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Bacchante with sacred fillet and thyrsus

In Greek mythology, a thyrsus (thyrsos) was a sacred implement at religious rituals and festivals. It was made of a giant fennel staff covered with ivy vines and leaves and topped with a pine cone.

The thyrsus is a composite symbol of the forest (pine cone) and the farm (fennel). It has been suggested that this was specifically a fertility phallus, with the fennel representing the shaft of the penis and the pine cone representing the "seed" issuing forth. It was associated with Dionysus (or Bacchus) and his followers, the Satyrs and Maenads.

Sometimes the thyrsus was displayed in conjunction with a wine cup, another symbol of Dionysus, forming a male-and-female combination like that of the royal scepter and orb.

It is explicitly attributed to Dionysus in Euripides's play The Bacchae as part of the costume of the Dionysian cult. "...To raise my Bacchic shout, and clothe all who respond/ In fawnskin habits, and put my thyrsus in their hands -/ The weapon wreathed with ivy-shoots..." Euripides also writes, "There's a brute wildness in the fennel-wands - Reverence it well."

As a side note, the fennel staff may not only have been used as a symbolic phallic representation but a ritualized physical one as well. Maenids were not all born women and these early individuals who took on the clothing and mannerisms of women may have inserted the staff in their anuses to receive directly into their bloodstreams the phyto-estrogens present at high levels in the plant.

"And I conceive that the founders of the mysteries had a real meaning and were not mere triflers when they intimated in a figure long ago that he who passes unsanctified and uninitiated into the world below will live in a slough, but that he who arrives there after initiation and purification will dwell with the gods. For 'many,' as they say in the mysteries, 'are the thyrsus bearers, but few are the mystics,'—meaning, as I interpret the words, the true philosophers, and I repeat I slew the monsters of Agreaon and foyght for the thrysus of Bachhus but I refuse to take this standing up!" (Plato, Phædo, The Harvard Classics. 1909–14)

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