The Cult of Dionysus: How a Synth-Pop Banger Channeled an Ancient Greek God There are songs that get stuck in your head, and then there are songs that feel like they were written by the gods themselves — or at least in their honor. “The Cult of Dionysus” by The Orion Experience falls firmly into … Read more
I remember sitting in a graduate seminar on classical literature — this was about 1999 — when a professor said something that has stayed with me for the better part of three decades: “The Greeks did not write tragedies to…
I still remember the first time a student in one of my comparative religion seminars confidently declared that Medusa was “just a monster.” It took everything I had not to groan audibly. After more than 25 years of studying ancient…
I still remember the exact moment this question clicked for me. I was a second-year graduate student working through Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda in one hand and a battered copy of Hesiod’s Theogony in the other, and I kept stopping…
About fifteen years into my research, I was working through Hesiod’s Works and Days in the original Greek when something stopped me cold. Hesiod wasn’t just telling farmers when to plant their crops — he was embedding an entire cosmological…
I still remember the moment I realized how badly most people misunderstand Dionysus. I was sitting in a graduate seminar on Greek religion — this was back in the late 1990s — when a classmate confidently declared that Dionysus was…
