BOOKS

Notices and reviews of books, ar. ticles, plays and poetry dealing with homosexuality and the sex variant. Readers are invited to send in reviews or printed matter for review.

DIONYSUS, MYTH AND CULT, by Walter F. Otto, 1933; tr. Robert B. Palmer, Indiana University Press, 1965, 243 pp., $6.50.

This first translation into English of Otto's classic study of Dionysus will deeply engage the interest of any student of Greek social and religious history. That the Dionysic cult was characterized by "a hounding and maltreatment of women" at once suggest insight into Greek attitudes toward homosexuality, as will many other pages in this provocative study.

Significant for historians of Christian legend, and other accounts of the unisexual origins of the human race is a reference to Herodotus' story that Zeus brought the man child sewn in his thigh to Nysa in Ethiopia. In other references, "The father himself assumed the role of mother. He took up the fruit of the womb, not yet capable of life, and placed it in his divine body. And when the number of months was accomplished, he brought his son into the light." Hence, Dionysus was the "twice-born one."

"His duality has manifested itself to us in the antithesis of ecstacy and horror, infinite vitality and savage destruction" writes Otto. He then vigorously repudiates the attempt, sometimes made, to relate the Dionysic rationale to "roughly corresponding practices of northern European peas-

ants," or vegetation cults elsewhere.

In further striking commentary Otto writes, speaking of the countless linkings made in ancient literature between Apollo and Dionysus "if this union actually was consummated . . . Apollo and Dionysus were attracted to each other and sought each other out And with this marriage, Greek religion, as the sanctification of objective being, would have reached its noblest heights."

STRANGE MARRIAGE, by James Colton, Los Angeles, 1965, 176 pages, Argyle Books, $3.95.

James Colton writes with facility and often with charm and with a sense of the metabolism of the paper-back racks. His book's title and blurb contain sure-sell words "passion," "weird," "virile," "(love) -hungry," "tempestuous" and others. This book will sell.

Moreover his first three chapters are plausible. Then improbabilities multiply. How is your credulity quotient?

Satyriasis has not been hinted at; but now the homosexual hero begins working both sides of the street hard-and yet he rejects the advances of another bisexual man.

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To write a novel without a villain is a kind of wrong-doing; although a case history may be all the truer for