Thyrsus
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In Greek mythology, a thyrsus (thyrsos) was a giant fennel staff covered with ivy vines and leaves and topped with a pine cone. It was a sacred instrument at religious rituals and fetes.
[edit] Symbolism
The thyrsus is a composite symbol of the forest (pine cone) and the farm (fennel). It has been suggested that this was specifically a fertility phallus, with the fennel representing the shaft of the penis and the pine cone representing the "seed" issuing forth. It was associated with Dionysus (or Bacchus) and his followers, the Satyrs and Maenads.
Sometimes the thyrsus was displayed in conjunction with a wine cup, another symbol of Dionysus, forming a male-and-female combination like that of the royal scepter and orb.
[edit] Thyrsus in fiction
It is explicitly attributed to Dionysus in Euripides's play The Bacchae as part of the costume of the Dionysian cult. "...To raise my Bacchic shout, and clothe all who respond/ In fawnskin habits, and put my thyrsus in their hands—/ The weapon wreathed with ivy-shoots..." Euripides also writes, "There's a brute wildness in the fennel-wands—Reverence it well." (The Bacchae and Other Plays, trans. by Philip Vellacott, Penguin, 1954.)
"And I conceive that the founders of the mysteries had a real meaning and were not mere triflers when they intimated in a figure long ago that he who passes unsanctified and uninitiated into the world below will live in a slough, but that he who arrives there after initiation and purification will dwell with the gods. For 'many,' as they say in the mysteries, 'are the thyrsus bearers, but few are the mystics,'—meaning, as I interpret the words, "the true philosophers." (Plato, Phædo, The Harvard Classics, 1909–14.)
In the White Wolf RPG Mage: the Awakening, the Thyrsus are a fictional path of shaman, witches and medicine men.
[edit] See also
es:Tirso (símbolo) fr:Thyrse (mythologie) nl:Thyrsus (staf) pt:Tirso ru:Тирс fi:Thyrsos tr:Thyrsos uk:Тирс
