dionysus: an ecstatic death with a directed soul

So now, as always, Dionysus shows himself in his traditional forms- alluring,pansexual; madness reigns, an urge to dance comes over people, a trance inducing beat can be heard from the mountains, and the wine is uncorked. But if Dionysus is resisted, either collectively or individually, he comes with superhuman power to rend you apart. And first to go is the head, the seat of the intellect, and when the head is lost from the body, Dionysus carries it off in frightful triumph…

In the scene from Euripides’ play Bacchae, Pentheus is perched on his pine branch, while at the foot of the tree is a throng of frenzied maenads, among them his own mother. By one of those miracles that abound in the legends about Dionysus, the women seize the tree and uproot it with their bare hands. They pounce on the king and, with his mother leading them, tear him limb from limb. When he is dead, they play catch with gobbets of his flesh.

Donald Kuspit:Is Louise Bourgeois smiling because she no longer has to envy the penis, now that she has one in her clutches? You are looking at Robert Mapplethorpe’s famous photograph of Bourgeois in 1982, carrying Fillette, a sculpture she made in 1968. Speaking about the work in 1998, Bourgeois said, "When I wanted to represent something I loved, I obviously represented a little penis." But Fillette is not such a little penis -- a clitoris, as the title suggests. It is huge, almost as huge as the giant phallus a naked woman carries in a picture painted on an Attic vase by the so-called Painter of Pan. As Peter Webb tells us, such enormous phalluses were dedicated to Dionysus, and ritually carried in ceremonial processions by naked women, who often straddled them to ensure fertility, and as Webb adds, "for more immediate pleasure."...Read More:http://www.artnet.fr/magazineus/features/kuspit/bourgeois-the-phallic-woman11-3-10.asp image:http://dailyserving.com/2010/06/louise-bourgeois-mother-and-child-at-gallery-paule-anglim/

So Pentheus, dressed as a women, becomes an eerie double of the bisexual Dionysus, who, as it happens, is also his cousin. In the earliest versions of the legend, it is Dionysus who is torn apart. But Euripides makes Pentheus his stand-in for the climactic scene of dismemberment. Once every two years, in historical times, the women of Greece would leave their homes on a certain night in mid-winter, go to the mountains, and dance in the snow, dressed in fawn-skins, possessed. There was no drinking, for this was winter, but at the climax of the ceremony an animal, it might be a goat or a bull, was torn apart; then the women ate its bleeding flesh still warm, sharing in communion the raw power of Dionysus himself.

Israel Koren:( Martin) Buber counterpoised Dionysus with Orpheus, who went to his ecstatic death with a directed soul. He was not seduced by the divisive powers of chaos, but remained focused: hence the wild beasts did not tear him apart but arrayed themselves around him. …Orpheus’s ecstasy is parallel to the ecstasy of “Ecstatic Confessions” whereas Dionysus’s lot is identical to that of the mystics who float about like drunk eagles dripping blood above snow covered peaks….

Donald Kuspit:It was clearly an act of worship, in which the apotheosized penis -- the erect penis as a sacred totem and fertility symbol, and thus of the generative or creative power of nature -- was put to practical personal as well as religious social use. The two converge in what amounts to the naked woman’s appropriation of the penis as a prosthetic device -- such as we see on the leg of the female in the copulating Couple IV (1997). The leg is in effect a substitute penis, as portable and gigantic as Fillette, displaced downward and enlarged, making it ironically more emphatic and important, indeed, the most prominent, differentiated, and vivid feature of her otherwise featureless, anonymous, headless black body. The usual penis is five and luckily seven inches when erect, but the prosthetic penis is enormous, suggesting that it symbolizes the greatness of woman’s desire, or else her exaggeration of its power under the spell of her desire -- perhaps unconsciously more for the penis than the man who normally has it. The prosthetic leg takes it away from her male partner, and adds a jarring note to the couple’s intercourse, undermining it by suggesting that the female only needs the man nominally -- for his penis, not himself....Read More:http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/kuspit/bourgeois-the-phallic-woman11-3-10.asp


…Koren: What distinguishes between mystics is the principle of the directed focused soul. It is therefore possible for there to be an ecstasy of unity in which the powers of destruction, the powers of chaos implanted within the very core of creation, do not severe the “I” to pieces. This ecstatic ascent depends upon the directive powers of the person himself, who must remain focused so as not to be swept off into dangerous and destructive realms.

...another recreation scene by the artist Lawrence Alma-Tadema, entitled The Women of Amphissa. This is the 'morning after' the women have participated in one of the wild frenzied celebrations of Dionysus. Read More:https://pantherfile.uwm.edu/prec/www/course/mythology/0700/dionysus.htm

Ancient Athens tamed the violent Dionysus ceremonies, particularly that in mid-March , the lavish Greater Dionysia, a city-wide festival with displays of wealth and power and the performances of tragedy and comedy that made the theater of Dionysus at Athens famous. But if the action of the ritual became civilized and cultivated, the spirit of the myth did not. In the spring, wine bottled the previous year was opened, and spread its message of disorder and madness through the veins of the holiday makers. Generations of children were fathered in those nights of Dionysian chaos, in thickets and shadows outside some Greek city.

Selena Kuzman. Dionysian. 2009. Christgau:And by 500 or so, Dionysus and his dithyramb were fixtures of Athenian life, because the midcentury tyrant Peisistratus, in an end run around both the aristocracy and a potentially anarchic popular force, had by then instituted the Great Dionysia, a rival to the aristocratically controlled Pythian Games. In other words, Apollo versus Dionysus reduces to a power struggle between hereditary rulers and the populist big men who supplanted them. And so Dionysus's dithyramb, once what a rakish classicist calls "a merry song sung by anybody who was feeling up in the world (usually after a few jars)," came to be performed by an elaborate chorus, complete with choreography as contained and "noble" as all official dance in Greece. Pindar, the untranslatable poetic titan who was the last great spokesman of the Greek aristocracy, was one of its masters. Before too long, the dithyrambic chorus morphed into tragedy, considered the most sublime of art forms even by some Chuck Berry fans. You can read whole books about tragedy and never guess that a third of it was sung, but for the most part its musical history is off topic. Note, however, that tragic music was dominated by the aulo


hich like Dionysus himself came to be regarded as exotic, disreputable, low-class--at best non-Greek in origin (which like Dionysus it wasn't) and for Plato and lesser snobs a carrier of cultural contagion. Read More:http://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/music/dionysus-emp.php image:http://aestheticamagazine.blogspot.com/2010_04_11_archive.html

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Meanwhile, other gods with other titles absorbed the wildness of Dionysus. They were, like him, foreigners, newcomers with exotic names like Sabazios, Bendis and Adonis, who invaded Greek culture at the end of the fifth century B.C. When the Romans came and took over Greece, Dionysus simply went underground and was reincarnated as a multitude of Roman and Near Eastern cult figures. And he still ives. Just as Dionysian festivals abolished all distinctions and annihilated the boundaries of the self, we still today search for Nirvana in a capsule and, by annihilating a good part of many defective “rational” structures, hope to let the green shoots of new forms of consciousness peek through the cracks.

Lovis Corinth. Bacchanalia. 1896. Christgau:So rather than an avant-primitivist continuum we have the kind of decadence decried by, of all people, rock criticism's most distinguished classicist: Nick Tosches, a major Pindar and minor Doors fan who believes rock was formally exhausted by the late '60s. But before we get too disillusioned, let's remember that in the bargain we get tragedy, which for all its overrated sublimity is some kind of recompense. And remember too that the Dionysian reality that got rationalized was rarely if ever as ecstatic as that postulated by Palmer or Nietzsche. Wine festivals certainly didn't occasion as many rejoicing pricks as jealous playwrights and censorious legislators believed; the Dionysus who embraces death in affirmation of the collective life-force is a Nietzschean figment; the maenads who tear Pentheus limb from limb in The Bacchae are a Euripidean device. Nor need we altogether regret this loss. One of the hundred reasons I wish Robert Palmer was still alive is so I could ask him how he felt when Alain Daniélou, the most extreme contemporary Dionysian of any standing, argued that the caste system is a natural way of life and a small price to pay for Shiva, whose maxims include: "Women are light-minded. They are the source of all trouble. Men who seek liberation must avoid attaching themselves to women." Read More:http://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/music/dionysus-emp.php image:http://hoocher.com/Lovis_Corinth/Lovis_Corinth.htm

 

ADDENDUM:

lovis corinth. Baccants returning home. 1898. "The bacchanalia were originally held in secret and only attended by women. The festivals occurred in the grove of Simila near the Aventine Hill on March 16 and March 17. Later, admission to the rites was extended to men, and celebrations took place five times a month. According to Livy, the extension happened in an era when the leader of the Bacchus cult was Paculla Annia - though it is now believed that some men had participated before that. Livy informs us that the rapid spread of the cult, which he claims indulged in all kinds of crimes and political conspiracies at its nocturnal meetings, led in 186 BC to a decree of the Senate - the so-called Senatus consultum de Bacchanalibus, inscribed on a bronze tablet discovered in Apulia in Southern Italy (1640),..." Read More:http://hoocher.com/Lovis_Corinth/Lovis_Corinth.htm

Robert Christgau:For certain rock and rollers, the program will always be liberation through ecstasy, and all the rest of us can do is thank them for creating temporary autonomous zones and hope they don’t die before they get old. Early in The Bacchae, before Dionysus starts illing, the Asian chorus sings his praises. I don’t know the tune, so I’ll just read:

These blessings he gave:

laughter to the flute
and the loosing of cares
when the shining wine is spilled… Read More:http://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/music/dionysus-emp.php

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405 BC was a long time ago. But Dionysus enjoyed a revival in the 19th century with Frederick Nietzsche, and through his influence, the great deviants of modernism – the Dada-ists, Surrealists, Artaud, Malarme, Baudelaire, Bataille. From the sixties to the eighties Michel Foucault wrote passionately about resurrecting ‘The Dionysian.’ In book after book turning sexual guilt into pain, into pleasure – hate into love, into ecstasy. To say YES to the chaos of life.

What Nietzsche was saying and Foucault after him was that there must be a balance between the two impulses in man – The Apollonian (God of Order) and the Dionysian (God of Chaos). Nietzsche foresaw a world in which Apollonian order would triumph. A world mechanised, reproduced in each living body, in which each person would conform to an industrialised model of normalcy. Read More:http://www.nationaltheatrescotland.com/content/default.asp?page=s313

The warning resounded through Foucault. If, he claimed, the revolutionary and destructive element in us is repressed and not celebrated it re-appears in more destructive forms (mass surveillance, consensual slavery to ‘norms’ etc) which ultimately end in wars against those who are ‘different’ and ‘other’: the aberrant, the perverse, the homo-sexual, the individualistic, the religious.

So are we living in the age of Dionysus? Or that of enforced norms?

We watch sex on TV, on DVD, our moments of transgression – an hour on the weekend when we fuck or scream or puke. Is this an affirmative YES to life? Do we experience the transmutation of all that is negative in ourselves into total affirmation as Dionysus did?

No, we have never been further from that spirit. Apollo has gone too far. We live now in a time where watching late night TV is to live vicariously through those who transgress for us. Waiting for someone to fuck on Big Brother. Read More:http://www.nationaltheatrescotland.com/content/default.asp?page=s313

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