What does the mythic relationship between Dionysus and the Titans suggest about our titanism and titanic culture, and ways to mitigate the destructive influence of titanic fantasies?
“Oh how lucky you are, how really lucky you are, if you know the gods from within…”
—Euripides, The Bacchae
Transcript of Dionysus and the titanic
Hello, and welcome to Myth Matters, storytelling and conversation about mythology and why myth matters to your life today. I’m your host and personal mythologist Dr. Catherine Svehla. Wherever you may be in this wide, beautiful, crazy world of ours, you are part of this story circle.
We’ve been talking about the current war between the Titans and the Olympians, and the ways that each of us participates in the struggle between the titanic impulses in human nature and the Olympian order, specifically the Zeusian posture. The titanic and the Zeusian are styles of imagining before they become styles of thinking, speaking, acting. I’m defining these two styles, following James Hillman, as the difference between the emptiness of the abstract and ungraspable (titanic), and the excess of that unbounded space, and the animate world populated by well differentiated and imaged individuals, a world of the gods, small “g.”
I ended the last podcast with this question: how can you cultivate the wide imagination of Zeus to reduce the titanic impulse in our world today?
We can consider this question from another angle by looking at another member of the Olympic pantheon who like Zeus, exists in tension with the titanic, the god Dionysus or Bacchus. Dionysus is commonly associated with wine, intoxication, and ecstatic dancing, with the hedonism of festivities like the Bacchanal, and with hysteria, bloody dismemberment, and madness.
Today I want to expand on this web of association, deepen your sense of its significance, and explore the myths that link Dionysus with the earlier race of gods called the Titans. For the ancient Greeks, this god personified the primal energy of life, the life force itself. This is the force that drives through the green fuse, that fuels the flower as Dylan Thomas writes. The ancient Greeks called this vitality “zoe.” James Hillman describes the zoe of Dionysus as “a savage and tender desire to live.”
What does the mythic relationship between Dionysus and the Titans suggest about our titanism and titanic culture, and ways to mitigate the destructive influence of titanic fantasies?
In the recent podcast about Zeus, we started with the myths surrounding his birth, so let’s take that approach with Dionysus. Or try to take this approach, as the tangle of stories around the origins of this provocative god or archetypal field, is especially dense. It’s quite likely that Dionysus predates the Olympians and Zeus and was incorporated into the later mythology, and also that he migrated into ancient Greek culture from other parts of the world, from communities east of the Hellenes, and these historical factors may account for the various forms of his birth mythology.
According to the mainstream or more popular version, Dionysus is the son of Zeus and the mortal woman Semele, a daughter of the Greek King Cadmus, founder of Thebes. If you are familiar with Euripides’s famous play about Dionysus, “The Bacchae,” you recall that the play takes place in Thebes as the god has returned to his mother’s hometown. But I want to begin with the myths found in the Orphic tradition as Semele likely belongs to a later mythopoesis.
In Orphic mythology, which is based on the stories of Orpheus, Dionysus, called Zagreus, was the son of Zeus and his daughter Persephone, the queen of the underworld. Zeus came to Persephone in the form of a serpent, a symbol of renewal and rebirth in cultures around the world. Zeus wanted Zagreus to assume rule of the world but the Fates prevented this. Anticipating Hera’s jealousy of the boy, Zeus hid Zagreus and entrusted his immortal son Apollo, with the baby’s care. Apollo undertook this task with the aid of the Curetes, who were childhood companions of Zeus’s when he was hidden from his father Cronus.
However, Hera managed to find Zagreus and sent the Titans to abduct him. Some say that Zagreus tried to escape by changing into a variety of forms, including the shape of a bull, but this was in vain. Some say that the Titans arrived with toys– a ball, top, and a mirror, and that they captured the boy while he was playing. In both versions, the Titans tore Zagreus to pieces, boiled some of them, and then ate some of the pieces, cooked and raw. They drank some of his blood. They didn’t eat the heart, which was left behind and found by Athena who brought it to Zeus.
Zeus struck the Titans with lightning, and they were consumed by fire. Some say that the first human beings were made from their ashes. This may be the source of our titanism and tendency to willfully destroy what gives life, and also the source of the divine in our nature. In some versions, Zeus then gave the heart to his mother Rhea, earth, and she brought Dionysus back to life. The child was then raised by mountain nymphs. In other versions, Zeus made the heart into a potion, which he gave to the mortal woman Semele to drink. She then became pregnant with Zagreus, now to be known as Dionysus.
The more popular birth myth of Dionysus picks up here. In this version, Semele falls in love with Zeus and becomes pregnant. When she begins to show, her family presses her for details and the young woman confides that Zeus is the father. Some of Semele’s family members are dubious but when this news reaches Hera, the goddess wife of Zeus, she has no doubt. Hera disguises herself as a nurse and goes to visit Semele. She gently inquires after the child and Semele tells her story to this sympathetic ear. She tells the nurse that she’s in love and that she has never really seen her lover, who comes to her in various forms in the darkness of night. Hera latches onto this detail and in an assumed spirit of concern, wonders if Zeus is really the father, if perhaps Semele could be the victim of a cruel trick, even carrying a monster child.
Semele is shocked at the suggestion but now has doubts herself. She asks the nurse for advice. “Insist that he show himself to you,” Hera said. “Tell him that if he loves you, the mother of his child, that he will let you see him in the same form as he shows himself to his wife.” When Zeus comes to Semele that night, she asks him if he loves her enough to grant her a favor. He promises to give her whatever she desires and is dismayed when she tells him what she wants. She wants to see the face that Hera beholds.
Zeus reveals himself as a flash of fire and light. His signature lightning bolt strikes the ground and Semele is killed, burned to a crisp. Luckily, Hermes is present and rescues the infant Dionysus from his mother’s womb. Hermes slices open Zeus’s thigh, inserts the baby, and sews him in to incubate until the time of his second birth, several months later. Some say the infant Dionysus was rescued by Asklepios, a son of Apollo who became a skilled doctor under the tutelage of the centaur Chiron and later founded the healing center at Epidaurus.
Now Zeus took the infant Dionysus to King Athamas and Queen Ino to rear and told them to dress the child as a girl to deceive Hera. Unfortunately for Athamas and Ino, Hera saw through this and brought them misery, so Zeus scooped up the child and took him to Nysa, a land far away from Greece, perhaps in Asia or Ethiopia, and gave him to nymphs to raise.
Dionysus was called the “twice born.” This image of rebirth is most likely a mythological root for the later figure of Jesus Christ. You may recognize other pieces of iconography that Christianity shares with this older myth, the eating of the body and drinking of the blood of the god’s body, for example.
Hera continued to torment Dionysus as he grew to manhood, even inflicting him with madness. He wandered extensively and discovered the vine and the use of wine, and while he encountered many enemies, he also had his supporters, both mortal and divine, who helped him to survive. Over time, Dionysus developed many powers– illusion, shapeshifting, and the use of intoxicants– and had many devotees, most of them women.
Those who followed Dionysus consistently were called Maenads, those who invited mania, or possession by the energy of this god. The celebration of this god took place on the mountains and in the forests at night, where wine and dancing generated a collective frenzy of release and abandon that could lead to amazing and also bloody and violent acts. Just as Dionysus was dismembered by the Titans, so the women tore young animals, a fawn or a goat, apart with their bare hands and consumed it.
The lives of Greek women were tightly controlled. Cloistered in their homes, they had no real political power and were not considered to be fully human, let alone equal to men. There was a deep need for experiences of wild abandon and expressions of rage and grief, and it appears that all of the women-only rites and festivals celebrated in Greece created some opportunity for this.
That said, the Dionysiac was the edge, the energy that compelled otherwise obedient women to abandon their husbands, set their household chores aside, and run away to the hills. It’s not hard to draw a connection between the historic suppression of the cult of Dionysus and the ancient patriarchy, or to perceive the links between the ongoing degradation of women and the values that have constellated around them, of life and sex and blood and death and abandon, and the generally suspicious and pejorative treatment of the mythology of Dionysus over the centuries.
The gifts of Dionysus are awful and awe-inspiring, frightening and brutal as well as liberating. Context is crucial, for the experience and for the interpretation of this experience. If you read about the ancient rites, I think it’s easy to understand the concern about them and a society devoted to the unfettered expression of Dionysiac energies. And yet these fears, which are close to our fear of death, have led Western societies to suppress them in ways that prevent us from finding a harmonious balance, in my view, and perpetuate a denial of the brutality in our civilization and ordered societies.
Have we found the appropriate space for the Dionysiac and is this even possible, without setting aside historical prejudices and fear of the instinctual dimension of human nature? This question is bound up with fears of women and misogyny, as I mentioned.
The questions, possibilities, fears, and repression that surround the Dionysiac have been part of the contemporary debate about the use of psychedelic plant medicines and substances too. You may have made the connection here between dissolution, intoxication, and mystical experience that belongs to the mythology of Dionysus and the use of these medicines. The possibility that the wine and beer and bread that were used in ancient rites, and around which cults like that of Dionysus formed, were actually psychedelic, is an avenue that many researchers and scholars across disciplines have refused to travel for quite a long time.
There’s some very interesting information emerging as this field of inquiry opens up. I’ll post a link to one resource, “The Immortality Key” by Brian C. Muraresku, on my mythic mojo website for those of you interested in pursuing this topic, of the links between our images of god, mystical experience, and the use of psychedelics by ancestors, going way, way back…
Dionysus, like Heracles, who was also the son of Zeus by a mortal woman, made a successful journey to the underworld. He went to retrieve his mother Semele, to restore her to life. This was accomplished when he agreed to give Hades, lord of the underworld, something that he, Dionysus, held very dear. Dionysus gave Hades the myrtle plant. After this amazing feat, Dionysus was called “The Lord of Souls” and finally granted the divinity, that is the place on Mt. Olympous that he had long sought, from his father Zeus. It was after becoming a god that Dionysus married the mortal Ariadne and became a rare thing among the gods– a faithful husband.
Now, the myths of Dionysus invite reflection on many different themes. I want to pick up a thread that weaves its way through the last few episodes of this podcast, a thread that begin in the discussion of Hermes and the magic of changing meanings, that brought us to Zeus, the upholder of order, and now this god of ecstasy and dissolution, Dionysus. This thread is actually a question. How can we respond to the events of our times, to this great transition? To the arguments and conflict over shifts in meaning, values, and authority? To the deep divides, and all that is being lost, the lives, the peace, the dreams for the future? In the last episode, I suggested that we are living through a Titanomachia, a battel between our titanic propensities and the Zeusian, and that the antidote is found through cultivation of the wide imagination of Zeus.
What is in the figure of Dionysus that might help us do this?
Let’s begin by noting that Dionysus, like his trickster brother Hermes, is admitted into the pantheon by Zeus. Dionysus, like Hermes, personifies energies that are part of existence that deserve and demand respect. Zeus with his wide imagination, the term used by James Hillman, judiciously makes room for this power and the new possibilities it contains.
What are these possibilities? I want to draw out one for our purpose here. Dionysus was called “the Loosener” or lysios, the loosener of limbs and of minds, the one who loosens your grip on fantasies of certainty or egoic self-importance, loosens your grip on daily reality and perhaps on sanity. “The Loosener” refers to the experiences of dissolution of self and dismemberment of the body. Both are part of the history of the god and his rites continued to inspire them, literally and metaphorically.
The Greek word lysios comes from lysis which means “setting free, unraveling.” This is the last syllable in the word “analysis,” Hillman notes. To analyze something, you deconstruct it, identify the constituent parts and their relations to each other, thus uncovering the logic. So, although Dionysus is associated with the rapture and mania that is immediate, perhaps mind-less, in the moment, the healing qualities of such experiences, whether Dionysiac rites or a psychedelic mushroom trip, are connected to one’s ability to access this inner logic, in the self or cosmos, as well as the direct apprehension of the paradox of existence, the mystical revelation of the many in one and one in the many. Walter Otto called Dionysus “the epiphany god.”
Dionysus then, is a pathway to intimate contact and intense experience of the Other, of the many presences– the gods with a small “g” –in an animate world, and the diverse community of identities and differentiated selves, in the psyche. The ego wants to perpetuate the belief that it is the sum total of the individual, the total personality, but this isn’t true. There is contact with the Others “inside” as we say, as well as “out there,” an opening for what has been repressed, hidden, denied, de-valued and an opportunity to understand or reclaim it.
I hope you see that Dionysus is the antithesis of the titanic emptiness, that the cosmos that constellates around him and his imaginal style, is dense, varied, immediate, and intense. Zeus and his powers are limited as we learned, by the Fates and by the need for Zeus to maintain alliances and negotiate. He doesn’t imagine escape from imposed boundaries but rather, imagines new possibilities within them.
Dionysus, like his father, is also limited by the Fates, and the tensions that exist between what he loosens and his model of excess, and the others, the Titans and also the other Olympians, Aphrodite, Demeter, and Apollo, for example. You may be familiar with Nietzsche’s description of the relationship between Apollo and Dionysus, in The Birth of Tragedy. Apollo is the form, he thought, the container or receptacle of the energy that is Dionysus.
The Dionysiac is powerful and fragile. As an image of life energy, I think it offers us insight into our battle with the titanic and the motivation to do so. “Dionysus is a special enemy of the Titans,” Hillman writes,” […] zoe is the vitality of life itself, a savage and tender desire to live […] this urge can be rent to shreds, atomized let us say, by any procedure, any ambition, any universal law that goes beyond bonds.”
Now, I frequently talk on this podcast about the shift in values that I think we need to make, from a society and a world view that places power, and power over others, in the center. To replace that with a life-serving view and a life-serving way of being in the world. This life-serving way of being in the world is one that can reveal to us the deepest truths of existence, as expressed through Dionysus, and also bring us into daily relationship with the many presences around us in our so-called everyday routine, and ordinary reality.
I’m going to stop there although I think there is enough material for me to probably do another podcast for you on Dionysus. So, if that’s of interest to you, feel free to email me with your comments and questions or to just say, “Yes, let’s do it more on Dionysus.”
I want to give a big welcome to new subscribers James, Mark, David, Mariela, Gustavo. Thanks for subscribing for email announcements about the podcast and my other programs.
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And that’s it for me, Catherine Svehla and Myth Matters. Thank you so much for listening. Take good care of yourself, and until next time, happy mythmaking and keep the mystery in your life alive.
Link to “The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name” by Brian C. Muraresku, foreward by Graham Hancock.
Examination of the role psychedelics have played in the origins of Western civilization and the central religious visions and ideas.
