We should all be more Bacchic, as long as we know when to pull away from the edge One female figure is wielding a whip. Another bears her buttocks to the room. A third crouches in orgiastic submission. […]

One female figure is wielding a whip. Another bears her buttocks to the room. A third crouches in orgiastic submission. A grinning mask surveys the scene. Immortalised on the walls of Pompeii’s Villa of Mysteries, these are the rites of Bacchus – ancient god of wine and ecstasy.

Bacchus-Dionysos was avidly worshipped throughout antiquity, and particularly by women, because this deity transgressed social norms – he was boundary-crossing, half-mortal, half-divine, a rule-breaker who welcomed all-comers, rich and poor, free and unfree, female and male.

From the Neolithic to now, being Bacchic has been central to human society The i newsletter cut through the noise Email address is invalid Email address is invalid Thank you for subscribing! Sorry, there was a problem with your subscription.

It’s why Bacchus still matters today. When the Greeks invented him back in the Bronze Age, Dionysos (Bacchus is the god’s cultic nickname) gave a name and a face to something essential. As a species we seek release. Whether it’s through ecstatic ritual, musical trance, drink, drugs or rock ‘n’ roll – we crave that journey of un-selfing. We are, too, the only mammals who choose to take stimulants we know can do us harm, compelled as we are to dance with both dark and light.

The ancients’ genius was to recognise our need for rapture and transcendence, and to put it at the heart of society. So yes, people could go wild – but in the safety net of a shared experience. In ancient Greece the god was honoured at a third of all festival days and at both the Rural and the City Dionysia – huge affairs where the whole community headed out onto the streets to let loose.

Brutal regime

Men also worshipped Dionysos at the heavily-regulated Symposia – literally a drinking together, while women escaped to mountainsides to meet the god in the wilds of raw nature.

Euripides’ play The Bacchae – in which the rational, hide-bound ruler Pentheus rejects Dionysos, and reaps the storm of his rage as his mother Agave, maddened by Dionysiac fervour, mistakes her son for a lion and rips him to pieces – is a tragedy that warns of the dangers of denying, of exiling the Bacchic from our lives.

For some, this was all just too subversive. The early Roman Republic was very leary about the power of high priestesses of Bacchus such as Paculla Annia who initiated teenage boys to the mysteries, encouraged excessive drinking and the “nightly co-mingling” of women and men.

The Bacchic cult was beginning to look like a state within state, attractive to marginals – plebeians, the poor and “men most like women”. So there was a crackdown. We’re told that thousands were brutally executed and Bacchus-worship was reformed to become a state-controlled affair.

Bacchus-Dionysos was troubling too because he was a gender-fluid god. In one stone carving now in the New Acropolis Museum, Athens, Dionysos has long-flowing hair and prominent breasts. Intriguing images on Greek pots show young men at Bacchic rituals looking into mirrors while a woman’s face stares back. Bacchus’ followers regularly cross-dressed.

As late as 691AD in Constantinople the Christian authorities frantically tried to outlaw the stubbornly popular Dionysiac festival when grapes were trod, and a procession of transvestites roared through the Christian capital.

Miracle-maker

The pagan god’s embrace of the weak and outcast, his access to the worlds of both living and dead made for a tightly-fought popularity contest with the fledgling Christian faith. Like Jesus, Dionysos was said to perform miracles, turning water into wine, healing the blind.

A tetchy missive from the early church harrumphs that one Christian priest insisted on singing hymns of praise to Bacchus during the church service. In a remarkable mosaic at Nea Paphos in Cyprus, the baby Dionysos, be-haloed, is cradled in Hermes’ lap while three men bow down to him.

Whether it’s through ecstatic ritual, musical trance, drink, drugs or rock ‘n’ roll – we crave that journey of un-selfing. We are the only mammals who choose to take stimulants we know can do us harm

Was this a religious joke? Or the followers of the old gods borrowing the clothes of the new, man-god, Christ, to buttress their threatened cult? It could perhaps be why in the New Testament, Jesus is declared to be the true vine.

From the Neolithic to now, being Bacchic has been central to human society. Even today, on the tiny island of Skyros, masked women and men dress as half-goat to trance-dance and sing in his honour.

The Greeks, as ever, saw us coming. Written over the Sanctuary of Delphi – sacred to Dionysos for the winter months of the year, were the words Meden Agan “Nothing in Excess”.

That seems about right to me. Sure, find the animal in you, lose yourself so you know who you truly are, but always keep just enough back to pull away from the edge. Being immortal, Bacchus is there to guide you.

Bacchus Uncovered, produced by Sandstone Global, will be shown on BBC Four on 11 April, and on BBC World News April 28-29

@bettanyhughes