Dionysus Commentary

Dionysus is the archetype of ecstatic religious experience. His myth is a metaphor about his role in the psyche and his positive and negative impacts on human history and a description of the psychology of ecstatic union with the divine and the experience of joy. But denied, Dionysus brings madness, murder, and anger.

Modern man has "lost this god" and denied him. His myth tells the story of the triumph of rationality over irrationality; thinking over feeling; the concrete "masculine" ideals of power, aggression, and progress over the intangible "feminine "values of receptivity, instinctive ness and nurturing. His loss coincided with the rise of the patriarch cal religions of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism and the decline of the matriarchal, Nature religions of the past. He symbolizes the irrational world of our senses as it interacts with the rational world of rules and limitations.

Dionysus has been called the most important of the Greek gods. He is the god of wine, the god of abandon, the great liberator, the god of ecstasy, the bull god, the vine, and a shapechanger. He stands as a complement to Apollonian reason, logic, thinking, progress and success. Without Dionysus, Apollonian rationality turns dark and becomes Wolf Apollo, a murderer and frightening projection of the shadow. Dionysus' rising releases Mankind from the tension of structure, rules, and self-limiting behaviours, values, morals, or concepts of self.

The Dionysian way is to see the world through the senses rather than through the mind. The realities of the "worshipper" of Dionysus is sensuous--sexually explicit; it has intimations of guilt-free sexuality to it as well as spiritual ecstasy. The follower of this way is able to drop their worldly responsibility for awhile, and be free; to let go of all that work and need to be as others wish us to be is his need!

Dionysus was lost through the elevation of patriarchal values and the denigration of feminine values in societies in the West. "Feeling" as the basis of making choices became unacceptable and was repressed. It is this psychological repression that is the denial of the god.

Repressed emotions and needs do not go away. They simply come back in an alternative (shape-shifted) and more negative form. The need for genuine religious experience denied returns as madness and rage. We see that rage and madness in riots of angry ghetto residents when provoked by police injustice, or in the riots of disappointed soccer fans in Europe or South America. We see that madness and rage in the actions of Islamic terrorists, as well as in American retaliation using torture and abusive interrogation methods. Instead of Apollonian justice, the rationalist rules of society get thrown out and murder is justified on the basis of fear or anger.

Repressed Dionysian needs in an Apollonian culture such as ours get diverted into materialist forms, such as the pursuit of power, acquisition of wealth, excessive eating, sexuality, alcohol and other addictions. Addiction is the outcome of the denial of our Dionysian needs. But at the core of these compulsions of material excess lies a spiritual vacuum. The denial of our Dionysian character creates a neurosis characterized by a hunger for genuine spirituality.

Another result of our refusal of our Dionysian character is our inability to allow others to "touch us." We shrink from physical contact with others--strangers especially. We fear the sexual aggressiveness of strangers. We hide our children away because we fear the sexual perversions of strangers. Our own inner fears of psychotic strangers and pedophiles reflects our own education in sexual matters and our own repression of our sexuality. In fact, it is often the twisted and perverted sexuality of parents that produces the sexually twisted personalities which stalk our dark places and alleys of our hometowns. Sexually healthy and mature parents does not create psychopaths through perverted child-raising practices.

Repressed sexuality produces men who are unable to express themselves in any way except rage against women, who rape instead of court with tenderness, who manipulate instead of respect.

Without sacred means of expressing our Dionysian qualities, our needs are diverted into compulsions or addictions such as substance abuse, child molesting, domestic violence, muggings, wars, terrorism, and madness.

To worship Dionysus is to worship the Life Force, for that is what "He" is. Community values which repress that Life Force, be they political, moral, or religious, are life denying.

In the Western tradition, man has his needs to appear manly. He is very uncomfortable with his "feeling" side. Homophobia in the west is a religiously tolerated phenomenon, and many traditional "believers" excoriate homosexual relationships. Dionysus was, of course, raised as a girl and driven mad by Hera (Great Mother goddess); as a result, he was androgenous, displaying a personality and behaviour characteristic of both man and woman. Often pictured wearing women's clothes and make-up, he presented a very uncomfortable image to the kings he confronted in his travels. They denied him and persecuted him, but in time they were "torn to pieces" by Dionysus's Maenad followers or by their own mothers.

The issue is that each of us--women and men--possess both feeling and logical natures; each of us has both a man and a woman within. To deny our own opposite nature within results in a fragmentation of our psyche. Men repress their own feeling nature, and by so doing, put huge pressure on their masculine nature. Their Apollo nature turns dark, with the result that they are ruled by their anger and turn mad. In the meantime, they are ruled by compulsions to work, to drink, to control their women, to seek sex constantly to manage their rage and anxiety. Psychologically, they are torn apart; they fall apart emotionally and psychologically, experience emotional break-downs, burn out too soon, fall into depression and anxiety disorders as "madness" rises within their own minds.