Today is a feast of Dionysus, an autumn Bacchanalia, and we toast the Greek god of wine and revelry. Old and new wine were traditionally mixed together, enchanted with a blessing:
...wine new and old I drink of illness new and old I am cured...
Ancient Bacchanalias were boisterous affairs, the masked celebrants (mostly women) caught up in the "Wild Divine" gave themselves over to actions and emotions ranging from mystical ecstacy to drunken orgy, to such extreme behaviours as reputedly uprooting trees and chasing down and eathing wild animals - all with their bare hands!
No surprise, this was soon outlawed by the Roman senate, and the harvest wine thanksgiving festival became another occasion for theatre and dramatic contests.
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Grape harvest festivals continue in modern Italy, notably in Tuscany, where their Festa del Uva (Festival of Grapes) marks the culmination of the September grape harvest with parades and outdoor feasting. In the here and now, at this time of year our region has a sort of mild Bacchanalia, the Renaissance Festival.
In the Renaissance Tarot, Bacchus Dionysus is represented by The Fool, and his autumn festival falls almost exactly halfway across the year from our modern Feast of (April) Fools. Other tarot decks that represent the god as Fool are Mythic (pictured above) and Pythagorean Tarots.
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The Fool in the Tarot of the Saints is my favourite saint, Francis of Asissi (pictured, artist Robert Place, used with permission), whose feast day is tomorrow, October 4. In his youth he was a bit of a Bacchus himself, the spoiled young son of a rich merchant who loved and indulged freely in the proverbial "wine, women and song". But his father disowned him when he gave all his possessions to the poor and took up a life of joyful asceticism, a sort of medieval Thoreau. He was a "beast whisperer" who blessed all the animals he encountered in his extensive travels throughout southern Europe. Even today, some Catholic churches hold animal blessings on or near his feast day. He is the patron Saint of Italy, animals, and modern folklorists declare him the patron saint of simple living.
St. Francis referred to himself as "idiota", a Fool. It's interesting that the feasts of "fools," Dionysus and St. Francis of Asissi, follow the feast day (September 30) of the matron saint of wisdom, St. Sophia (pictured, Robert Place).
In Napoleon's words, "From the sublime to the ridiculous, there is but a step."
Or maybe - 0 - steps.
Myths and legends associated with the tarot Fool (card zero, the alpha and the omega of the Tarot trumps) show that the "ridiculous" and the "sublime" can be one and the same.
