Taliesin's Map

 Dionysus, Hades and Soma: The Greek Lunar Cycle Part 3 of 3 < Part 2 Dionysus and Hades Building on this understanding of Dionysus as Soma, we must make a further leap to consider if Hades too might be rooted in this same Indo-European “Soma” mythos. This connection is prompted by the aforementioned fact that the moon was often seen as an afterlife destination with the moon god as the lord of this destination (Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, The Moon and its Mystique). Dionysus, after all, with his vegetative powers rooted in the depths, is already a clearly chthonic god, who was often considered to have a "subterranean" aspect, called Dionysus  Khthonion . But in addition, both Dionysus' explicit Egyptian parallel and influence, Osiris, and the Welsh “Soma” god, Arawn, are named as the Lord of the Underworld in their respective mythologies, while the Irish parallel, Midir, is suggested to be an underworld lord as well by his depiction with three cr...

< Part 1    Part 3 > Dionysus, Hades and Soma: The Greek Lunar Cycle Part 2 of 3                 The crucial “eye-poking” motif, always present in a similar form in the Lunar Cycle, is not absent from the Greek version either. Just as it is performed by the young Perceval in Chretien's Grail poem, by the youths in the kingdom of the Young Son Aengus, and perpetrated on the son of Osiris in the Egyptian case, so the eye poking is connected to the son of the Soma God Dionysus in the Greek case (in Vedic and Norse cases it is not directly connected to the Young Son(s)). Due to the apparent Egyptian influence on the Dionysus mythos, this son of the Greek god could be taken as repeating the lunar power of the father in the manner that Younger Horus does in relation to his father Osiris. Dionysus' son's name, meaning “wine drinker” or “wine-rich” relates him intimately to his father, to the vegetative power of the vine, and to the l...

Dionysus, Hades and Soma: The Greek Lunar Cycle Part 1 of 3 Part 2 > Dionysus and Soma With a clarified understanding of this “Lunar Cycle,” as it appears in the Celtic and Germanic mythologies, we can begin to look toward Greece to see if some of these same motifs and deities may be identifiable there. The prime candidate for the Greek “Soma” god becomes apparent at once by way of a near-exact myth once again involving the central Soma incarnation, Chyavana. It ought to come as no surprise that this Greek “Soma” candidate is the lord of divine intoxicating liquid, vegetation and mystical experience, Dionysus. The nexus between Dionysus and Chyavana-Soma is the close similarity of the stories of their births.   In the Vedic case, Chyavana's mother-to-be, Puloma, is pregnant with Chyavana. A conspiring  raksasa  demon, who desires to marry Puloma, turns into a pig and steals her away. This frightens Puloma into giving birth right then and there. The child's name, “C...

The Great Lunar Cycle: The Horse Twins and the Grail [ A glossary of relevant names and charts of parallels appear at the end of this article.] The Aesir-Vanir War and the Holy Grail The Aesir-Vanir War's place in comparative mythology has perplexed and misled interpreters for a long time now, not least because it is somewhat unclear if there is an exact example of the same motif in any other branches. Some point to the Deva-Asura conflict of the Vedic religion, but this can be shown to have at its root an internecine dispute possibly stemming from the time of Indo-Iranic unity, out of which arose, over time, the demonization of the favorite gods of the Iranics by the Vedics as “asuras” and the demonization of the favorite gods of the Vedics by the Iranics as “devas.” The division between the Asuras and Devas fails to match the division between the groups of gods who make war in the Norse myth. These are not the same groups of gods coming in conflict. To greatly simplify the matt...