Dionysus

Andrew Mason · 09 Dec 2010, 17:46 · from 2010-December.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: andrew.mason53 at googlemail.com (Andrew Mason)
Date: Thu, 9 Dec 2010 17:46:34 +0000
Subject: (urth) Dionysus
Message-ID: <AANLkTi=uJqirb=oaXyyo5M0n6jOnt6YdVdpdo95eYdXv at mail.gmail.com>

>
> So...we agree that he's is the god of the "vine", not just grape vines.
> I do not believe specific species of vines mattered to Wolfe for this
> association one little bit.

I find that most improbable. The title 'god of the vine' is a
translation of Greek and Latin phrases which referred to the grape
vine. Dionysus was the god of wine and of grapes and so of the plant
from which they come, the vine, in the historic sense of that term. He
is not the god of climbing plants generally. (There seems to be a
difference between British and American usage here. To me, 'vine'
primarily means grape vine, and can by extension mean other plants
that resemble it. I get the sense that to Americans it just means
climbing plant, without grapes having any special precedence.
According to the OED the wider sense is first attested in 1563, but
doesn't become widespread until the 18th century, and is then
distinctively American. )

He is also associated with ivy. I wouldn't say he was the god of ivy -
that would be like calling Hermes the god of winged sandals - but it
is one of his symbols. So an imaginative writer might use climbing
plants more generally as a symbol of him. But I don't see that as a
foregone conclusion, just because of the word 'vine'.

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net