Dionysus is a god who came from the region of Thrace. There are theories that his roots lie in Thebes, and others that they trace back to the Mycenaean civilization.
It is said that Thracian women danced as if seized by madness when performing rites for Dionysus. There is speculation that the Maenads came to be called frenzy devotees due to the influence of Thrace, the heartland of Dionysus worship.
According to records, the female devotees of Thrace boasted tremendous superhuman strength, uprooting trees and tearing the limbs of beasts to shreds. They did not hesitate to eat animals alive or engage in orgies while naked; this appears to have been a form of primitive faith meant to unleash the primal desires and urges within humankind.
According to myth, Dionysus was in the womb of his human mother Semele, then moved to the thigh of Zeus and born again. As his name suggests, he is a god born twice.
For this reason, Dionysus also played an important role in mystery rites related to resurrection.
Originally, Dionysus was worshipped as the god who first created wine, and as a god of alcohol, festivals, and theater, receiving great love from the citizens.
Curiously, most of his devotees were women. The fact that the frenzied bands who followed him were depicted mostly as women was because the groups that actually worshipped Dionysus were largely comprised of married women.
It has been mentioned time and again, but the lives of women in the Greek era were so miserable they could not be put into words. They endured grueling housework and labor, and many lost their lives or fell ill during childbirth.
Living lives no different from slaves, some women appear to have attempted to escape from husbands who abused them. They left their homes and joined the bands of Dionysus followers, who found themselves in similar circumstances.
The followers roamed mountains and fields in bands, engaging in orgies and revelry, living free and primitive lives. This gave the women, who had been living suffocating lives, a great sense of liberation.
But the Greek men were not ones to sit idly by and watch. From the husbands' perspective, it was simply displeasing that a god followed by runaway married women existed. All the more so in ancient Greece, the pinnacle of patriarchal society.
They portrayed the women who worshipped Dionysus as lunatics from the outset. They were not merely mad—they were supposedly so crazed that they could not even recognize their own children, tearing their own sons apart alive. This is the story of Pentheus, the famous king of Thebes.
(No, but no matter how supernaturally strong a woman might be, I cannot fathom how it makes sense that she tore the arms and legs off an adult man's body like disassembling a jointed doll and ripped his flesh to pieces. At least the male villains in Greek mythology are given some plausible background for the strength they possess, are they not?
Titans or demigods might as well be divine beings, so one can let that slide; but when an ordinary human is a villain, there are background explanations such as having eaten the food of the gods, or having received and equipped themselves with legendary weapons or armor bestowed by a god who favored them.
In contrast, the Dionysian frenzied devotees are described simply as human women with no justification whatsoever for possessing such tremendous strength. There really is nothing to say.)
Moreover, Dionysus himself, whom they served, was always depicted as perpetually drunk and not in his right mind due to madness. There is a side to this where Dionysus, being a god who came over from Asia Minor, was oppressed; but if one thinks about it, oppression against the god was also oppression against his followers.
(Addendum: Mount Nysa, the background of Dionysus's origins, is a legendary mountain said to be located in Africa or Asia. However, since various places claim to be the original Nysa, it is not easy to verify the truth.)
Anyway, despite all that, the popularity of Dionysus, the idol of Olympus, pierced the heavens.
Dionysus was a new-generation god who inherited the shining throne from Hestia, the goddess of the hearth, whose influence among the twelve gods of Olympus had waned.
Around the 7th century BCE, early Dionysus was depicted as an old man with a long beard, but gradually appeared as a young god with feminine aspects; this can be seen as having been influenced by changes in the gender and age of his worshippers.
As befitting the god of wine, there was virtually no god who could rival him when it came to holding festivals, and he was worshipped extensively throughout Greece, instantly being bestowed with various abilities. Among them was the power of prophecy. Perhaps that is why he firmly took his place at Delphi, known as the sanctuary of oracles, alongside Apollo.
(When people are intoxicated by alcohol or drugs, they fall into an egoless ecstasy and feel as though they are possessed by something. Ancient peoples in particular would have fallen into such delusions more easily. They would sometimes fall into illusions as though they were seeing into the future, and thus there must have been those who muttered unsettling things to listeners for no reason, saying, "The god has spoken!")
Curiously, Dionysus possessed androgynous characteristics. He was depicted as the only male among the Olympian gods without fertility.
Looking for the basis of this in myth, the Maenads are said to have raised young Dionysus disguised as a girl to avoid the eyes of Hera, who sought to kill him; because of this, Dionysus was called guinnis (guinnis), meaning "woman-like one," or arsenothelys (arsenothelys), meaning "effeminate man," or also pseudanor (pseudanor), meaning "man without reproductive ability." Furthermore, as a hermaphroditic being possessing both sexes, he was also revered as dyalos (dyalos).
The fact that he had so many aliases suggests just how immensely popular he was. Who could be named as the god with the most aliases among the Olympian gods? It is Apollo, the eternal role model of the Greeks.
If you go to Delphi, Apollo's sanctuary, you can see a sanctuary of Dionysus together at its center; this was not only because of Dionysus's prophetic ability, as mentioned earlier, but because the Greeks worshipped Apollo and Dionysus together.
The ancient Greeks believed that Apollo, who occupied the rational aspect of culture, and Dionysus, who governed chaotic and destructive instincts, should exist in harmony with each other. Therefore, during winter when Apollo left his sanctuary, they held festivals for Dionysus and offered sacrifices to him.
Some tended to view Apollo and Dionysus as a single god, and believed that Apollo, the god of order who valued reason and balance, also appeared as the figure of Dionysus who caused chaos, thereby seeking harmony in human affairs.
This was also a result of the influence of Eastern yin-yang philosophy spreading to Greece.
In any case, if one were to speak of Dionysus, there would truly be endless things to say; that was because the pain and sorrow of the citizens who worshipped Dionysus were deep and diverse, and therefore Dionysus was a god with multidimensional aspects.
The citizens spoken of here were of course mostly women, but looking at the origins of Dionysus's emergence, there are also tales that he was the first male king who offered himself as a sacrificial victim, so interpretations can vary.
(This is the theory that he consequently came to possess symbolic qualities that conflicted with the myths deifying him. If we dig any deeper, it feels as though one would have to write a thesis, so I will wrap this up here.)
The portrayal of the women who worshipped Dionysus as madwomen, their treatment as an ominous mob leading even other married women down the wrong path, and the depiction of even the god they followed as having a vulgar and gloomy nature were all, as has been repeatedly mentioned, due to the influence of the patriarchal culture rampant in Greece.
That the women of that time could not even freely choose the god they wished to follow—this cannot but be a truly sorrowful thing.