Thyrsus

What it is

Greek religion knew the thyrsus as a staff carried in procession: a tall stalk of giant fennel, dressed with ivy and sometimes ribbons, and finished at the top with a pine cone, an artichoke, or grapes and vine leaves. Devotees of Dionysus held it during festivals and ceremonies. It stood for prosperity, fertility and enjoyment, and the same object appears in myth as a weapon when its leafy head hides a spike said to drive people mad.

Where it comes from

The staff belongs to the religion of Ancient Greece, and Roman writers knew it as the attribute of Bacchus, their name for Dionysus. Its mythic history is told as legend: Bacchus is said to have turned the staffs of his retinue into spears by fixing iron inside the leaf head. Greek literature returns to it often. The Iliad has Diomedes recall Lycurgus of Scyros beating the nurses of Dionysus with an ox goad, and Euripides builds The Bacchae around it.

How it is done

Use was ceremonial rather than technical. Worshippers carried the staff in Dionysiac processions and rites, and Euripides pictures honey dripping from the fennel wands of the maenads, the god's female followers. In the dance it was lifted and thrown: a line in The Bacchae has Dionysus tell Pentheus to take the staff in his right hand and raise his right foot with it. It also marked who belonged to the cult, a badge carried by initiates and by the satyrs and thiasus in the god's train.

Tools and materials

The shaft is giant fennel, Ferula communis, a tall plant with a hollow stem. Ivy wraps it, and taeniae, the woollen fillets used in Greek ritual, are sometimes bound around it. The head could be a pine cone, an artichoke, fennel, or a spray of grapes, vine leaves or ivy berries. Ivy and vine both belong to Dionysus, and Euripides gives the staff its nickname by calling the thyrsi fennel-wands.

What it is for

Because it belonged to Dionysus, the staff carried his meanings: abundance, fertility, pleasure, and the release associated with wine and dance. Devotees took it up in worship and festival, and it signalled membership in his cult. In the stories it can also injure. The spike hidden among the leaves is said to stir madness, and in The Bacchae the emblem of the god's company stands at the centre of a city's ruin.

Who does it

The people who carried it were the god's worshippers: maenads or Bacchantes, his female devotees, together with satyrs and the thiasus, the company that danced in his honour. Plato adds a distinction of his own. Quoting an Orphic saying in the Phaedo, he separates the thyrsus-bearers, who hold the outward signs of a religion, from the mystae, who have been initiated into its secrets, a contrast like the proverb that many are called and few chosen.

Peoples and places

The staff is Greek, recorded in the religion and literature of Ancient Greece and carried at Hellenic festivals. Rome took over the god as Bacchus, and the staff travelled with him: Ovid has Bacchus and his followers bearing thyrsi in the Metamorphoses, his retelling of the story of The Bacchae. Later European writing inherits the image through those texts.

What people believe

Dionysus is the power behind the staff. His company held that the god entered their dance and their wine, and the staff was among the signs of his presence. Honey flowing from the wands, as Euripides describes it, belongs to the same picture of a god who makes the natural world overflow. The hidden spike carries a darker idea: the thing wreathed in leaves can also pierce and unseat the mind, and such madness comes from the god.

How scholars and sceptics see it

Plato gives the earliest reading of the staff as a figure of speech: the carrier without initiation stands for outward observance without understanding. Work on the classical world has since compared it with other rods and staffs. Ferdinand de Waele wrote a study of the magic staff or rod in Greek and Italian antiquity, and a collection edited by Casadio and Johnston gathers work on the mystery cults of Magna Graecia, where such emblems circulated.

Compare and confuse

The thyrsus is closely tied to the cult of Dionysus and to the Orphic mysteries that Plato mentions, and Roman writers simply renamed its owner Bacchus. Poets nicknamed it a spear dressed in vine leaves, which points to the double nature the myths give it. Its bearers are named in different ways across the texts: maenads, Bacchantes, satyrs, the thiasus, and the initiates called mystae.

Questions people ask about Thyrsus

Good reading and sources

• Encyclopaedia BritannicaArticle

• Thyrsus on WikipediaEncyclopedia
• More photos on Wikimedia CommonsPhotos and video
• Wikidata recordOpen data