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First, thanks for the welcome and for the positive remarks about Zeus. My previous book was called The Summer of My Greek Taverna. It was a memoir about living on the island of Patmos, site of St. John's Revelations. Mainly it is the story of coming to terms with Greek reality, which you can only do by actually working there, as I did when trying to run my own restaurant for one summer. But there are also meditations on Greece's spiritual aspects - as well as a number of my best recipes!

Erik: I know that the many of the conclusions of Jane Harrison et al are rightfully suspect these days in archeological and anthropological circles, but what attracts me to them is the way they try to connect the ancient Greeks on an intuitive, spiritual level. The way they just leapt so enthusiastically in, feet first. And, of course, it could one day turn out that they weren't so excessively wrong after all.

All I can say is that in writing Zeus, (especially the "dramatized" scenes of his seductions, etc.), I often had the eerie feeling that I was getting my insights directly from the Great Thunderer himself. No kidding.

As for Robert Graves, well, I met him once and worshiped him as a young man (have you read his late love poems? wow!), but now I know better about his often wild conclusions. So I believe I only quoted him after using his references to thoroughly check the original sources, i.e. Pausanias, Siculus, Nonnos, Apollodorus, etc.

Idriani's observations are spot on. The "Venus of Willendorf" was the source of my remarks about the "blindness" of the Goddess, and if I didn't credit Camille Paglia in her fascinating book, Sexual Personae, I should have. Also fascinating is Anne Baring's and Jules Cashford's The Myth of the Goddess, which delineates her manifestations throughout the ages. With many, many marvelous images.

I'm afraid I don't know much about the Gnostic purloining of the birth, death, and resurrection of Dionysos (also called Zagreus), but it's safe to say - as Frazer pointed out many years ago - that these death and rebirth stories were around for millennia before the Christians adopted them. As I note in Zeus,what's also interesting that his Mt. Ida birth cave on Crete was (and still is) a manger. Here's a photograph proving it:

[Taken from Iannis Sakellarakis' beautiful book on
the excavations, Digging for the Past]

However, as Elaine Pagel writes in The Gnostic Gospels, "some gnostics called the literal view of resurrection the 'faith of fools.' The resurrection, they insisted, was not a unique event in the past: instead it symbolized how Christ's presence could be experienced in the present. What mattered was not literal seeing, but spiritual vision." (p. 11).

Indrani: Do you think the source of your Hindu-Hellenism dates back to the encounter of Alexander the Great with the Gymnosophists? That event has always fascinated me.