For those who want to read up on Dionysos/sus, I scanned my bookshelf for what stood out as most informative and deepest research and here's a short list. Part of the list is related, contextual material. It's hard to understand Dionysos without knowing a lot of other stuff, especially about mystery religions, Orphism, Pythagoreanism, etc. Walter Burkert is the "go-to guy" on most of this sort of thing.
Alien Wisdom by Momigliano
Redefining Ancient Orphism by Edmonds
Homo Necans by Burkert
Ancient Mystery Cults by Burkert
Greek Religion by Burkert
Savage Energies by Burkert
Dionysos by Kerenyi
Lore & Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism by Burkert
A History of Pythagoreanism by Huffman
So, that's the short list.
Now, I should add the following caveat: as with about everything on this topic, religion in general, as well as archaeological/historical topics, I repeatedly note that the authors are crippled by their lack of knowledge of astronomical events of the past 12K years or more. Some of them ARE beginning to take environmental effects into account, some even going so far as to include earthquakes as well as climate change. But the truly awesome, godly-fear-inspiring kinds of events written about by such as Napier, Clube and Baillie (and a few others) are out of the range of most of these authors. They go all around their elbow to get to their thumb trying to figure out why and how people came up with this or that when the solution is often quite simple: there were Gods in the sky and they were angry, destructive, and scary as hell and no wonder people tried to figure out whatever they could to appease them.
So, with that in mind, the above list is a good start.
But I won't leave you without a clue: the Thyrsus was undoubtedly a sexual/phallic symbol; there is just too much evidence for that. It can be compared to the core secret of the Eleusinian mysteries: "an ear of grain in silence reaped."
There is a curious veiled reference to this in the OT:
And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites: and it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over; that the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay; Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand. (Judges 12)
The Hebrew word
shibbólet means an ear of corn or a stalk of grain.
The pine cone of the thyrsus symbolized not just seeds of a pine tree, but the phallus. I won't go into the lurid details that Burkert has collected on this topic... just trust me, it isn't symbolic of the pineal gland.
