Demigods and Monsters

Do what you want and what you can. That’s the training you need.”

The Dionysian spirit at its worst was cruel, uncontrollably violent, and flat-out insane. At its best it inspired art, joy, celebration, and a reverence for nature and the beauty of the wild

For all our civilization, we’re primates, and a certain primal savagery lingers beneath whatever morality and sophistication we acquire, a savagery that often surfaces in connection with intoxication. We do our best to suppress this wildness and keep it in check—that’s why every civilization has laws—but it never entirely vanishes. It shows up in our crime rates and in our thirst for violent entertainment

So the God of the Vine was born of fire and nursed by rain, the hard burning heat that ripens the grapes and water that keeps the plants alive

Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes

Hera, not content with destroying his mother, ordered the Titans to seize the infant. What happened next was not only violent but seriously gross. The Titans tore the baby to pieces then boiled the pieces in a cauldron. A pomegranate tree sprang from the place on the earth where the infant’s blood had fallen, and Rhea, Dionysus’ grandmother,1 somehow brought the child back to life.
Realizing that Olympus was not the safest place for the child, Zeus put Dionysus in the care of King Athamas and his wife, Ino, who was one of Semele’s sisters. They hid the young boy in the women’s quarters, where he was disguised as a woman (which may account for some of the descriptions of Dionysus as having a feminine appearance2). This arrangement lasted until Hera found out about it and drove both the king and his wife mad. The king in his madness even killed his eldest son, thinking him a stag.
Zeus then put Hermes on the case. Hermes disguised Dionysus as a young ram and managed to get him safely into the care of the five nymphs who lived on Mount Nysa. They were more successful guardians, raising the young godling in a cave, feeding him on honey. Zeus, grateful to the nymphs, set their images in the sky as stars and called them the Hyades. These are the stars that are believed to bring rain when they are near the horizon

Semele, who was not a goddess but a princess, the daughter of Cadmus, King of Thebes. Zeus fell in love with the young princess and swore by the River Styx that he would do anything she asked. But falling in love with Zeus never works out well for mortals. When Hera, Zeus’ wife, found out about the romance, she disguised herself as an old woman and persuaded the princess to ask Zeus to prove his love by showing himself to her as he showed himself to Hera, in his undisguised divine form. Zeus, knowing that no mortal could survive such a sight, begged the girl to ask for something else. Semele, already six months pregnant and wanting to know the truth about her child’s father, refused. Bound by his own oath, Zeus showed himself in his true form, an immense, glorious vision blazing with thunder and lightning. I suspect this was the equivalent of looking at a nuclear blast up close. Semele was by some accounts frightened to death; by others, she was incinerated on the spot. What nearly all versions of the myth agree on is that in the moment before she died, the god managed to rescue the child she was carrying. Zeus hid the unborn child by sewing him into his own thigh and only undid the stitches when Dionysus was ready to be born.
One interesting thing about Dionysus’ birth is that, of the twelve great Olympian gods, only Dionysus had a mortal parent. Dionysus, though fully divine, is the only god who started life as a half-blood. Which gives him a rather unique qualification to run the summer camp

Who . . . who am I?” . . .
“Who are you?” [Chiron] mused. “Well, that’s the question we all want answered, isn’t it

is that Dionysus also had a bit of history with the original Perseus, the hero who defeated the Gorgons and Medusa. According to Robert Graves’ The Greek Myths, Perseus fought Dionysus when the wine god came to Argos, killing many of his followers. Dionysus retaliated by driving the women of Argos mad, to the point that they began to eat their own children. Perseus finally had the good sense to appease the god by building him a great temple. So in addition to not liking heroes, Dionysus might simply dislike Percy because of his name

He turned to look at me straight on, and I saw a kind of purplish fire in his eyes. . . . I saw visions of grape vines [sic] choking unbelievers to death, drunken warriors insane with battle lust, sailors screaming as their hands turned to flippers, their faces elongating into dolphin snouts. I knew that if I pushed him . . . [he] would plant a disease in my brain that would leave me wearing a straitjacket in a rubber room for the rest of my life