A Story of Dionysos and Madness

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Once upon a time, years ago, I tried to offer my madness to Dionysos.

I was very young and very sick and very tired. At 18, I had already experienced more madness than most people will undergo throughout their whole lives. I felt like I was living with one foot in the grave and the other foot in a world full of ghosts. So I took the piece of my madness that I had a name for, and I asked Dionysos to remake me without this piece. No matter the cost – that was the deal.

And Dionysos did not take it. He did not reject it; he said nothing at all. He became silent, a silence that lasted the entirety of one very long year.

I was lost and heartbroken. Not only was I still crazy and in pain and trying to die, but the Liberator and Savior wouldn’t deign to help me. I couldn’t understand his intentions then, and he’s never completely revealed them.

When Dionysos left me, I found Hethert. With her she brought the Netjeru, and I found my home. I leaned as well on the stories of Amaterasu-omikami, which had helped me survive in high school when I was unmedicated. These beautiful goddesses, Hethert and Amaterasu, were as full of rage and grief as they were of sunlight. And I began to see a way through.

Eventually, I became an Oath-breaker. Many polytheists consider this our equivalent of a mortal sin, but Dionysos rewarded me for it – for breaking my Oath to him. I broke my Oath the way Hermes taught me to, and Dionysos laughed for the first time in a year.

It’s nearly 7 years after I made that failed offering, and the madness has not left me. Unfortunately, my madness is not curable. In the medical sense of the word, I am very crazy. I am also very lucky to have a graduate degree and a job and amazing friends. The mortality rates of my diagnoses are very, very high, and many people with my diagnoses live objectively awful lives, and yet I’m truly better than I have ever been.

While my madness is not curable, it is tameable. And usable. I do not talk extensively about my worship of Dionysos because it has become something impossible to describe. Once I learned to accept my madness and what it had taught me, I began to understand the Liberator. I began to understand how Dionysos and I both live wondrous lives with madness sleeping in our bones like a well-fed tiger. I began to understand how madness made me closer to Ariadne, and Erigone, and Antinous. I began to understand that madness alone does not make me a monster; that is something I must choose to be. And I began to understand why gods of madness have remained so ingrained in cultures around the world over millennia of modernization.

This isn’t to say that I’m glad to be mad, although in some respects I am. I also don’t think you must be clinically psychotic to worship Dionysos – that’s the exact opposite of how he works! But all these years later, I’ve finally understood a glimmer of why Dionysos didn’t take my madness like I begged him to. And when I trance out in shrine before him today, I’m so glad he forced me to remake myself instead of fracturing me even more.

Io Dionysos 🐯