Beautiful Roman mosaic of Dionysus sitting on the back of a leopard, from Felix Romuliana-Gamzigrad site, imperial residence of emperor Galerius buil in 3rd century AD, and named after emperor’s mother Romula. Site is located in eastern Serbia...
Dionysus is often depicted wearing leopard skin or riding on a leopard...The question I would like to try to answer here is why?
The oldest festival dedicated to Dionysus was Rural Dionysia. It was held during the winter month of Poseideon (modern December or January)...
The main part of the festival was the procession. The god’s entourage during the procession consisted of the male satyrs and the female maenads. I love this depiction of reveling dancers (satyrs???) lead by the piper dressed in leopard skin (Dionysus???)...
So why leopard? Well maybe this has something to do with the actual leopards. This is a mating pair of West Asian leopards (Anatolian leopard, Amur leopard and Persian leopard), which can still be found in Eastern Turkey, Caucasus, Iran, Afghanistan and Central Asia...
The general belief of the local population is that Leopards mated during "midwinter" the time of Rural Dionysia. Is this why Dionysos was associated with leopards?
Recent studies have shown that the actual mating starts in January, soon after the Rural Dionysia, and peaks at the beginning of February...
Now interestingly, Dionysus was also very often depicted riding on tigers.
Like on this late second century BC Hellenistic Greek mosaic depicting Dionysos as a winged daimon riding on a tiger, from the House of Dionysos at Delos...
Or riding on chariots being pulled by tigers. Like on this Roman Mosaic depicting the Triumph of Bacchus, third century, Sousse Museum, Sousse, Tunisia
So why tiger? Well for the same reason...Indian tigers don't have fixed mating season, but most mating is done from November to April...Amur (Siberian) tigers mating season is in the middle of that period, December to January...Right at the time of Rural Dionysia...
Basically, tiger and leopards are as calendar markers symbolically opposed to lions. Tiger and leopard are used as markers for the period between the beginning of November and the end of April and lions are used as markers for the period between the beginning of May and the end of October...
This is particularly important for understanding ancient images from Indus Valley civilisation and Central Asian civilisations...But more about this soon...
To read more about ancient animal and plant calendar markers, start here…then check the rest of the blog posts related to animal calendar markers I still didn't add to this page, and finally check my twitter threads I still didn't convert to blog post...I am 9 months behind now...
No comments:
Post a Comment