Dionysus! Dionysus!
“For the highest images in every religion there is an analogue in a state of the soul. The God of Mohammed-- the solitude of the desert, the distant roar of a lion, the vision of a terrible fighter. The God of the Christians --- everything that men and women associate with the word 'Love." The God of the Greeks-a beautiful dream image”
-- Nietzsche
Let us picture the world that birthed ancient Greek religion; a world of constant strife between differing city-states, a world where the check and balance to tyranny was not the holy scribble of an ancient revolutionary, but the threat of annihilation at the hand of your neighbor.
The only thread of order holding this tenuous balance... A Sword of Damocles above the heads of all states. And what was common law to a Greek? Annihilation of males of a conquered city, a life of slavery for the rest; total subjugation to those who fell lethargic in this existential struggle. And the Greek never found solace in death--- just as many today find relief in nihilism and a Christian heaven--- for when Odysseus attempted to console Achilles’ shade in the underworld, Achilles declaimed:
“Don’t give me consolation about death, glorious Odysseus. I’d rather be above earth and labour for someone else, a man with no land of his own and little livelihood, than be king over all the lifeless dead”
How terrible, bleak, and gruesome was the Greek outlook! How could it be otherwise? When we observe the scattered remains of their highest culture what do we see? The statue of a seated pugilist licking his wounds like a wolf, darkened eyes under fearsome brow, his muscles tense and taut from constant strife. Their architecture stands solid with their massive columns and architraves, statues of godly perfection reminding them of an ungraspable ideal. From this war-like peoples sprouted all good culture. And even as the conquering Romans lay claim to this western heritage, we always place the Greek in front of Greco-Roman.
Indeed, It was an earthly culture focused, until Plato, on the world of appearances; of constant contest even within their city gates and among their artists.... as Nietzsche here describes in Aphorism 170 of Human, all too Human:
“The Greek artists, for example, the tragedians, wrote in order to triumph. Their whole art is unthinkable without the contest: Hesiod's good Eris, ambition, gave wings to their genius. Now this ambition demanded above all that their work attain the highest excellence in their own eyes, as they understood excellence, without consideration for any prevailing taste or public opinion concerning excellence in a work of art. Thus Aeschylus and Euripides remained unsuccessful for a long time, until they had finally educated judges of art who appraised their work by the standards they themselves applied. Thus they strove for a triumph over their rivals in their own estimation, before their own seat of judgment; they really wanted to be more excellent; and then they demanded outside agreement with their own estimation, a confirmation of their own judgment...”
Poetry, as opposed to the emotional masturbatory act it’s become today, was grand and majestic and divinely inspired; it was born out of the wish to overcome your poet peers with a sprawling work of sheer power! Architectural works stood not to house the worker bees of a degenerating society, but to induce religious awe and fear upon enemies, to propitiate their shining gods. Frescoes and amphoras writhed alive with depictions of perfect athletes, graceful women in chiton outlining their subtle voluptuousness, and capricious deities who often envied and cursed these hellenic men and women for almost outshining them. Even Zeus, the mightiest god, could not rein in the homicidal, infanticidal, rage that flashed and flared from a Hera jealous of his trysts with these mortal women.
Now, picture to yourself the competitive pressures built up in such a society, the rigidity, the miasmic order! Such people needed to fashion for themselves a relief valve... and here came Dionysus.
He was the nomadic god, the twice-born, the many-named. From Egypt to Crete to Greece and Rome, he took to the character of the tribe that showed him hospitality but always remained distinctly Dionysian. At first the Greeks saw him as an aberration and only reluctantly introduced him into the parthenon. Yet the power of his rituals could not be contained and it overflowed in the hearts of the rural populace. Little is revealed about the Dionysian mysteries,yet archeological findings show his many manifestations predating the parthenon itself. From the wild vines of the mountain slopes of Libya and other regions of North Africa to ancient Egypt (2500 BC), his cultic praise took the shape of ecstatic rites of animal possession; chief among them are the goat and panther men---- a clear call back to Satyrs and Centaurs and to the holy depiction of Dionysus upon his sacred leopard. Dionysus appears as Osiris in Egypt, as Bacchus in Rome, as Sabazius in Phrygia. If we call him Dionysus it is out of convenience, for he is at once nameless and many-named. But to get to the core of the matter... What were the contents of his worship? What made Dionysus so indestructible and ever-present throughout all history?
Enthousiasmos
"I call upon loud-roaring and revelling Dionysus,
primeval, double-natured, thrice-born, Bacchic lord,
wild, ineffable, secretive, two-horned and two-shaped.
Ivy-covered, bull-faced, warlike, howling, pure,
You take raw flesh, you have feasts, wrapt in foliage, decked with grape clusters.
Resourceful Eubouleus, immortal god sired by Zeus
When he mated with Persephone in unspeakable union.
Hearken to my voice, O blessed one,
and with your fair-girdled nymphs breathe on me in a spirit of perfect agape".
Let us trace our human heritage to a time before the emergence of formalized religions, before the written word bogged us in a slew of legalistic tabulations and priestly dogmatisms. What we find is a frenzied and inscrutable world of dance, music, and trance. A world which now-- to the regimented, zoo-caged, mind of modern man-- seems alien, primal, savage. Every community which today remains tribal is, regardless of geographical separateness, threaded together by a particular form of ritual that seeks the same end goal: Loss of self and communion with gods by means of induced trance.
As our great scholar, Nicholas Wade, writes in The Faith Instinct:
“In the ancestral religion of hunter gatherers, people bound their communities together in emotionally compelling dramas of music, chant and dusk-to-dawn dances. The marathon rituals ended for some in exhaustion, for others in a state of trance that opened doors, for them and their community, between this world and that of the supernatural. Little by little, the ancestral religion was suppressed in the settled societies that began to emerge 15,000 years ago and has survived only among the handful of hunter gatherer tribes that endured into the modern era. The new settled societies adopted a structured form of religious practice, one in which priests controlled the ritual and monopolized interaction with the supernatural. The communal dances ceased. The songs were silenced. The shamans were marginalized as witch doctors or sorcerers. But the ancestral religion was woven too deeply into people’s behavior to disappear entirely.”
In the dead of night, joined around a mighty flame, our mute ancestors synchronized their bodies in a rhythmic-hypnotic wave of beating drums, rattles, bells and meaningless song; the collective movements of limbs in vigorous dance bound their minds in an almost hive-like union, giving way to complete erasure of individuality. Hours pass, a thick film of sweat on every dancer, when one by one they foam at the mouth and fall unconscious or perhaps flail about in animalistic fashion, utterly possessed--- The trancing man or woman has now lost all faculties and is steeped in a dream-like state.
What do they see when they break through this gate?
Dream is the generator of all religions. In dreams a primordial man reunites with the spirits of dead brothers and convenes with a panoply of mystical chimeras. As we examine more and more the religious life of hunter-gatherers, the more clear the certainty that the central goal of all their rites led to this exact trance-dream state-- his entry into a cryptic world of cosmic-sized awe, unspeakable epiphanies of large scale importance, unforeseen solutions to life’s ills, an unfathomable sense of oneness. Our fleshy prisons torn asunder and our souls cast into the spirit world.
And that, I can confidently surmise, is the root of most Greek religion. Even at the peak of their civilized life there remained an atavistic use of trance-states. An obvious example jumps out in the famed Delphic oracles who presumably inhaled subterranean fumes and attained swiftly what took primitive dancers hours of exertion to achieve. Another more striking illustration are the Eleusinian Initiations, which involved a beer mixed with a secret recipe jealously guarded by priests; its main ingredient likely being ergot extracted from Eleusis’ fields of wheat.
In addition, there is something about the sharp definition-- the imaginative grandness!-- in Greek myth which makes it different from that of, for example, rigid Judeo-Christian texts. If Jewish flights of fancy showed a crude immovable monument upon a nondescript desert, Greek dream-imaginings spread over a vast and varied tropical jungle squirming with an unrivaled diversity of life.
It is certain that this close contact with Enthousiasmos allowed them, like a creative IV drip into their cultural vein, to preserve their wondrous zeitgeist.
So what do we, Dionysians, seek to propose with this cumbersome wall of words? What gap do we want to fill?
Our decaying society is atomized and quarrelsome even as we achieve a zenith of connectedness. It stands to reason that, if hard-etched barriers of language and culture are made more opaque, the ensuing cross-pollination would allow for an unmatched blossoming of health and moral values. To clarify! We shouldn't as an advanced society suffer record high levels of anxiety, depression, morbid obesity, addictions, and other myriad conditions, while our costly secular institutions try to seal this bleeding wound only to predictably fail -- One could safely say our institutions make the bleeding worse.
Meanwhile, established religions strive to be outdated cultic caricatures with their lack of creativity and life-stifling convictions. Much like a man donning sword and armor to fight with a tank, they invite quixotic derision from anyone with a particle of intellect. To turn to them we must suspend disbelief and believe once more in fairytales.
Indeed, surveys show that most people in the US-- 65% to be exact-- like to identify as Christian; but to us, Dionysians, this reeks of statistical smoke and mirrors: Are most people truly Christian? Or do they wear the religion as some fashionable necklace, a quaint heirloom inherited from dead grandparents?
The latter strikes a more plausible conclusion.
For even as they brandish their Christian faith they lead their children astray and grow ever fatter in their disgusting gluttony. A vacuous consumerism is reflected in the junk which fills market isles to meet their incessant demand. What they call music, what they term art, their flaccid morals, are worse than Christian. Much worse. They seem to compete in an inverted hierarchy of ever-sinking standards, an upside-down pyramid leading to the eventual demise of man.
The only thing that can divert this deeply entrenched course, the only way to restore our overgrown paths and defaced temples, and to feel again the sacred synergism of bodily instinct and intellect... is through a revivification! A recontextualized revivification of ecstatic Dionysian worship and ritual! Once we throw apart these iron-bound gates of perception, and we steal a look over the banks of our entrenchment, we shall stumble upon a philosophical renaissance and renewal of purpose unmatched.
A city of gold more real and more beautiful awaits those who are intrepid enough to see differently!
Let us accept bitter truths and revel!
Dionysus awaits!