… and Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat, and confess over him all the iniquities of the people of Israel, and all their transgressions, and all their sins; and he shall put them upon the head of the goat, and send him away into the wilderness. … The goat shall bear all their iniquities upon him to a solitary land; and he shall let the goat go in the wilderness.
LEVITICUS 16:21–22
In biblical times on Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement, all the sins of the Jewish people were heaped on the back of a goat. The goat was then driven off into the wilderness, ostensibly taking all the evils away with it. To this day we “scapegoat” certain groups of people, conveniently blaming them for all the ills of society.
Somebody—I wish I knew who it was—defined our age as the time when the Old Testament scapegoats are coming home. Leading them is the original scapegoat, Dionysus.
The Goat
The Greeks had a powerful ceremony to ensure the continuance of the ecstatic principle. They took a young goat to symbolize Dionysus, killed it, cut it into seven pieces, and stewed it in its mother’s milk. Psychologically, they took the irrational, jumpy quality symbolized by the goat and killed it, returning it to the underworld, taking it back to where it came from. They put the goat into its mother’s milk to take it back to its origin, where there is only peace and happiness. They then ate this as a kind of Communion. This was the highest symbol of the ecstatic quality that the Greeks could devise.
The Romans took this ecstatic quality and perverted it by making Dionysus into Bacchus and crowning him the god of drunkenness. Their culture reveled in materialism and excess, and Dionysus was perverted to their own use.
He fared no better with the Jews, who like the Greeks had lived a matrifocal life for a long time before their recorded history began. Dionysus was no stranger to the Jews. Coins from this time, found near Gaza, picture Dionysus on one side and Jehovah on the other.
At around this time the Jews seem to have decided—at least in their collective unconscious—to establish a patriarchal society based almost exclusively on masculine laws and ruled by the vengeful, judgmental Jehovah. We have the legacy of that decision to this day. Our reasonableness and sense of discipline come largely from the Jewish genius of setting up a patriarchal society. But they could do this only by an almost total suppression of Dionysus, the other side of the coin.
Fortunately, a bit of Dionysus does live on in the Jewish tradition—far more than in the Christian tradition as it is practiced in most of the Western world. As a culture Judaism never lost its spontaneity, love of dance, and humor. But the Jews had so much of this quality that, subconsciously, they felt in danger of being overwhelmed by it. So they put a lid on it. And I think at the high point of Jewish history they struck a beautiful cultural balance—the spark and fun of Dionysus with enough of the patriarchal form for structure. But we in the Western world have forgotten spontaneity and brightness and have taken only Jehovah, the god of vengeance who thunders the law.
The Jews banned the Dionysian quality in a very interesting way. In Leviticus it is said, “It is forbidden to seethe a kid in its mother’s milk.” This curious injunction was the process of banishing forever the Dionysian quality, which was so strong in the Greek world around them.
In Orthodox Jewish households to this day there are two sets of cooking utensils—one for meat and one for dairy. Anything that is cooked with meat is served on one set of dishes, eaten with its own utensils, and washed in its own dishpan. The same goes for the dairy food. In this way the kid may never meet its mother’s milk again. The Dionysian quality is banished.
This enormous effort on the part of the Jews to maintain their identity in a world largely fashioned by Greek thought still has an effect on us today, because of course we follow the Judeo-Christian tradition and have the Old Testament qualities about us. Thus the Dionysian in us has been officially obliterated.
The Sheep
The goat was now off-limits. So what did Judaism and, later, Christianity do for a symbol? It adopted the sheep, “the Lamb of God who taketh away our sins”: about as opposite a symbol as one could devise.
The sheep is certainly not like the mischievous goat. It is docile, the eternal victim. The Bible refers many times to the sheep being separated from the goats. We have translated this in our modern Western minds as separating the right from the wrong, the noble from the ignoble, the righteous from the unrighteous. That mythology has been built into us so deeply that the goat quality, the ecstatic Dionysian quality, still does not function in us today.
Sheep represent everything of value in our Judeo-Christian world. The sheep, in fact, is the chief determinant of our currency. Every currency in the Western world—the shilling, the franc, the deutsche mark, the lira, the peso, and the Austrian thaller (from which we get our dollar)—was the price of one sheep. For centuries there was no inflation in the Western world because one of our money pieces was worth a sheep. You could count on that anywhere, anytime.
The Scapegoat
So the sheep was in and the goat, Dionysus, was out totally. The ecstatic quality, the capriciousness of life that the Greeks enjoyed so much, was discredited. The goat became the scapegoat. It was given a very bad name—so bad that it came to represent the worst evil. Dionysus Melangius, “Dionysus of the Black Goatskin,” was an ancient scapegoat-satyr form of the god, whose appearance greatly influenced the medieval Christian notion of what the devil should look like. To this day the devil is pictured with the goat’s horns, cloven hooves, and tail. In medieval Christian Europe, goats were renowned for their lechery and were said to be familiars of witches.
Significantly, the scapegoated groups are usually those that are out of power. The classic example of this in our own time is the scapegoating of the Jews by the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s. In the West the decision makers are typically adult, white, Anglo-Saxon males who hold responsible positions. Our scapegoats, then, are the ones who do not fit the mold—women, people of color or other religions, youth, artists. To these groups we give the attributes of Dionysus. Women are often said to be irrational, unpredictable, capricious, and likely to turn violent, especially sexually: “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.” (Remember Hera?) The stereotypical black or Latino is thought of as “naturally musical.” Such groups are “not to be trusted” with rational decisions. And the youth, of course, are considered to be hopeless. Their music screams, their dancing is wild, and they are completely unpredictable.
Return of the Scapegoat
What happens to a scapegoat? Does it disappear, never to be seen again? Absolutely not. Scapegoats will eventually return to those who sent them away.
Our scapegoats are coming home, and leading them is Dionysus—emerging once again from the sea of the collective unconscious, reborn in our world and asking to be humanized before his archetypal energy runs amok. As he did in ancient times, the god is throwing off his chains, flowing as glorious wine, and demanding to be heard.
And he will be heard, because this is the inescapable truth: You cannot kill a god. You can only repress him, sacrifice him, drive him to the underworld and to a new epiphany. But you cannot get rid of him. We carry the archetype of ecstasy deep within us, and it must be lived out with dignity and consciousness. The scapegoat, Dionysus, is returning; and we must recognize him and welcome him back gladly.