For a long time now we have lived with the Lamb of God, who taketh away the sins of the world, and a high and beautiful and finely differentiated culture has been won in that fashion. But now it is time to do something for the goat, the joyous Dionysian quality.
It is no longer a question of either/or, the lamb or the goat; we must bring the lamb and the goat together. To do this we must honor both the rational and irrational aspects of ourselves, just as the Greeks once accorded equal honor to Apollo and Dionysus at Delphi.
Unlike the Greeks, however, we have no established Dionysian cult or ritual to which we can turn. We are not likely to tear a goat to pieces these days! Because we have so effectively removed the Dionysian experience from our world, we can no longer look for it outside ourselves. Instead we must turn inward to find the archetype of ecstasy.
We can touch Dionysus and learn to express that archetypal joy through three psychological disciplines: active imagination, dreamwork, and ritual. The first two are wonderful and direct ways to contact the ecstasy and joy within us, and it is in this context that we will discuss them here.* The third, ritual, has been very much neglected in the twentieth century. With it we can learn how to contact the Dionysian element within ourselves, and to contain and formalize the ecstatic experience.
Before We Begin
We like to think of ourselves as individuals. But it is important to remember that, on a deep level, we are really plural beings. That is, we are one being made up of quite a number of distinct personalities, behaviors, archetypes, all looking for expression. When we first dip beneath the surface in search of these personalities, we may feel insecure because we are in uncharted waters. For this reason the first appearance of the god can be terrifying, and your first response may be to run for your life.
Don’t! Remember, everything comes from one source, and the unity of that oneness can be restored. As I have said elsewhere, a good place to begin our understanding of inner work is with the Nicene Creed, Credo In Unum Deum: I believe in one God. Psychologically, this means that there is only one source, one beginning, one unity, out of which all life flows and to which it returns. You cannot get lost because you are already home.
According to Jung, humanity holds a special role in creation: to contribute to the act of consciousness, and the point of view of morality, in its highest sense. Raw archetypes, like tornadoes, are amoral. A tornado doesn’t care where it touches down or what it destroys; it is simply acting as it is meant to act. We have no control over the actions of a tornado. We can, however, come to terms with an archetype—because, in a real sense, it is us.
Always remember that you have influence in the archetypal world. In the introduction I told you about Dr. Jung’s observation that the ego has the same relationship to the collective unconscious as a cork does to the ocean on which it floats. But because the ego has consciousness, it can make a dialogue of equals with the unconscious. In the same way the “I” and Dionysus are equals; but the “I” has the inestimable value of being conscious. Because both the “I” and the archetype arise from the same source, the collective unconscious, they can find a common ground and strike a common chord.
With this in mind, let us look for Dionysus.