Islam, ironically, gave us distillation just as the Greeks gave us fermentation. Distillation and fermentation: they could not be more different. One rational and scientific in origin, the other mystical and organic.Dionysus is the god of vegetation, of the theater, of bulls, of women, and of wine. He is the destroyer and the liberator, “the god who crushes men.” But he is the god who also demands that embryos not be harmed. His cult was dominated by women. Its practitioners were primarily female with a reputation for being “raving women,” mainas. He was the god of what the Greeks called zoe, or indestructible collective life, as opposed to mere bios, the life of an individual. He emerged from the thigh of Zeus and was also known as Dios phos, “light of Zeus.”The Greeks themselves found him baffling and unnerving, They struggled to find the words to describe him. Was he anthropomorphic, or was he like some element of the universe that could only be sensed indirectly? The poet Pindar, invoking his miraculous relationship to the blossoming of orchards, compared him with hagnon phengos oporas: “the pure light of high summer.”The great Hungarian scholar of Dionysus, Carl Kerényi, began his opus Dionysos, Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, with a remarkable scholarly reverie on the subject of fermentation in Crete.
