"The Aigyptians in their myths say that in ancient times the Titans formed a conspiracy against Osiris and slew him, and then, taking his body and dividing it into equal parts among themselves, the slipped them secretly out of the house, but this organ alone they threw into the river, since no one of them was willing to take it with him. But Isis tracked down the murder of her husband, and after slaying the Titanes and fashioning the several pieces of his body into the shape of a human figure, she gave them to the priests with orders that they pay Osiris the honours of a god, but since the only member she was unable to recover was the organ of sex she commanded them to pay to it the honours of a god and set it up in their temples in an erect position." -Diodorus Siculus 4.6.1
Carl Kerenyi suggests that Dionysos, like Osiris, was a castrated God. He begins his discussion by suggesting that Dionysos' birth from the thigh of Zeus metaphorically referred to this. "The logic of the Greek version of the myth is marred only by the substitution of the thigh birth for the God's self-emasculation, a terrible but not meaningless act. The invention of a birth from the thigh of Zeus had its function in Greece: to cover over the God's lavish gift at the expense of his own body. The myth cruelly emphasized the eternally necessary self-sacrifice of male virility to the feminine sex, and hence to the human race as a whole. One account of the concrete mission of the Dionysian religion - in its more masculine form, the mysteries of the Kabeiroi - tells us that the murderers of the God brought his male organ in a basket from northern Greece to Italy. 'For this reason,' Clement of Alexandria, our Christian source concludes, 'certain persons, not inapropriately, equate Dionysos with Attis, because he too was separated from his reproductive organ.' (Protrepticus 2.19.4) Eunuchism was as characterisitic of Dionysos as Attis. It was one of the secret components of the Dionysian religion, but to the conoisseurs of the Dionysos cult cited by Clement it was an open secret." (Dionysos: Archetype of Indestructable Life, pg 276-77)
Copyright 2005 Sannion
All rights reserved
Posted with permission
Warning: include() [function.include]: URL file-access is disabled in the server configuration in /home/wargod/public_html/greek/rel/diosiris/penis.php on line 60
Warning: include(http://www.wargoddess.net/includes/back.php) [function.include]: failed to open stream: no suitable wrapper could be found in /home/wargod/public_html/greek/rel/diosiris/penis.php on line 60
Warning: include() [function.include]: Failed opening 'http://www.wargoddess.net/includes/back.php' for inclusion (include_path='.:/usr/lib/php:/usr/local/lib/php') in /home/wargod/public_html/greek/rel/diosiris/penis.php on line 60
