Dionysus in Thrace

In this continuation of his lifelong research on Eleusis, Carl A.P. Ruck traces the roots of Dionysus — god of wine, madness, and resurrection — back to Thrace, a region bridging Greece and Asia Minor. He reveals that Dionysian ecstasy was not symbolic intoxication but the actual experience of divine union through psychoactive sacraments. By linking Dionysian worship to earlier shamanic traditions, Ruck shows how the god of theater, intoxication, and rebirth encoded the initiatory technology of direct communion with the living cosmos. The book challenges the sanitized, academic view of Greek religion, restoring its original entheogenic and ecstatic core.