This is the telling of the origin of Dionysus with which this Society's original chapter was founded. There are other versions, and those may be as true or more so, but this is our version. Note that this is a myth, not a history; all here is symbolic rather than factual.

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In ancient days, long ago but not before the fall of the titans, Zeus turned his lust upon Persephone and impregnated her. This impropriety offended Hera, who bid Zeus find her a husband at once. Zeus sought out his ever hospitable brother who was in want of a wife and asked if he would marry Persephone, a proposal which Hades agreed to readily. Hades took Persephone and made her queen over the underworld, a fitting domain for one known as Dread Persephone, but her mother had not been consulted nor told and sought her daughter in distress. In the underworld was born the son of Persephone by Zeus, and he was named Zagreus, taken as son by Hades, prince of the underworld.

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Shortly after the birth of Zagreus, Zeus demanded Hades send Persephone to her mother, who had withdrawn the gift of fertility from all the forests and fields. Persephone went, escorted by Hecate to Demeter as the sat in grief with Hera consoling her, and bore with her the son she had given birth to below. Hera beheld baby Zagreus and saw in him her natural foe: as she was marriage and custom and tradition, so he was death to custom, freedom from marriage, end to tradition. So Hera decided he must die.

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To this end, she contrived to tend the babe as Persephone reunited with her mother, and in that moment spirited it away to give to bound titans. The titans took this chance to rage against the gods, and tore the infant godling limb from limb, devouring his still bleeding flesh. Athena, in her wisdom, had noted that something was off and followed Hera. As the red and grasping hands of the titans cracked open the ribs of the infant god's chest, Athena flew in as a great owl and snatched the heart out of its sundered cavity.

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Wise Athena had recognized that while traditions and laws must hold sway for ordered society to live, without liberty and change to stand against them only tyranny and oppression could truly rise. So she bore forth the heart to a mortal woman, Semele, Princess of Thebes, beloved of Zeus, but cursed with barrenness by blind fortune. Athena offered the young woman the chance to bear her lover's child, a chance Semele eagerly accepted unknowing that no mortal may bear the truth of a god.

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Semele grew pregnant from the divine heart Athena had placed in her barren womb, and told Zeus she carried his child, and he was filled with joy, but her sisters and father were less pleased when she grew pregnant unmarried. Their disapproval and mockery grew harsh, and Semele fled her home in distress, afraid for the life of her child soon to be born. her birth pangs came upon her as she lay in a goat pen, and as she gave birth she felt a flame within her grow, as the sun at morning grows terrible in its brilliance. And as the first cries of the newborn god, clothed in the flesh of a mortal, split the nocturnal air, Semele was burned to ash by the ferocity of his divinity and the welling up of her own soul in answer.

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The baby Dionysus, yet unnamed, lay there in the mud and straw, among the goat kids, and sought to suckle among them, but found no succor at their mother's teat. in his hunger and frustration he reached out and used his godly might to tear a goat kid limb from limb, as he had been torn. This amused him and he sated his hunger on its blood and meat, but then he realized the distress the mother felt and he was made sorry by it. So as he had returned from his dismemberment, he restored the goat kid: as he had been made whole from divine spark and mortal flesh, he took the remaining flesh of the kid and mud from the ground and willed them become as one, and the mud mingled with the flesh and bone and blood and became as they were and the kid bounded away, alive again.

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Hermes, kind guide for the ghostly dead, was drawn by the ripple this left, so soon on the tail of the death of Semele, and he found there this divine child, and in him saw the signs of his father. Knowing a child of Zeus unsheltered was doomed, he bore him far afield; to the mountain of Nysa, domain of Silenus, an old and secretive god. There Dionysus was named, god of Nysa by the reading of some, and there he was raised by Silenus and the Nysiads until he had grown into his own.

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Once young Dionysus had grown to the form of a young man, he decided to set out, to leave the protection of sacred Nysa, despite the warnings of Silenus that he would face dangers beyond the slopes and vales of that holy place. And no sooner had he left the shadow of that hallowed mount than Hera's gaze once more found him and recognized again the foe she had thought destroyed. in her rage she sent venomous snakes to bit at him and great cats to devour him, but the cats bowed before him and the snakes twined about his body like jewelry. She knew then that he had grown to strong for her to simply destroy, so instead she sought to cripple his power to effect change and disruption as she feared he would. To that end, she married to his mind Madness itself, to bind the Maniae to ever hound him.

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Struck mad in such incurable a way (for who can divorce what the goddess of Marriage wills never to be apart?), Dionysus wandered far, spreading the knowledge of wine and intoxicating drugs freely among mortals, driving women mad both with thoughts of equality and freedom and with uncontrolled insanities that saw they tear their own children limb from limb and suckle serpents as if they were babies at their breast. He carried on in this way for quite some time, until he came to the city of Phrygia and was denied entrance. His fury roused, the mad god leapt the city wall and slew the king of that city before sundering the gates that his followers may enter. The king felt unfairly slain and abandoned by his patron goddess, Kind Rhea, mother of Zeus, lady of Healing Time, and petitioned her for vengeance. Rhea heard his plea and went to see this monster who had slain a king who bore her blessing upon his brow.

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She went among the maddened nocturnal revels, and there found dozing Dionysus, her grandson and great grandson both, and saw the curse her daughter had wrought upon him. She pitied the mad god and so gave the requested vengeance: in that night she let Dionysus sleep a thousand years, that he may have time enough to gain mastery over his madness rather than be slave to it, for even she could not set apart what Hera had wed.

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Dionysus awoke the next day new, a god of madness rather than merely a mad god. He went forth from Phrygia and travelled onwards, now wiser and growing still greater in his divinity. There are many more myths of his exploits; from the tale of his flight from Lycurgus in Thrace, when he was reminded of his godhood, to the tale of the Bacchae, when he avenged the humiliation of his mortal mother, to the tale of his abduction by pirates, when he made of them dolphins, to his raising of his mortal mother from the lands of his divine mother into the heavens. But those stories are not this story, and this is the end of this story.