According to the Orphean myth, during the war between Titans and Olympics, Deméter hid her daughter Persephone into a cavern to protect her. Nevertheless, Zeus, under a serpent form, took the Maiden whom gave birth a son called Zagreos. Hera, jealousy, persuaded Titans to kill and devour the boy. The Titans fulfilled the sentence, but Zeus kept save the heart of his son and gave it to a mortal woman (Semele) in a potion. This way, Semele gave light to Dionysus, the second born.
— The Myth & Alexander The Great—
Sabazios is the nomadic rider of the skies and God father of the Phrygians. In Indo-European language, the element ‘ – zios’ is precursor of Dyeus-Deus (God) and Zeus.The Greeks, by inherit of the Thrace around century V b.C., associated the phrygid Sabazios with Zeus and Dionysos. The representations of Sabazios, still in roman empire days, show it like a nomadic rider who maintains a walking stick (the celestial figure of the phrygians). Late Greek writers such as Strato (around the first century of our era), identifies Sabazios with the Zagreos of the phrygian ministers and the one of the assistants to the sacred rites of Rhea and Dionysus (Strabo, 10.3.15). Also, Diodoro Siculus of Sicily, contemporary of Strabo, associates Sabazios with the “second Dionysus” (born from Zeus and Persephone, Diodorus Siculus, 4.4.1). Coherent with the previous and according to registries of Clemence of Alexandria, the mysteries of Sabazios, as they were practiced by the Romans, involved the serpent as symbol of the initiates: ” the God in the chest” (Protrepticus, 1, 2, 16).
The Prhygians seem to have brought the cult of Sabazios when settling down in Anatolia. The origins of the God have been raked into Macedonia (notables riders until the times of Filipo II, father of Alexander the Great) and Eastern Thrace. The mythology that surrounds the life of Alexander The Great presents him, in fact, like Zagreos-Dionysus: conceived by Zeus who descends, in the form of serpent, over Olimpia; the powerful figure, mounted over horse, awaiting the fly of an eagle over the battlefield as sign of victory; and the man whose march of conquest across the eastern territories evokes the courtship of Dionysus during its march towards India. Sabazios-Dionysus and Alexander the Great, represents for the Institute “the divine one” as conqueror. The figure of the nomadic God is symbol of union and identity between the telluric and celestial power, the life and the death, the creation and the destruction. Sabazios as principle of will and vital force, transform the Eros into Poiesis over the Earth.
— Bios, Thanathos, Bios—
The old philosopher already conceives the life like contrast to the death. The ancestral source has been split. According to Kerenyi, only the delayed European thought began to include/understand the phenomenon “life” of a form that was not identical to the death nor either excluding, but it considered integral part of the same. The complete separation between life and death, corresponds, following the same author, to the distinction that separates the alive ones and deads, which mythologically it are expressed by means of the border of Hades. By such reason, the classic antiquity already must be considered like a phase of its decay. The authentic vital time of this culture is limited to the early mediterranean antiquity, being able to reach at the most, the first archaic period.
The interesting thing here is the breakage of the bond between the visible appearance and the invisible privacy, which symbolically, for the early antiquity, is expressed by means of the drawn and danced spirals that represents the continuity of the life of the mortal creatures beyond their death; that is to say, the infinite succession life-death-life. One is an absence of limits, in whose flowing interminable each individual it emerges to disappear again. The spiral in movement goes towards the limitless thing, in certain way towards an infinite fluid without principle nor aim. Persephone reunites the idea of the death that establishes the foundation of the life notion; the eternal being who lives and dies eternally (the Maid) and whose destiny is divine archetype of the earthly life.
Also Dionysus, as Walter Otto indicates, represents the eternal-feminine. His spirit burns with the blood of the Earth (wine). He is primitive sensuality, delirium, dissolution of the thing. Also the dead ones come with him in the spring when it brings the flowers (Anthesterion). Wild love and frenzy are all primitive characteristics of the Earth Deity. That’s reason why we can to assume: “There was a time in which the way to the underworld was open. Persephone was first that undertook east way in the dark, like booty and bride of the underground God. Since then, the world has been as it is for us: full of vegetal food and plenty of hope; of hope because the way by which she traveled initially has taken to her from always”.
