What an opening! A 12-foot spacewalking astronaut, a spaceship and a blimp flew over the crowd on guy-wires. There were flashing spotlights, exploding flashpots, belching fog everywhere, deafening noise for four minutes. … Thousands of boys and young men. … pushed, shoved, slam-danced and reached riot-pitch as the band increased its sonic attack. … At the show’s climax … a gargantuan inflatable head … billowed up under Nicko McBrain’s drum kit at stage center, leaving McBrain bobbing 15 feet above the stage atop the head.
REVIEW OF THE HEAVY METAL BAND IRON MAIDEN
BY LARRY KELP, OAKLAND TRIBUNE, FEBRUARY 23, 1987
What goes up must come down.
ANONYMOUS
When Semele became filled with the joyous light of Zeus, she conceived Dionysus. But when she asked the impossible—to look directly at the divine fire—she was destroyed. In the life and death of Semele we can see the positive and negative sides of Dionysian energy: enthusiasm and inflation.
Enthusiasm and Inflation
Enthusiasm is truly a divine word because it means “to be filled with God” (en-theo-ism). Thus to be visited by an enthusiasm is legitimately to be filled with God. The soul is enhanced where the self is activated—a beautiful experience. Joy is a part of this.
Inflation, on the other hand (and this is a meaning that Jung attached to this word), means to be filled with air—generally hot air. Inflation means to be blown up, to have your ego puffed up, to be arrogant. It is always an egocentric experience because one has taken the air, the spirit, and assimilated it with the ego—and then one goes off like the puffed-up idiot that one has become.
We must know the difference between an enthusiasm, which is entirely legitimate—a visitation of God—and an inflation, which is always followed by a crash of some kind. If you find that you can’t stop a flow of energy, then—paradoxically—you must stop it. If you can’t put on the brakes and slow down, then do anything—bail out, jump off—but do whatever you have to do to stop. Because that which takes on a life and momentum of its own and can’t be stopped must be stopped, and as quickly as possible. This is a good test for inflation.
An inflation is always of traumatic proportions; in fact, it is a small psychosis. We go a little mad, get driven out of our true orbit, and become a fanatic.
Certainly none of us is immune to inflation—myself included. I will never forget the Englishman in London who, after quietly listening to me hold forth on some of my youthful carryings on, leveled a very steady finger at me and said, “You, sir, are a heretic and a fanatic.” I was deflated on the spot, and I have never been so subject to fanaticism again. He woke me up.
Induction and conduction, a pair of terms from the language of electricity, can help explain how enthusiasm and inflation work. Induction is characteristic of enthusiasm. You stand close enough to a source of energy to be energized or warmed or quickened by it, but none of that energy flows into your system directly. For example, you can safely warm yourself by standing near a radiator. Conduction, in contrast, consists of direct contact with a source of energy. Some of that energy comes flooding into you directly—just as if you put your finger into a light socket.
All transformers work on the principle of induction. Electricity of proper voltage goes through a coil and back out where it came from. Other coils, very close by, get a charge of energy excited by induction and take their energy off for household use—lower voltage, generally. But no energy from the first set ever enters directly into the second set.
This is excellent; this is safe, controllable transformation of energy. Semele was able to be impregnated by Zeus because he appeared to her transformed; she received the god by induction. In this way we can stand close to God or to the collective unconscious and be safe. When 100,000 volts of unconscious energy flows on its way, 110-volt household current is generated in our human lives, and we are enlightened by it.
But should conduction begin, then some of that 100,000 volts would leap directly over to the second system and blow it up. It would be as if 100,000 volts suddenly began to flow into your wall sockets. It would break everything! It is no wonder that when Semele looked directly into the fiery face of Zeus, god of the thunderbolt, she was incinerated.
So: Induction produces enthusiasm and conduction produces inflation. These are good models to go by.
Inflation: Put on the Brakes
Inflation, the conduction, makes us behave as if we were mad. This is such a wretched business because it is like drunkenness—Dionysus in his degraded, Bacchanalian form. When you get drunk the first thing you lose is your capacity to see that you are getting drunk.
The first inkling I have that I’m inflating doesn’t come from me, because at that point it’s already too late—I’m too pleased with myself to have any objectivity. So how do I know? If I am giving a lecture I hear a wretched tone of voice echoing off the back wall. I hear this high-pitched whine, a wail, and I know that I’ve gone off into inflation—something that everyone who has been listening to me has been painfully aware of for the last half-hour. So when I hear this tone I simply stop speaking, take a deep breath, and continue in a more human manner.
For many of us, unfortunately, inflation has become the norm. A thing must be outsized if it is to interest us. Car dealers try to sell us “the deal of the century” we have to work our way through a forest of neon signs, desperately flashing their messages to get our attention, just to walk down the street; fast-food restaurants have no small-size order of fries, just “regular” and “large.” We moderns are so jaded, for any of a hundred different reasons, that unless we are inflated we feel that there’s no life going on. We must go out and squeal the tires, blast our eardrums with sound.
We are so inured to the things of the spirit that we actively search for the inflation rather than for the enthusiasm. And because Dionysus is served up to us so often in the form of inflation—dancing nude on the beach, participating in group sex, getting roaring drunk and tearing up the town—he has gotten a very bad name. This is the hardest struggle in discussing Dionysus: the fact that almost all the examples of him are issuing forth into the world as inflation and are destructive.
The negative Dionysus has perhaps nowhere been as destructive as it was when expressed as the Nazism of the 1930s and 1940s in Germany, which scapegoated the Jews so terribly. It was made up of legitimate material that came flooding up from the German unconscious. But it affixed itself to the collective German ego to become one of the worst fanaticisms and inflations that the world has ever known. And what wreckage it left in its wake!
The details of the rise of Nazism are extremely interesting. Dr. Jung said that he felt something brewing in the German psyche soon after World War I. He wrote his first article about it in 1921, and spoke of the blond beast stirring in the German unconscious. The beast surfaced as Nazism in the early 1930s and came forth as World War II, a whirlwind that devastated Europe. What a lesson to learn! Jung felt that it was Wotan, the German Dionysus, who had energized and fueled the Nazi movement. Wotan was called the Berserker, a word which has been drawn into the English language to mean “that which has run amok.”
For centuries it had been foretold in Europe that the Third Reich would rise in Europe and be its salvation. Jung, of course, knew about this; and when Nazism first came rushing out of the German unconscious and was labeled the Third Reich, he was cautiously interested. He watched and waited, looked and wondered. Was this the heralded Wotan, rushing up to illuminate twentieth-century Europe?
One day in Germany Jung had occasion to go to a Hitler rally and hear the führer speak. All Jung’s hopes were dashed. “It is madness,” he said, and immediately began to write against it. He became so vocal that before the end of the war the Nazis had put a price on Jung’s head.
Enthusiasm!
When we see frightening examples of negative Dionysian energy, such as Nazism, we are rightfully afraid of doing any work with the Dionysian quality in ourselves. We say, “He’s too dangerous. He drives people to do crazy things.” This is a bit like saying that you should never go to a hospital because people so often die there. The argument is compelling but it doesn’t hold up. If we understand the difference between enthusiasm, being filled with God, and inflation, being filled with hot air, we will be quite safe.
So how can we—safely—invite Dionysus back into our lives? With enthusiasm! To express ecstasy with dignity and consciousness we must meet it head on, with a joyful spirit of acceptance.
Enthusiasm annuls the distance between the pairs of opposites, and this brings ecstatic joy. A visitation of God, which enthusiasm gives, transcends the duality of one’s life—the either/or—and brings them into a synthesis. This is an experience beyond price. Then, for a short time—because this is all that we can stand—the opposites cease torturing us. When we transcend the cross of opposites, we will find ecstatic joy.