The story of Dionysus' beginnings is remarkable for his difficulty in coming into the world:
ZEUS AND MORTAL SEMELE
Conceived in the union of Zeus and the mortal woman Semele, he fell victim to jealous Hera even before he was born. Knowing what the consequences of her advice would be, Hera persuaded Semele, who was already six months pregnant, to insist that her mysterious lover reveal himself to her in his true form. When she did so, she was destroyed by the sight of Zeus in his full power. “It is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living god” ( Hebrews 10 : 31, AV )
ED ¶ 0UNBORN DIONYSUS SEWED UP IN ZEUS' THIGH
Zeus plucked the unborn child from Semele's body and sewed him up in his thigh, where Dionysus spent the three remaining months. Shortly following his birth as a horned infant crowned with serpents, and again at the instigation of Hera, he was torn to pieces by the Titans from which he derived the name Zagreus, meaning approximately “dismembered.” His body was then consumed by the Titans except for his heart, which was recovered and from which he was reconstituted and reborn
ED ¶ 0DIONYSUS GREW UP IN THE
COMPANY OF PROTECTIVE WOMEN
Entrusted finally to the charge of Persephone, he was more protected and in fact grew up in various situations in the company of protective women and nymphs. As an adult, he was described as somewhat feminine in appearance and he went always in the company of groups of Maenads (the word means “mad women”) who had become his devotees
ED ¶ 0DIONYSUS TRAVELED THE WORLD BRINGING
EXCITEMENT, JOY, TERROR
Dionysus was a wanderer, traveling through the world with the bands of Maenads, setting up his worship and bringing the culture of grapes and wine. He is pictured as a beautiful young man draped in a fawn skin, holding the thyrsus, a staff or wand made of a fennel stalk wound with ivy. His rituals were held in the woods, in uncivilized nature. He was associated with the bull and with serpents, the imagery pointing to his wildness and his power, and to his place outside the bounds of civilized order. Thought of as “the God who comes,” he would appear unexpectedly in a new place, bringing excitement, joy, and terror, and changing what was there before
ED ¶ 0DIONYSUS AND FOLLOWERS HELD ECSTATIC
CELEBRATIONS IN THE WOODS
The classic account of Dionysus is to be found in Euripides' The Bacchae. In this play, he comes to Thebes and what he brings with him destroys the status quo. When King Pentheus of Thebes returned to his kingdom to find that Dionysus and his followers were holding ecstatic celebrations in the woods and that many of the local people, especially the women, were joining them, he was outraged and vowed to lock up the revelers and punish Dionysus. The authority or power principle stiffens and becomes vengeful in the face of Dionysian wildness. When Dionysus appeared to him, Pentheus defied the wild god and tried to lock him up, but after the king had him bound with knotted ropes and deposited in his stables, a bull was discovered in his place. Dionysus had slipped through his fingers
ED ¶ 0PENTHEUS GRADUALLY TURNED
MAD HIMSELF
Pentheus gradually turned mad himself, under the influence of the appearing and disappearing god, finally attempting to spy on the Bacchic revelers in the woods, where he was discovered and torn to pieces by the crazed devotees, who included his own mother. Two old wise men of the city, Teiresias, the blind seer, and Cadmus, the former king, decided, as aged as they were, to join the celebrations in the woods; they knew that everyone must honor Dionysus and could feel the invigorating power of his presence
ED ¶ 0The two old men returned safely from the revels, but not so the king who had refused to honor Dionysusone need not become possessed by the god, only respectfully acknowledge him, perhaps risking one's dignity
DIONYSUS AS EXCESS AND THE
VALUE AND SIGNIFICANCE OF EXCESS
What Dionysus brings is wild, spontaneous, inspired behavior. If Apollo signifies measure and mean, Dionysus symbolizes excess and the value and significance of excess. There is ecstasy on the one hand and terror on the other, and the whole potential for inner transformation. He is connected to rapture, to the release of everything that has been locked up, to the blaze of life, but also to persecution, suffering, and death, and to madness. He is associated with Persephone, the queen of the Underworld. He brings wisdom in a sudden flash, epiphany, and also the suddenly recognized truth that can lead to madness. Where he is, things change
ED ¶ 0DISMEMBERMENT OF THE
INFANT DIONYSUS
Usually a bull or a goat representing the god was dismembered in a ritual reenactment of the dismemberment of the infant Dionysus, and the raw and bleeding flesh was then distributed and eaten by all the participants, who thus took on the role of the Titans
ED ¶ 0ZEUS PUNISHES TITANS FOR
DISMEMBERMENT OF DIONYSUS
In punishment for the Titans' dismemberment of Dionysus, Zeus had hurled a thunderbolt at them, which had reduced them to dust, but that dust had little sparks of Dionysus scattered in it because they had all eaten him, and that Titan dust was later used to make human beings. Hence, we are made out of Titan dust with the Dionysian spark in us that is left over from the Titans' meal. Such was the mythical story the omophagian rite reenacted [the eating of raw flesh]
ED ¶ 0PSYCHOLOGICAL MEANING OF
THE OMOPHAGIAN RITE
What would such a rite represent psychologically? It certainly echoes totem meals that we know of in various societies, and it is a remarkable, if crude, parallel to the Christian Eucharist. If the Dionysian principle can be thought of as a primordial dynamism, the experience of dismemberment would correspond to a voluntary breaking up of elemental psychic or spiritual energy, to make it available for the emerging conscious ego. There are subtle and profound ideas implied in the image
ED ¶ 0DIONYSUS AS THE WHITE
RADIANCE OF ETERNITY
We could say that Dionysus is the white radiance of eternity that voluntarily submits to dismemberment, fragmentation, refraction into specific colors in order to generate the particular colors of light and of actual existence, rather than just remaining eternal white unity
ED ¶ 0FEAST OF RAW FLESH IS
CLOSE TO COMMUNION SYMBOLISM
The ritual of the feast of the raw flesh, at the same time, bears a close relationship with Communion symbolism. As reenacted in the Mass, Christ experienced sacrifice and dismemberment in order that he become food for the believers, just as Dionysus in the guise of the animal served that function in the more primitive rite. Dionysus suffered incarnation and dismemberment just as Christ suffered it with the Crucifixion and with the symbolic dismemberment of the Last Supper, at which he breaks the bread he calls his body. In a medieval woodcut of the Crucifixion reproduced in Alan Watts's book, Myth and Ritual in Christianity, dismembered arms and legs are shown hanging on the cross, indicating that these two images, crucifixion and dismemberment, can be equated. It seems that the divinity, or the archetypal psyche, permits itself to become manifest and endures fragmentation in order to promote life. This dream of a young man alludes to that point:
ED ¶ 0Dream:
Modern Christ Figure
I dreamed that I saw a modern Christ figure who was traveling in a bus with a group of disciples. Then I sensed that there was danger. The man was going to be betrayed. It happened and the bus rocked with violence. The figure was set upon and subdued. They had apparently tied ropes to each of his hands and feet and had pulled him tight, spread-eagled in four directions. I knew they would kill him that way. [There was going to be a quartering, a dismemberment.] Then it appeared, when I looked at him more closely, that he was not tied by the hands, but was grasping with each hand a wooden bar attached to the rope. He was cooperating in his own death. At the end of the dream came an image of a magnetic field of force showing the forces pulling him apart in the four directions, making a cross with the field of force between the four poles
DREAM COMMENTARY
Here is a dream of dismemberment, which is clearly a profound process, as well as a sacred one since it is associated with religious ritual. It should be noted that the archetype or the deity itself is subject to this dismemberment, not the ego
ED ¶ 0CREATIVITY IN THE INSPIRED,
ALMOST INTOXICATED SENSE
Creativity is an aspect of Dionysus, and one of particular psychological importance. It is not a deliberate Hephaestian creativity, but creativity in the inspired, almost intoxicated, sense, in which the unconscious wells up. It corresponds to the way Nietzsche said he wrote Thus Spake Zarathustra; while he tramped the mountains of the Engadine, Zarathustra shouted in his ear. That is Dionysus, that is Dionysian creativity, and Nietzsche is probably the outstanding example of Dionysian possession. Following his mental breakdown, at times he signed himself “Crucified,” at times “Dionysus,” at times “Zagreus,” showing how close certain aspects of the myth of Christ are to the myth of Dionysus. Jung has written on the subject of identification with the creative principle in his seminar on Nietzsche's Zarathustra. He talks about the creative powers as they manifested themselves in Nietzsche ( Jung, Nietzsche's Zarathustra, Princeton Univ. Press, 1988, pp. 57f. )
ED ¶ 0SAFE CREATIVITY IS THAT WHICH
MAKES ONE UNCOMFORTABLE
So people who are intoxicated by some creative effort should be warned that the only safe creativity is that which makes one uncomfortable. If one feels burdened down with every sentence one writes or every brush stroke comes with an effort, then one is safe and not in danger of falling, one is already down. But otherwise, to identify with Dionysus has the opposite danger, and Nietzsche is an appalling example of this
ED ¶ 0PSYCHOLOGICAL EFFECT OF
COMMUNION SYMBOLISM
These reflections help us to understand the psychological effect of communion symbolism, whether it be the rite of the raw flesh in more primitive times or the modern Christian communion. One effect of participating in the ritual would be to spare the participant the fate of God. It protects one from identification with the inner creative powers, since by acting out the role of the communicant, the receiver of the divine nourishment, one is taking on a humble position and is thus protected against inflation
ED ¶ 0ALCOHOL IN GRAPES HAS A
TRUE POWER OF TRANSFORMATION
The central symbol of Dionysus is the grape, the product of which is wine and the essence of which is alcohol. Early man was profoundly impressed by the effects of alcohol. It is indeed a mysterious and miraculous substance, which when drunk, changes the personality; it has a true power of transformation that led early people to believe that wine contained a spirit. This is why alcoholic beverages are still called “spirits” and why the Latin name for whiskey is spiritus frumenti, the spirit of the grain. This remarkable substance lends itself to the projection of profound psychological imagery and Dionysus is the name of the mysterious transforming spirit that is symbolized by its effects. By extension, it is the principle of creativity, life renewal, and the unpredictable qualities of the spirit as such, the spirit that blows where it will
ED ¶ 0In this symbolic sense, the verses of Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat become a hymn not to banal, vulgar alcohol but to the spirit of Dionysus and what that represents psychologically. For example: You know, my Friends, how long since in my House For a new Marriage I did make Carouse: Divorced old barren Reason from my Bed, And took the Daughter of the Vine to Spouse
And: The Grape that can with Logic absolute The Two-and-Seventy jarring Sects confute; The subtle Alchemist that in a Trice Life's leaden Metal into Gold transmute ( Edward Fitzgerald, trans., The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, verses 40 and 43 Peter Pauper Press, 1937 )
WINE EQUATED WITH ELIXIR VITAE
OR AQUA PERMANENS OF ALCHEMIST
Here wine, along with what it symbolizes, is equated with the elixir vitae or aqua permanens of the alchemist. In Christian psychology, the Dionysian principle was largely relegated to the devil and so lived, at least in part, an underground existence. But we see Dionysus as he was starting to emerge in the modern mind in John Milton's poem “Comus.” Identified by Milton as the son of Circe and Dionysus, Comus is pictured as a kind of degraded Dionysian figure, who lived in a dark wood where he accosted travelers and offered them his wine in a crystal goblet. The effect of the wine was to turn them partly into beasts
ED ¶ 0DIONYSIAN PRINCIPLE IN DREAMS
The appearance of the Dionysian principle in dreams is not uncommon and some of the most powerful Dionysian dreams are dreamt by clergymen, which, given the law of opposites, is not surprising: those most affected by the repression of the Dionysian principle would be just the ones whose unconscious could be expected to present it in most vivid form
ED ¶ 0Certainly the wine of Dionysus symbolizes a powerful but paradoxical content, like the spirit Mercurius in alchemical symbolism, which is poisonous to some at certain times and healing to others at other times. Not for nothing did Christianity relegate Dionysus to the devil. However, when his time has come, when he is truly knocking on the gates of one's city of Thebes, then to deny the Dionysian principle is a grave mistake, although to embrace it superficially and frivolously can also be unwisea fact strikingly indicated by the symbolic implications of Paul's statement in First Corinthians, in which he says:anyone who eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord unworthily will be guilty of desecrating the body and blood of the Lord. A man must test himself before eating his share of the bread and drinking from the cup. For he who eats and drinks, eats and drinks judgment on himself if he does not discern the Body ( I Cor. 11: 27, NEB )
ED ¶ 0“The Body” here refers to discerning the deity he is incorporating, with the realization that there is indeed a sacred nature. Only with that awareness can the creativity and spontaneity of the psyche be realized without either an infantile regression or a presumptuous inflation. To return to thee words of Euripides, we could say as Dionysus says in The Bacchae, “[I come] establishing my mysteries and rites that I might be revealed on earth for what I am, a god” ( Euripides, The Bacchae, line 18 )
ED ¶ 0