In the papyrus of Nebseni, written about 1550 B.C.E., Osiris is depicted sitting in a shrine, from the roof of which hang clusters of grapes; and in the papyrus of the royal scribe Nakht we see the God enthroned in front of a pool, from the banks of which a luxuriant vine, with many bunches of grapes, grows towards the green face of the seated deity. Hellanicus maintains that the vine was discovered first in Plithine, a city of Egypt and the physician Philomides says that the vine had been brought from the Red Sea into Greece (Athenaios 1.34a, 15.675)
According to Diodorus Siculus , "The discovery of ivy is also attributed to Osiris by the Egyptians and made sacred to this God, just as the Greeks also do in the case of Dionysos. And in the Egyptian language, they say, the ivy is called khenosiris, the 'plant of Osiris' and for purposes of dedication is preferred to the vine, since the latter sheds its leaves while the former ever remains green." (1.17.4.)
These two plants are especially sacred to Dionysos.
Homer calls Dionysos Kissokomes or "ivy-crowned" (Hymn 26) and Pindar calls him Kissophoros or "Ivy-bearing" (Olympian Ode 2.50). The Acharnian deme, which was supposedly the first place where the plant grew up, was more explicit, and simply called him Kissos or "Ivy". (Pausanias 1.31.6) The plant was wrapped around the thyrsoi of the God and his followers, and draped around the life-size mask of Dionysos in Icaria. According to the scholion on Euripides' Phoenician Women 65, ivy appeared simultaneously with the birth of Dionysos in order to protect the infant from the flames of lightning which consumed his mother. Arrian in his Anabasis says that there was no ivy to be found in all of Asia, except for Mount Meros and Nysa in India as a token that the God had been there. (5.1.6) In the Hellenistic period, Initiates in his Mysteries had themselves tattooed with ivy-leaves (3 Maccabbees 2.29) and decorated their tombstones with it. According to Plutarch, ivy had the power to insight madness, "For women possessed by Bacchic frenzies rush straightway for ivy and tear it to pieces, clutching it in their hands and biting it with their teeth; so that not altogether without plausibility are they who assert that ivy, possessing as it does an exciting and distracting breath of madness, deranges persons and agitates them, and in general brings on a wineless drunkenness and joyousness in those that are precariously disposed towards spiritual exaltation." (Roman Questions, 112)
Vines are a prominant feature in the iconography of Dionysos. His statues were frequently draped in it, and the maenads twined vines as well as ivy around their fennel stalks in order to create the sacred wand of Dionysos, the thyrsos. Homer describes how the plant creeped up the mast of the pirate ship as Dionysos' wrath was made manifest. (Homeric Hymn 7) Alcaeus said that no plant should be planted in preference to vine, and both Horace (Carmine 1.18.1) and Ennius (Trag. 124.5) called the vine sacred. But the most famous association of the vine with Dionysos are the miraculous "one-day vines" which Walter Otto describes as follows: "These flowered and bore fruit in the course of a few hours during the festivals of the epiphany of the God. A choral song in Euripides' Phoenissae ... sings of the twin peaks lit up by the fire of the Bacchic festival and the vine which 'daily bears its yield of juicy thick grape clusters.' As Sophocles tells us in his Thyestes, on Euboea one could watch the holy vine grow green in the morning. By noon the grapes were already forming, they grew heavy and dark in colour, and by evening the ripe fruit could be cut down, and the drink could be mixed. We discover from the scholia of the Iliad that this occurred in Aigai at the anual rite in honor of Dionysos, as the women dedicated to the God performed the holy rites. And finally Euphorion knew of a festival of Dionysos in Achaean Aigai in which the sacred vines blossomed and ripened during the cult dances of the chorus so that already by evening considerable quantities of wine could be pressed." (Dionysos: Myth and Cult, pg. 98-99)
Copyright 2005 Sannion
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