'' and topped with a
pine cone In the
Iliad,
Diomedes, one of the leading warriors of the
Achaeans, mentions the
thyrsus while speaking to
Glaucus, one of the
Lycian commanders in the
Trojan army, about
Lycurgus, the king of
Scyros: He it was that drove the nursing women who were in charge of frenzied Bacchus through the land of Nysa, and they flung their
thyrsi on the ground as murderous Lycurgus beat them with his oxgoad. The
thyrsus is explicitly attributed to Dionysus and his followers in
Euripides's tragedy
The Bacchae, which describes the degradation of Thebes in vindication for the sullied name of Dionysus's mortal mother. The story concerns the murder of the young king and the indoctrination of all the Theban women into Dionysus's cult, with the
thyrsus serving as a badge of sorts for members. To raise my Bacchic shout, and clothe all who respond / In fawnskin habits, and put my
thyrsus in their hands– / The weapon wreathed with ivy-shoots ... There's a brute wildness in the fennel-wands; reverence it well.
Plato, in his philosophical dialogue
Phaedo, quotes an Orphic proverb that
metonymically distinguishes the "thyrsus-bearers" of a religion — those who display its external trappings, but do not necessarily understand its mysteries — from the "
mystae" (mystics,
Bacchantes) who have been initiated into its secrets. This proverb has entered the lexicon, with a meaning similar to "
Many are called, but few are chosen." I conceive that the founders of the
mysteries had a real meaning and were not mere triflers when they intimated in a figure long ago that he who passes unsanctified and uninitiated into the world below will live in a slough, but that he who arrives there after initiation and purification will dwell with the gods. For 'many', as they say in the mysteries, 'are the
thyrsus bearers, but few are the mystics', – meaning, as I interpret the words, the true philosophers. In Part II of
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's
Faust,
Mephistopheles tries to catch a
lamia, only to find out that she is an illusion and that he instead holds a
thyrsus. The play contains major themes of sin and hedonism, and makes connection to Dionysus through the
thyrsus: Well, then, a tall one I will catch... And now a
thyrsus-pole I snatch! Only a pine-cone as its head.
Robert Browning mentions the
thyrsus in passing in ''The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St Praxed's Church
, as the dying bishop confuses Christian piety with classical extravagance. Ovid talks about Bacchus carrying a thyrsus'' and his followers doing the same in his Metamorphoses Book III, which is a retelling of The Bacchae. The bas-relief in bronze ye promised me, / Those
Pans and
nymphs ye wot of, and perchance / Some
tripod,
thyrsus, with a vase or so. == Gallery ==