a gorgeous double rainbow right outside her office. Two of her other essays appear in The World of the Golden Compass, edited by Scott Westerfeld, and A New Dawn, edited by Ellen Hopkins. Her Web site is www.ellensteiber.com.
The Gods Among Us
Elizabeth M. Rees
When the gods come among men, they are not known.
—RALPH WALDO EMERSON
What You Can’t See Might Harm You
Living in New York City, just under two miles from what became Ground Zero, I witnessed the events of 9/11 all too close to home. It was a scene to gladden the war-mongering heart of Ares, the Greek god of war. The smoky, fiery image of the Twin Towers was surely one lifted straight from Hades’ wildest dreams.
Although I am old enough to know Superman is make-believe and that James Bond is just a character in books and film, I actually found myself wondering, “Where are they?” Why didn’t Superman soar onto the scene and snatch a plane in each fist a second before they struck? Why had James Bond’s trademark derring-do failed when his valiant deeds were most crucial?
What a foolish part of me expected was larger-than-life action taken by one of our own pop culture demigods (Clark Kent) or heroes (Bond). What I and the rest of the world got instead was a reality check: heroes and demigods sure don’t exist in real-life New York.
But subsequent events proved me wrong. Mr. Emerson says if divinities are here, we don’t know it, but he might better rephrase it: We just don’t recognize the gods and demigods and heroes that surround us in our daily lives.
Every emergency worker who raced into those buildings that terrible day or worked to help victims or labored over recovery of any possible survivors was a hero ten times over. It was as if they reached inside the deep pocket in the overalls of their souls and pulled out the equivalent of Percy Jackson’s penknife in Rick Riordan’s series, Percy Jackson and the Olympians: a great weapon with which to combat evil. Our twenty-first-century heroes’ weapons were courage and strength beyond any ordinary mortal’s wildest expectation, courage and strength on the scale of those exemplified by those old Greek gods.
According to Riordan in his quartet (so far) of books, the gods are indeed among us, and they can be known: that is, if you happen to be half-blood like Percy Jackson and many of his friends.
But like Percy at the start of the series, you’ve probably never given much thought to Greek gods—or their complicated lives and carryings on—outside of the classroom. And again like Percy (and later in The Titan’s Curse, both Bianca and Nico di Angelo), you’d certainly never imagine that immortals might be living right down the block in your own neighborhood.
Who even bothers to give a second glance to the extensively wired guy riding the city bus? While he messages someone on his Blackberry, Mr. Motor Mouth is babbling nonstop on his cell and tapping his foot to an upbeat tune playing on the iPod plugged into his free ear.
Or how about that leather-jacketed biker roaring by on his Harley? What gives him the right to curse you as he nearly wipes out at the crosswalk? You glare after him, but I bet you don’t wonder—or even care—who he is.
Then there’s that panhandler who has staked her claim on your corner—she’s homeless, and you want to feel sorry for her, but she doesn’t smell so great, and there’s something scary about her sunken eyes and that weird knit jester’s hat she wears even in mid-summer. If you’re like me, you scurry past, pretending not to see her, not wanting to think where she came from or who she might be or even if she has a name.
Or did you even wonder why that amazingly beautiful girl stopped to preen and fix her makeup at every cosmetics counter in Macy’s en route to the exit? Maybe, maybe not.
But since I entered the world of Percy Jackson and the Olympians, I find myself thinking that, just like Percy, I might have encountered Hermes, or Ares, Medusa, or even Aphrodite on a shopping spree, and not even known it!
Although come to think of it, just once, maybe I did.
Late afternoon winter sunlight slanted from west to east across from Grand Central Station as I waited to cross the street. It was the height of rush hour and hoards of commuters hurried down the sidewalk to get into the station. In the crowd I spotted a matted-haired man. He was walking the head-down, shuffling walk of the homeless and looked half-crazed. But New Yorkers, as is their wont, took no notice of him.
Suddenly he looked up and a radiant smile crossed his dirty face. Walking in front of him was a young woman. He could only see her from the back but her long blonde hair shimmered like spun gold in the sun. He reached out with one hand and touched it. From across the street I gasped, fearing she was in some kind of danger. But the smile on his face was so joyful, and his touch must have been gentle because she never noticed—nor did any of the milling crowd, intent on getting somewhere fast. It was a moment’s vision, but it has never left me.
Since reading Percy Jackson and the Olympians, I’ve wondered: Was the woman a demigod? Was she a child of Aphrodite, lighting the world with her beauty? Was the homeless man a half-blood like Tyson, unclaimed, unloved, and lost in a world that could never provide him with shelter or understanding? And, if indeed I was treated to a glimpse into Percy
Jackson’s universe, how come no one else noticed? If these demigods inhabit my hometown, how come I don’t see them more often?
Pulling the Mist Over Our Eyes
In Riordan’s world, the gods themselves and their half-blood children, as well as the occasional ordinary mortal, can see through what Riordan dubs “Mist,” a brilliant invention that makes the whole premise of gods among us possible. Mist is the phenomenon that veils gods, as they go about their own twenty-first-century lives, from the view of ordinary mortals. Because I’m not a half-blood, or at least I don’t think I am, I’m not supposed to recognize a god even if he or she were standing next to me. The Mist obscures the identity of the gods so people (or ast least most people) can’t see them for what they are.19 Occasionally, however, the Mist suffers a major-league breakdown.
Like during Percy’s gym class at Meriwether College Prep in downtown Manhattan, when all Hades breaks loose and a gang of man-eating giants called Laistrygonians attack Percy during a dodgeball game. Suddenly all the kids in the gym find themselves in an explosive, deadly mêlée while their coach fiddles with his hearing aid and never looks up from his magazine. Mist renders the coach oblivious, but Mist everywhere else in the gym dissolves, and reality abruptly breaks down. Prompted by Percy, the kids dash for cover. But the blood-thirsty monsters have magically sealed all the exits, barring all hope of escape. Eventually Percy, his half-brother Tyson, and Annabeth manage to flee onto the streets of lower Manhattan. Fire engines roar to the scene of the explosion. And ordinary mortals had witnessed the whole thing, because, for a moment, the Mist had lifted.