On this Pompeian mural fresco from the Villa of Publius Fannius Synistor in Boscoreale, Dionysus/Bacchus is depicted with his gaze wide open in ecstatic rapture, with the thyrsus, his ritual staff, under the vines from which bunches of grapes hang. At the same time, he pours wine from a kantharos into a panther, which symbolises the power of wine to tame animal ferocity, next to an old Silenus, the god of wild nature, on his left, who plays the lyre.
The mural painting, dated to 30 BC, is now part of the British Museum in London, which purchased it in 1899 from the Italian authorities of the time.
Dionysus, god of ritual madness and ecstatic liberation from everyday identity through wine and intoxication, represents transcendence. The deity's followers connected to him and each other through rituals of altered consciousness through intoxication, ecstasy, and intoxication.
This altered state, required to evoke one's primal emotions, was the first step toward union with the deity —a kind of emotional, religious frenzy. This trance-like condition initially involved an experience of mystical self-transcendence.

His various followers: satyrs, sileni, nymphs, and maenads, are often depicted in art in this state of ecstasy. Satyrs and Bacchantes are shown dancing and drinking freely, often with bright smiles and wide-open eyes.
Among the cults of classical antiquity, the worship of the Greek god Dionysus is one of the most intriguing, ranging from rural and later urban agricultural festivals in Greece, Asia Minor, and Magna Graecia, to complex mystery rites, such as the Bacchanalia, established throughout the Roman Empire, based on the Greek Dionysiaca and Dionysian mysteries, which probably arrived in Rome in 200 BC via Greek colonies in southern Italy.
Like all mystery cults, the Bacchanalia were kept strictly secret, and initiates were sworn to secrecy; what little is known about the cult and its rites comes from Greek and Roman literature, plays, statuary, and paintings.
Dionysus is almost always depicted with vines, grapes, cups, and jugs, presumably carrying wine, which he made himself. Silenus, god of the woods, wilderness, and winemaking, was his companion and guardian. In most myths concerning his origin, Dionysus is said to have brought the art of winemaking to mortals. He travelled throughout Eurasia, spreading his knowledge to all who would listen.

Euripes in his The Bacchae describes Dionysus: "Dionysus discovered the liquid drink of the bunch of grapes and presented it to mortals, that which puts an end to the suffering of miserable men, when they are satiated with the stream of the vine, and gives sleep as the oblivion of the ills that happen by day; nor is there any other cure for anguish." (Euripides, 279-83)
His worshippers were drawn to him for the freedom he offered: freedom of the body, through intoxication and ecstasy, and freedom of the mind, elevating women to dominant positions within his cult.
Intoxication and ecstasy were the initial physical means of connecting with Dionysus, but to fully embrace the divinity, one had to communicate with him in transcendence.
Nietzsche describes this experience in The Birth of Tragedy: "Now the slave is a free man, now all the rigid and hostile boundaries that necessity, arbitrariness, or 'shameless fashion' have established among men. Now, in the gospel of universal harmony, every man feels not only reunited, reconciled and fused with his fellow man, but even one with him, as if the veil of Maya had been torn away and was now fluttering in tatters before the mysterious original unity". (Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy V. III).