H. Jeremiah Lewis takes us on a guided tour of the divine nursery--a museum as much as a theatre--where we see as both exhibits on display and actors on stage the Toys of Dionysos. The labyrinthine corridors of their associated imagery and the intoxicating panoply of their legacies in ancient, medieval, and modern literature and philosophy are deftly explored via the marshaling of a great variety of sources. Amongst those contributing to this discussion under Lewis' curation and direction are Homer and Hesiod, Plato and Proklos, Aristophanes and Athenaios, Sophokles and St. Paul. We hear the...

In this collection of inspired Dionysian poetry, H. Jeremiah Lewis blurs the boundaries of the mythic and mundane, the personal and the divine, the familiar and the "unheimlich." Narratively flowing in and out of time, and roaming from dark urban alleys to the ancient shores of Greece and Italy, "End to End" explores the ever-changing concepts of memory and identity, serving as a guide to those who might seek this strangest of gods, Dionysos, and how he walks among us. Use these pages as a map and a mirror, be wary of their shifting words and hidden pathways, and choose your entrance...

A collection of mysteries and other poetry.

This cycle of poems weaves back and forth from myth to history, the ancient world to the modern devotee's practice, new takes on old stories to new stories with old elements, and even encompasses the extremes of age-old cryptic marginalia to modern political satire, and by such skillful juxtapositions creates a fluid and florid landscape that celebrates as well as elucidates this ancient holy tide of Anthesteria. Populated by deities, heroes, queens and kings, poets, seers and commoners in both tragic and comic masks spanning the corpus of antique and contemporary Dionysian narrative, these...