Mythical themes have always served us as guideposts in the world of the unconscious. They are necessary at places where reasoning and formation of concepts is impeded by the intimate nature of the experience. If we want to answer questions about its structure we will strike very deep chords in our hearts making it difficult to operate rationally. The stories and personalities of myths reflect inexpressible desires of the heart which they try to distill and clarify.
The Dionysian myth is a kind of theory of life reaching from the organization of it in civilization into the chaos and incomprehensibility of nature.
Dionysos was the youngest one in the Greek pantheon of twelve gods - most of them children of the chief god Zeus. Only Aphrodite was a timeless creature born of revolt of the time Titan, Kronos, against his father - Uranos. She was the last offspring of Sky after he was castrated by Time. Her eternal child and consort, Eros, was said to be born before Time. Dionysos in a way complements Aphrodite in an interestingly ambiguous way. He was born out of a mortal woman, one of many loves of Zeus, who perished in a sacrificial pyre while Zeus took pity on the child Dionysos still in her womb, ripped her womb open while the flames were engulfing her. Child Dionysos then gestated in Zeus's thigh - one of the nether parts of a man's body - in contrast to the female goddess Athena who sprang from Zeus's head. Being the last god to enter the pantheon, after being born out of the body of a the supreme man, he was to be extolled ambiguously as "not the least one of the gods." This expresses indirectly that he is the patron of the life functions normally considered base - that is the god of sexuality and lower chakras, so to speak, functions that women are very comfortable with and are degraded for in most cultures. If Aphrodite is the goddess of erotic and sexual life she is so with the full blatant mandate of her timeless genesis. She expresses the feminine ownership of sexuality. Dionysos is a man who melds sexuality into the drama of life. He earned his power and status through sacrifice and humiliation. While in Aphrodite the sexuality is ancient, natural and intrinsic, in Dionysos it is part of the new and nascent art of life. Dionysos is a prototypical Tantric master.
As he was born as Zeus's illegitimate offspring he was persecuted by Hera, Zeus's domestic partner, who always stood for a woman's destiny of domestic life. Dionysos was revered in childhood as the holy child, protected by devoted women who sensed the advent of a new type of man. He was also identified with the persona of Zagreus, a mythical hunter who was able to capture wild beasts live.
Dionysos functions within life that is timeless, spontaneous and unindividuated. This is known in the language of Greek myth as "zoë". Zoë is the life from which separate living forms emerge and into which they disappear. It is not concerned with fate since fate is always connected to an individual and his striving. Zoë is the stream of life underlying all existence. Women in most cultures consider and feel themselves strongly settled in zoë. As the underlying life force zoë is as apt to kill as to revive. A model of zoë is plant life and our attitude toward plants is a model of the attitude toward zoë. We are not concerned with the fate of each particular grain of wheat - they are always regenerated even after most of them are crushed. Extended to all forms of life the zoë attitude leads to rather savage habits and such were the rites honoring Dionysos.
In opposition to zoë the life of individual existence is known as "bios". It reflects the story of a person, his striving and failings - it reflects the maturity and integrity of the individual. This is the most typical culturally accepted view of life: as linear progression of events concerning and befalling an individual with which he deals using his inner and outer equipment. He chisels out his life's story, the bios, using his life force, fed by the surrounding zoë, into a sort of monument. A typical striving man of most cultures.
In contrast to that Dionysos is a man in the zoë. He is not afraid to be a victim, to be subdued, debased, raped, killed, - because he trusts not in the reward of glory but in the support that the stream of life brings to his existence. Dionysos is not afraid of suffering and death also because he knows that all man's titanic strife of "bios" ends in ruin of destruction and falls in the hands of zoë seeking revival in its own way.
Dionysos's coming into the pantheon as one the children of Zeus is different as described above. But importantly he comes into being with a powerful antagonist - the goddess Hera hates his illegitimate status, but even more because Zeus attaches a special, irrational, one might say, importance to the protection of the child's life. Zeus's rapes and pursuits outside of the heavenly marriage are quite common. While all of them signify a sort of expansion of his realm and, by this token, of our consciousness, the generation of young Dionysos has a special significance, perhaps comparable only to the rape of Nemesis - the "nymph" of consequences and necessity.
Dionysos is given up for care to a family of Cretan goat shepherds. Later he is taken care of by a group of nymphs, and accompanied by a group of armed young men. The women feed, bathe and cuddle the child, while the young men, the Kouretes, dance fully armed to drown out his cries and entertain him, so that his presence can be hidden from his enemy, Hera. Dionysos is an unusual child and exudes and aura of miracle around his very existence. He shows an affinity for wildlife and appears to embody another mythical figure - Zagreus - a hunter who caught wild animals live while carrying no weapons. His first caregivers, the goat shepherd family, ends up mad and merges with wildlife in the woods - being variously transformed into raving hunters and wild prey.
At the beginning of his life Dionysos reveals a streak of madness, embodying irrational urges residing in the depth of life. His Cretan childhood also resembles the childhood of Zeus. Various stories are told about his nurses driven to murder him in a savage way while at the same time empathizing with his suffering. His Kouretes guardians are also said to stab and slay the child. Most significant story of his martyrdom as a child tells about it happening at the hands of the Titans. Titans were a generation of gods prior to and inimical to Zeus and his Olympian posse. They were called the striving gods - they went about their goals by accumulation of power and exerting effort. The Titans ripped the Dionysos child apart and boiled his body parts in a kettle preparing to eat him. Not all seven body parts were boiled - his male organ was saved from boiling. The Titans did not get to eat the flesh of Dionysos before Zeus found out about the murderous feast and struck them with thunder incinerating them. Zeus thus killed his rival Titans whose ashes are said to have given rise to the race of men - the striving men. The nymphs, his wet nurses, were allowed to collect his body parts, including his phallus, and joyfully restore young Dionysos to life.
Dionysos dies at the hands of men and revives in the arms of women. It happens so because women have extraordinary access to the stream of life - zoë, and because Dionysos has the Supreme Man, Zeus, as his protector who is guiding the world toward recognition of that seemingly lower mode of existence.
There are times in the life of Dionysos when he travels the world incognito and alone, an abandoned and struggling youth. This is the time when he reaches the portal of the netherworld but needs directions and help to find exactly how to descend there. The price he pays to his guide is a sexual one - he allows himself to be penetrated. In the imagination of the Greeks it makes him partly a woman. The story of his descent into the underworld is again another story of death and resurrection of an emasculated Dionysos. Yet in his triumphant celebrations he is again surrounded by ecstatic women and virile Satyrs while himself being sometimes present as a pillar dressed in mask and a women's garment. In other events he is adored in the form of an erect phallus carried by women in a basket normally used for infants. Dionysos reflects the paradoxical nature of the male who is worshipped by but also surrendered to the female power for whom he becomes a prototype of a child.
Dionysos is the god of wine and intoxication, enabler of the ecstatic and unindividuated core of life. The goat, especially the he-goat, is the enemy of the vineyard. Admitted to the area he can destroy much of the vine very quickly. Thus the goat is selected as the sinner against the goods of Dionysos and destined to be the sacrificial animal. But the he-goat is also the companion of children including the child Dionysos. In the heart of the ancient spectator the he-goat sacrifice is a re-enactment of the sufferings of Dionysos as well as punishment for the sins against him. In the course of the sacrifice of the he-goat stories of the Dionysian sufferings are told, scenes are enacted among the noise of the prolonged cries of the martyred animal. Such is the genesis of tragedy - "the song for the he-goat" - which for the Greek meant generally "story about Dionysos." An ancient criticism of a theatrical act would sound like: "this had nothing to do with Dionysos". Drama and performance art in the ancient world were strongly associated with the paradoxical life of the god, full of suffering and transformation.
The he-goat sacrifice was a pre-classical precursor of the classical drama of Athens but was still performed as an introduction to the festivity of the Great Dionysia, the birth of the god, in Athens at the time of Thespis - the first dramatic actor. While the major opening act of the fest was the sacrifice of a bull rather than a little he-goat, the festivity was still a show of a series of tragedies presided over by religious authority. Tragedy was a religious service in honor of Dionysos.
Comedy followed being inspired by tragedy. Groups of men, intoxicated and ecstatic after viewing the tragedies, roamed the streets. It was said that the right mix of water and wine enabled them to be brilliant, granting them scintillating humor and great virility. These groups of men, called in Greek "komoi" (sing. "komos"), were enabled by the Dionysian pouring out of the zoë. Comedy was the way allowing men to forget their striving lives and pull closely toward nature in a free expression of their spirited minds and powerful presence of their bodies. Much of the expression was indeed unrestrained and sexual as the invitation from nature sounded very loud, but the result was often the delivery of flights of genius.
The birth of the miraculous child and its suffering bring about mourning and ecstasy in women - exposing the zoë stream of life in public. Wine, the gift of the god, allows the men to deliver their gift of brilliant expression and imagination and join in.
The great festival of Dionysia in ancient Athens has its modern day reenactment - unconsciously conceived in 1986 by Larry Harvey in San Francisco. Throngs of young and old converge on a desert in Nevada bringing their yearning for broader and deeper life. Ostentatiously they are seeking a party and fun that cannot be had in ordinary life. An escape from the ordinary which often results in kitschy art productions at the desert. But most important is the fact that all this is organized around and focused upon a structure of a man who is there waiting to be martyred in the final burn, just like the "suffering God". It is an image of a striving man, lone and masculine to be sure, to be elevated and allowing oneself to be destroyed, brought down to the underlying stream of life which is the Dionysian revelry of the party. The party of Burning Man is a supremely reenacted rite of crucifixion in which the participants are both the tormentors and executioners as well as compassionate soothsayers. This is so because they are re-energized to revive the man next year - the man who has trustingly descended into the undifferentiated stream of life.
Despite his ability to move scores of women into worshipful orgies Dionysos does not get close to any particular one - except for the improbable individual of Ariadne. Ariadne was a Minoan princess, sister of the monstrous Minotaur - man-bull creature conceived by her mother in passion for a Dionysian bull. The Minotaur was the shame of the kingdom and was enclosed in the trap of the Labyrinth. Ariadne had felt much compassion for her brother but also harbored a deep wish to be freed from the house clearly affected by a Dionysian curse. She was a different woman - one seeking liberation from "zoë", resistant to Dionysian passions. When the Athenian hero Theseus showed up on Crete to kill Minotaur she helped him. She showed him how to get lost in the Labyrinth while holding a path of return to the external world. The Labyrinth was an ancient Cretan dancing ground where reputedly one could get lost in ecstasy and find a way of new life. Labyrinths were places where "one gets lost in order to be found." Ariadne betrayed that function of the Labyrinth, while condemning her brother to death at the hands of the Athenian. She allowed herself to be seduced by him into Apollinian life and then betrayed and abandoned by Theseus on the deserted island of Naxos. She, the Minoan mistress of the Labyrinth, herself was lost and stuck on a lonely island. Dionysos recognized her betrayal and asked for her to be killed. As he does not kill directly he asked his brother and sister, Apollo and Artemis, for their bows and arrows. Ariadne dies to atone for her sin against Dionysos not like the striving men he usually punishes, but by the exacting arrows of the Apollinian gods.
Yet Ariadne survives resurrected later by Dionysos. Raised into marriage with him and into sojourn in the skies where one of the constellations is the Crown - the Crown of Ariadne. She is Dionysos's ultimate victim and consort. She is his crown.
There is an immense contrast between these two divine brothers - Dionysos and Apollo. While Apollo embraces and elevates anything that pursues perfection, refinement and superiority, Dionysos invites into orgy, madness and loss of individuality. Yet the Apollinian oracle can see the future only when she is enveloped by the fumes of boiling body of Dionysos. Dionysos never kills directly - he punishes by sending individual life into the stream of life - be it through madness or hopeless encounter with wild life. Apollo loves and pursues his beloved and in the end kills them - turning them into works of art. Apollo is arrogant, Dionysos is kind - even though both are ruthless. Apollo refines and crystallizes, Dionysos dissolves and dilutes. Both processes are needed and reflect the path to one's true self - that one has to have the courage to lose oneself in order to find oneself.
Dionysos is often characterized as the god of intoxication, madness and women. As a man immersed in zoë he arouses women to be his followers because they feel the manifestation of the stream of life to which they are connected flowing freely through him. Dionysos invites the feminine to pour out its energy and manifest it in an orgiastic fashion. An individual maenad will join in the celebration of the zoë, the unindividuated life, with others like her, forming raving packs given to violent acts. Curiously, this seemingly unbounded and orgiastic activity is guided by a god who is a man. Dionysos never comes in a direct sexual contact with his women worshipers - he merely frees them to manifest their nature. Dionysos invites men to join in the orgiastic madness of his ceremonies and become more like women. Those who refuse are punished. Pentheus in Bacchae is ripped to pieces by a pack of maenads which includes his own mother.
As god of women, a man immersed in zoë, Dionysos nobilitates the feminine energy, invites women to manifest it outwardly and demonstrates a way for the masculine to partake of it or assimilate it. In Tantra one of the ideas is for the man to develop and strengthen his feminine characteristics to get a better balance between the typical male outward impulse and inward female receptivity. Likewise a woman Tantrika is expected to develop more strongly an outward impulse expecting a better receptivity in her partner. Looking at Dionysos and his worshipers we clearly see that the unleashing of feminine energy creates an opening where men can forget their strident ambitions and "bios" way of life and join in the orgy of "zoë". The essential enabling element for this sort of abandon into the reality of zoë is the attitude of Dionysos. A man not afraid of his death, and even destruction of his individuality, and yet powerfully present, imbued with the feminine essence of zoë, projects the knowledge of the feminine and sets himself up as the women's friend, indeed their god. Dionysos is not a seducer of women but, in a subtle and profound way, one of them. He is a vessel into which the feminine nature can pour out the richness of the stream of life, revel in it and make a gift of it. He is the man ultimately worthy of this abundant gift unlike the striving men of "bios".
In Tantra one speaks of being completely, unflinchingly present in the experience. It is an expression of trusting the life process to take us through it and avoiding to control the process of its unfolding by the projects of the ego. This principle is embodied precisely by Dionysos - all the way to accepting one's own destruction. This sort of attitude invites the manifestation of "zoë" in its full force.
In the modern manner of speaking Dionysos gives us a representation of a particularly powerful interplay of the masculine and feminine principles. These are two modes of sexual relating: penetrating one opposed to enveloping, freedom versus fullness, negative versus positive. Dionysos is a god in the form of a man - wearing the masculine on the outside and filled and imbued with the feminine on the inside. Women around him feel and recognize his nature intuitively as they are the ones wearing the feminine on the outside - overflowing with sensual energy. In the presence of Dionysos they feel the masculine core within them, feel penetrated, as it were, by the depth of meaning he accords to zoë, while its abundance resonates with the god's feminine inside.
The Dionysian myth offers not so much a model of the masculine-feminine interaction as an explanatory principle of why these two separate modes exist and attract each other. More compellingly it explicates the urge of the masculine to immerse itself in the feminine. In order to see the other direction of attraction one ought to consider Apollo.
The Greek mythology is still a live mystery and will probably always be. Dionysos nad Apollo were not that separate from each to the Greek mind and attitude. Perhaps the nature of sexual relating was clearer to the ancients than to us in modern times.
Surreal Tee © 2010
on the basis of Carl Kerenyi's "Dionysos - Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life"