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.
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….
…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.
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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.
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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.
ADDENDUM:
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