Dionysian-light - Dionysian~Light

Antoni Piotrowski (1853 – 1924, Polish)

"You Have The Lovers" - by L.Cohen

You have the lovers, they are nameless, their histories only for each other, and you have the room, the bed, and the windows. Pretend it is a ritual. Unfurl the bed, bury the lovers, blacken the windows, let them live in that house for a generation or two. No one dares disturb them. Visitors in the corridor tip-toe past the long closed door, they listen for sounds, for a moan, for a song: nothing is heard, not even breathing. You know they are not dead, you can feel the presence of their intense love. Your children grow up, they leave you, they have become soldiers and riders. Your mate dies after a life of service. Who knows you? Who remembers you? But in your house a ritual is in progress: It is not finished: it needs more people. One day the door is opened to the lover's chamber. The room has become a dense garden, full of colours, smells, sounds you have never known. The bed is smooth as a wafer of sunlight, in the midst of the garden it stands alone. In the bed the lovers, slowly and deliberately and silently, perform the act of love. Their eyes are closed, as tightly as if heavy coins of flesh lay on them. Their lips are bruised with new and old bruises. Her hair and his beard are hopelessly tangled. When he puts his mouth against her shoulder she is uncertain whether her shoulder has given or received the kiss. All her flesh is like a mouth. He carries his fingers along her waist and feels his own waist caressed. She holds him closer and his own arms tighten around her. She kisses the hand besider her mouth. It is his hand or her hand, it hardly matters, there are so many more kisses. You stand beside the bed, weeping with happiness, you carefully peel away the sheets from the slow-moving bodies. Your eyes filled with tears, you barely make out the lovers, As you undress you sing out, and your voice is magnificent because now you believe it is the first human voice heard in that room. The garments you let fall grow into vines. You climb into bed and recover the flesh. You close your eyes and allow them to be sewn shut. You create an embrace and fall into it. There is only one moment of pain or doubt as you wonder how many multitudes are lying beside your body, but a mouth kisses and a hand soothes the moment away

If I recall correctly, Zeus was well known for taking the form of a beggar to test the generosity of mortals, and by the time of the Odyssey most Greeks knew that beggars should be helped or fed something as an act of devotion to Zeus.  Expansive Jupiterian Jovial generosity... "All strangers and beggars come from Zeus."

Hypothetically speaking, if an offering was intended for a spirit/ deity/ more powerful being with the offering being food and drink and a hungry beggar went past who had not had food/drink for a few days and saw the offering and had it, would that...

Dionysos and Ariadne on a quadriga drawn by panthers on the top of the Semperoper opera house in Dresda,Germany, sculpture by Johannes Schilling, 1871/77

Dionysus & Ariadne ↳ She was a mortal once, a Princess of Crete, but so loved was she by the God Dionysus that she ascended to immortality as his lady wife, the Goddess of Labyrinths.