From joy springs all creation.
By it is sustained,
Towards joy it proceeds,
And to joy it returns.
MUNDAKA UPANISHAD
The Dionysian experience is immediate and galvanizing: ecstasy or madness. This may be extreme, but it corresponds closely to our real psychological and spiritual needs. Today our scrupulously clean, law-abiding religions have little place for either the love of God or the fear of God. Like the Hindu who nearly starved on the sanitized British food, we suffer the effects of spiritual malnutrition.
When we deny ourselves contact with the awe-fulness and terror of the soul, we do ourselves great damage. When we conceive of heaven as a clean, well-lighted place with pleasant harp music and bland angels, we eviscerate our religion. When there is no longer any official room in our religious observance for the ecstasy of divinity or the dark night of the soul, we experience that light and darkness in whatever way we can. In other centuries that way might have been called possession; we have chosen to express it through physical and psychological symptoms.
I once upset an audience of seminarians in this regard by insisting that neurosis is actually a low-grade religious experience. One young man jumped up and said, “Do you mean to tell me that God is to be found in those kinky things that I do at midnight, that I would die if anyone found out about, and which I haven’t even gotten up the nerve to confess?” For many people our religious structure has become just that: structure devoid of meaning.
But if you look closely and with open eyes you will see that Dionysus inhabits even our most staid religious structures—an idea that may be shocking to those churchgoers who conceive of the goat Dionysus as more akin to the devil. Take a look at the Christian Communion service, for example, and you will see that a Dionysian ritual is being carried out behind the safety of the altar rail. There we have betrayal, murder, crucifixion; the god become wine. If we can understand a Communion service as it really is—the inner meaning, not the outer structure—we will be so frightened and chills will go down our spines so violently that we will have to be transformed—which, after all, is the point of the ritual.
I recently witnessed a particularly compelling form of such a transformation in India. Like all traditional non-European societies, India has kept an honored place for Dionysian expression. (The god Siva is the chief carrier of Dionysus, but Dionysus also lives in the sensuous life of Krishna.) One day I made a visit to the temple of Tiruvanamalai and found myself confronted with a dancing Dionysus who took my breath away.
I saw a young man, accompanied by two drummers, cracking a long leather whip with explosive force. He made a great deal of sound with his whip, the drums beat louder and faster, and he danced a wild, sensuous step. A moment later he made another crack of the whip, which was aimed to dig out a chunk of flesh from his arm or chest. Blood flowed, agony was on his face. Then he danced his pain into an ecstatic state with a fury and energy I had never witnessed before. His face was transformed from pain to ecstasy by his dance.
After several of these flagellations (there are Christian parallels to this in the flagellants of the medieval church) he went to the shopkeepers around the temple asking for coins. The tradition is that one man takes on the task of inviting pain to himself and dancing it into ecstasy so that the community can be freed of this suffering. The community then provides the living for the dancer.
His dance was too raw and rough for my Western eyes, but I was aware that I had witnessed the Dionysian principle of the transformation of suffering into ecstasy in so direct a form as to take my breath away.
Dionysus and Western Christianity
To follow Dionysus is to enter the realm of the spirit, to experience the ecstasy of union with the divine. In John 6:53–54 Jesus says, “Truly, truly I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you; he who eats my flesh [bread] and drinks my blood [wine] has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.” In John 15:1 ff., Jesus says, “I am the vine.” For the person taking Communion the bread is the flesh, the wine is the blood. The followers of Dionysus also consumed their god symbolically, as goat flesh, and drank him in the same way: as wine.
I am often asked if I see any connection between Dionysus and the expressions of Jesus, and the answer is, yes.
This is not as surprising as it may sound. Every disciplined or elaborate culture—as ours certainly is—needs a reprieve from its responsibilities. The Greeks had Dionysus to help them stand outside themselves and be free of their burdens for a moment. The Romans, who followed them, took the Dionysian principle off into an orgiastic expression, a drunken brawl, and renamed him Bacchus. Christianity came along and restored the ecstatic principle in the figure of Christ—twice-born, much as Dionysus is thrice-born. Christ is the god of love, the god of ecstasy, the visionary god. For me the figure of Jesus is a new trial at making respectable, making human, making workable the transcendent principle: that which shows us something greater than ourselves.
Anybody who has ever loved another human being knows what the incarnation is, because in human flesh we have godhood or goddesshood walking before us. A lover may “idolize” or “adore” the loved one: a man may “put a woman up on a pedestal.” To experience the love of God through our senses—by loving another human being—is just as good as through any other faculty, although Christianity has certainly downplayed it. Jung once observed that we distort our principal mandala, the cross, by making the bottom longer than the arms or top. The Greeks had better sense: They made all points of the cross equal because they valued the sensuous and intellectual worlds equally. Because we diminish the senses, the lower half, we overcompensate the earthy dimension of the cross. Western Christianity is out of balance in this matter of sensation. Jesus was equally spirit and matter, but we tend not to believe that way. This quality in Jesus has been misunderstood so totally that he has, paradoxically, become the chief enemy of the Dionysian element in the Christian world.
One of the Hindu saints said, “The best way possible to worship God is simply to be happy.” And we’ve lost that. We have looked only at Jesus’ suffering and taken it to ourselves. We feel that if we do not suffer as he did, we are not good people, and we certainly will not go to heaven. I don’t think it was the nature of Christ to be so repressive as Christianity has become.
Jesus and Dionysus
The Antioch chalice, a famous Christian chalice, shows Christ engaged in one of Dionysus’s favorite activities—swinging on a seat of grapevines, poised between two worlds. This is a clear reference to the Dionysian precedent. We should not be surprised at the many parallels between Jesus and Dionysus. No matter how we try to suppress them, the archetypes that dwell within us all will look for avenues of expression. If we shut the door, they will come in the window. If we force them to take off one disguise, they will reappear in another.
Jesus and Dionysus are both sons of divine fathers and mortal, virgin mothers. Christ harrowed hell, Dionysus emerged from the underworld. Semele ascended to Olympus as Thyone, the Virgin Mary ascended to heaven. Dionysus and Jesus were both hailed as the King of Kings. At Eleusis the followers of Dionysus celebrated his “Advent” with a newborn baby placed in a winnowing basket—the forerunner of baby Jesus in the manger.
Both Jesus and Dionysus die—Jesus on the cross, Dionysus at the hands of the Titans; and both are reborn, symbolizing the life that does not end. Dionysus ascends to Olympus, Jesus to heaven, and both sit at the right hand of their father.
Like Jesus, Dionysus was usually not believed when he claimed to be the son of God. Both suffered at the hands of local political authorities; both had retinues comprising outcasts and women of questionable repute; and both showed a disregard for the established modes of worship.
And, of course, the wine. One of Jesus’ miracles was turning water into wine, something Dionysus can be said to do on a regular basis: One waters the vine, grows the grape, and turns it into wine. Eucharist is a ceremony of ex stasis—drinking the wine, the blood of God, and transcending time and space to become for a moment divine.
So we have tried to kill the god, to extinguish the ecstatic experience. But he always returns, and with each return he seems to gain strength and power. We dethrone Dionysus, tear him to bloody bits, boil him in a pot, and he returns as Jesus. We crucify Jesus, and he is reborn.