It's #InternationalBatNight this weekend! The #BatNight has taken place every year since 1997 in more than 30 countries in Africa and Europe on the last full weekend of August. 🦇 #Bats rarely feature in #GreekMythology but they appear in #Aesop's fables as a creature of dual nature, neither bird nor mouse. As an animal blurring the lines, it fits well with #Dionysos, a god who blurs the lines not between mouse and bird but between male and female.
The story of #Dionysos and the Minyades appears in Plutarch's Greek Questions 38 and in the Metamorphoses of both Ovid and Antoninus Liberalis. The daughters of Minyas, Leukippe, Arsippe and Alkathoe were startlingly diligent. They strongly criticised other women for abandoning the city to roam the hills as Bacchantes. Dionysos took on the likeness of a girl and urged the Minyades not to miss out on the rites and mysteries of the god. But they paid him no heed.
#Dionysos was angered and turned into a bull, then a lion, then a leopard. From the beams of their looms there flowed for him milk and nectar. Gripped by terror, the maidens threw lots determining that Leukippe had to offer her son as a sacrifice to the god. They tore him to pieces and went into the mountains as Bacchantes until #Hermes (or Dionysos himself) changed them into #bats.