1
Dionysus in Jung's Writings
An examination of C. G. Jung’s view of
Dionysus and the Dionysian is the subject of this note. Elsewhere [1]
I suggested with some detail that analytical consciousness has been
governed by an archetypal structure that favors the principles of light, order,
and distance over emotional involvement, or what has, in short, been called the
Apollonic over the Dionysian. There I also examined the notion of Dionysus,
exposing prejudices in both classical psychiatry and Classical scholarship,
prejudices that hinder the transformation of consciousness and resolution of
fundamental analytical problems. I made the case that the fields of psychiatry
and mythology by using each others arguments [2] have been, for the most part, in collusion
against the Dionysian, resulting in a repression, and thus a distortion, of all
Dionysian phenomena, so that they have come to be regarded as inferior,
hysterical, effeminate, unbridled, and dangerous. I suggested a rectification
of our appreciation of this archetypal structure and also a means to move
towards this rectification. After all, Dionysus was the lord of souls (as Rohde
called him), so that psychotherapy can hardly afford to labor under misleading
notions of him.
This
note is a postscript to that argument. I ought to add here that objections to
the usage of “Apollonic” and “Dionysian” and to their opposition were there, in
part, rehearsed, and I believe satisfactorily answered. We may, therefore, have
a freer hand in using the term “Dionysian” for an archetypal structure of
consciousness, much as Nietzsche introduced it in The
Birth of Tragedy (1872), which Cornford called “a work of
profound imaginative insight, which left the scholarship of a generation
toiling in the rear.” [3] We are also following Jung (who followed
Nietzsche) in employing “Dionysian” as a term for a basic structure of consciousness.
[4]
The
First Dionysus
The following selection of passages
represents the dominant notion of the Dionysian in the
Collected
Works:
Dio
nysus is the abyss o f impassio ned disso lutio n … [5]
Seldo
m o r never have I had a patient who did no t go back to neo lithic art fo rms
o r revel in evo catio n o f Dionysian orgies. [6]
No
reaso n guides him, only the Dionysian libido effrenata. [7]
“Before
dinner I am a Kantian, but after dinner a Nietzschean.” In his habitual
attitude, that is to say, he is an intellectual, but under the stimulating
influence of a good dinner a Dionysian wave breaks thro ugh his conscious
attitude. [8]
The
“terrible Mother” is the mater saeva cupidinum,
unbridled and unbroken Nature, represented by the most paradoxical god of the
Greek Pantheon, Dionysus … [9]
…
Dionysian orgies that surged over from the East … Dionysian licentiousness … [10]
He
delivers himself up unresistingly to the animal psyche. That is the moment of
the Dionysian frenzy, the overwhelming manifestation of the “blond beast” … [11]
… an
outburst of bestial greed and the tearing of living animals with the teeth were
part of the Dionysian orgy. [12]
In Jung’s alchemical writings, Dionysus is
associated with the ape and the Black Mass, [13] an atavistic identification with animal
ancestors, [14] and the Lord of Darkness (devil). [15] The association of Dionysus with the devil
continues in both Jung’s alchemical study of transference [16]
and in his late opus, Mysterium Coniunctionis. 17
Another group of passages, fewer in number and lesser in power, give us
another connotation – a second Dionysus. But we shall put off these passages
until later because there is still more to say about the first Dionysus in
Jung’s writings.
Despite the many references to Dionysus and
the long “Zarathustra Seminar,” Dionysus was never central to Jung’s focus.
Dionysus had been given ample attention by Jung’s earlier contemporaries in
both classical psychiatry and in the history of religions, so that perhaps this
avenue of mythology and pathology was less open to original n exploration.
Rohde and Nietzsche had forced Dionysus upon the consciousness of Classical
scholarship. Freud and Janet had done the same for hysteria, which had already
in the nineteenth century been associated with Dionysus. [18]
Then there was the literary-philosophical psychologizing of Stefan
George and Ludwig Klages, which Jung would not go near and in which he saw a
poetic cult of the irrational in the name of Dionysus. [19]
Thus, as Jung’s attention was only
peripherally engaged with hysteria, [20] likewise was he only occasionally occupied
with Dionysus. Schizophrenia and Hermes-Mercurius, however, received his full
interest from the start and into his late work. He wrote separate studies on both
schizophrenia and on Hermes-Mercurius (and Trickster), making extraordinary psychological
contributions to both psychopathology and mythology. His basic insights into
the nature of the psyche owe more to this work on schizophrenia than to
hysteria and more to his investigation of the archetypal complexities of
Hermes-Mercurius-Trickster than to those of Dionysus.
Although Dionysus was not in the foreground,
Nietzsche was. There is probably a direct and causal relation between the
presence of Nietzsche in Jung’s consciousness and the absence of Dionysus, as
if the more deeply Jung entered into Nietzsche, the more he was dissuaded from
the Dionysian.
Jung says in his autobiography [21]
that in his youth (around 1890) “I was unconsciously caught up by this
spirit of the age, and had no methods at hand for extricating myself from it.” This spirit he describes:
The
archetypes of Wagner were already knocking at the gates, and along with them
came the Dionysian experience of Nietzsche – which might better be ascribed to
the god of ecstasy, Wotan. [22]
Jung displays already in his doctoral thesis
his familiarity with Nietzsche’s work. [23] But it is
Nietzsche as “case” that seems uppermost in Jung’s mind already in
1901–02. Jung writes that Nietzsche’s “poetic ecstasy at more than one point
verges on the pathological.” [24] Perhaps the history of psychiatry and of
ideas will one day examine more closely the effects of the “case” of Nietzsche
upon the spirit of the 1890s and turn of the century. It must certainly have
been vividly felt in Basel, city of both Nietzsche and Jung, and especially in
psychiatric circles, owing to the questions about Nietzsche’s diagnosis and to
the patholography on Nietzsche written by Möbius.
At
least we do know that the “case” of Nietzsche had a profound effect upon Jung.
During his student years he harbored “a secret fear that I might be like him
[Nietzsche], at least in regard to the ‘secret’ which had isolated him from his
environment.” [25] And Jung imagined his personality Number
2” to correspond with Zarathustra. [26] Let us remember that at the core
of
Nietzsche’s catastrophe was his identification with Dionysus-Zagreus.
Evidently, the fate of
Nietzsche
was a Vorbild of possession by an archetypal power,
neither the idea of which nor a
means
of extrication from which were then available to Jung. This power was called
Dionysus,
even
if it should have been called Wotan. [27] “In Nietzsche’s biography you will find
irrefutable proof that the god he originally meant was really Wotan, but being
a philologist and living in the seventies and eighties of the nineteenth
century, he called him Dionysus.” [28]
We
find this proof not only in Nietzsche’s biography. The
Birth of Tragedy opens with a dedicatory foreword to Wagner
in which Nietzsche relates his essay to the “German problem” and “German
hopes.” At the end of the book, he warms again to his German theme:
… the German spirit has remained whole, in magnificent health, depth,
and Dionysiac strength, resting and dreaming in an inaccessible abyss like a
knight who has sunk into slumber; now the Dionysiac song rises from this abyss
to tell us that, at this very mo ment, this German knight still dreams his
ancient Dionysiac myth in blissfully grave visions. [29]
The
paragraph ends with Brunnhilde and Wotan’s spear. This is not Greek, not
antiquity, but
the
return of Wotan in modern Germany. The restitution of the Dionysian in modern
Western
consciousness
was from the very beginning entangled in Wotan.
In 1911 Thomas Mann recapitulated the
disastrous mess of this archetypal contamination by means of a dream, which
turns the fate of Gustav von Aschenbach in the novella Death
in Venice. It must be read. There we see Dionysus, Pan, and the Maenads in a
Germanic inscape informed by a Wotanic spirit. The facet of Dionysus that is
revealed is altogether an enemy to dignity and self-control. But is this
”stranger god” not more likely Wotan than the one depicted in antique
vase-paintings, where he appears so dignified and self-possessed. Or, even if
there is a Dionysus as obscene and exuberant as Aschenbach’s dream, that
obscenity meant a death of another sort than the one in Venice. Heraclitus [30]
pointed out in regard to the obscene Lenean rites of the Dionysian cult
that they must be understood in the light of the unity of Hades and Dionysus.
They may not be taken on the literal level of concrete enactment, but have an
invisible meaning for the soul in terms of its underworld psychic life. Thus,
though the images presented to Aschenbach seem authentically Dionysian, the
structure of his consciousness in which they perform provides a stage for
literalism that is Wagnerian, Nietzschean, Wotanic, and where Hades
becomes literal death, rather than the invisible realm of souls. The case of
Nietzsche repeats in Mann’s Aschenbach where “Dionysus” means enantiodromia,
disease, and death.
Unlike Nietzsche, Jung saw through to the
Wotan shadow of what Nietzsche called Dionysus. [31]
Yet Jung insists that the “two gods have much in common.” He speaks of them
as “cousins.” [32] He brings them into juxtapositions which
are mytholographically strained, as, for instance, Jung’s amplification of the
horse and horse’s hoof motifs [33] appropriate to Wotan, but where Dionysus
is suddenly introduced by means of the bull’s foot. Another peculiar – and Nietzschean –
instance is the apposition of “Dionysian frenzy” and “blond beast.” [34]
It is as if, despite himself, Jung had difficulty extricating his
perception of Dionysus from the Wotanic distortion shared by his generation and
their transalpine, Germanic view of pagan Mediterranean culture. He observes
this himself, saying: “Hence the Christian Weltanschauung, when reflected in
the ocean of the (Germanic) unconscious, logically takes on the features of
Wotan.” [35] As Kerényi points out, “in that which concerns the image of Dionysus,
researchers and scholars have submitted to the influence of German philosophy
to a much higher degree than they themselves realize.” [36]
In other words, Jung’s first view of Dionysus is distorted not only by
the influence of nineteenth-century northern European scholarship but also by a
dominant in the background of that scholarship: Wotan. More specifically,
Jung’s view is crucially affected by the model of Nietzsche who not only was the
first to formulate and thus give his personal stamp to what has become our
popular notion of this divinity, but who chose him as his god. Jung asks and
answers what Dionysus signifies by means of Nietzsche. The first Dionysus of
whom Jung writes is thus neither a figure of antiquity nor a figure in Jung’s
own life but one who is vicariously known to Jung through Nietzsche. The key
passage illustrating this is in Psychology and Alchemy:
It needed a Nietzsche to expose in all its feebleness Europe’s school-boy
attitude to the ancient world. But what did Dionysus mean to Nietzsche? What he
says about it must be taken seriously; what it did to him still more so. There can
be no doubt that he knew, in the preliminary stages of his fatal illness, that
the dismal fate of Zagreus was reserved for him. Dionysus is the abyss of
impassioned dissolution, where all human distinctions are merged in the animal
divinity of the primordial psyche – a blissful and terrible experience. [37]
That Nietzsche’s
experience – eleven years of degenerating madness – should have provided the
Virgil for the underworld descent in Psychology and Alchemy is of no minor
importance for everyone who uses the model of individuation described in that
book. Let us return to that text to see exactly where and how the Nietzschean
Dionysus enters and how it affects the course of psychic movement.
The passage occurs at the end of part 2,
chapter 2. The initial dreams and visions of the case have led to a climax. An
elephant, an apeman or bear or caveman with a club, and a man with a pointed
beard appear. The text is accompanied by three terrifying pictures of a
skeleton, a wild-man, and a devil.
These visual images may be referred to “the
Dionysian experience” as Jung does in paragraphs
118–19, but strictly they are not images of Dionysus. Mythographically,
Dionysus was not a cave god (like Pan), nor were the ape or elephant in his
train. The vision finds its lysis in a voice saying, “Everything must be ruled
by the light.” Jung concludes that the nekyia is now reversing and that the light refers
to that “of the discerning, conscious mind.” [38] The chapter ends with the “active
intervention of the intellect” and the “symbols of the self.” [39]
Immediately
thereafter, we turn to the study of the mandala while the pictures accompanying
the text turn from horrid images of human shapes to abstract contemplative
forms. Of course, Jung was following material of a case and not his own visions
and dreams – neither was the case one of his. [40] Also, the accompanying pictures were not
chosen and placed there by him. Yet the selection of the
material, the amplifications, and
the elaboration of the case into the sequences of the
book are Jung’s. How are we to understand this sudden return to the upper world
via the light of intellect to the mandala? Does not the pattern presented in
this movement indicate a direct relation between the Dionysian and the mandala?
We may remember that in Jung’s life the
mandala played a similar role. Jung’s discovery of it came toward the end of
his nekyia [41] when he “began to emerge from the
darkness” of that long phase of intense psychological disturbance (1913–1919), [42]
which Ellenberger calls “a creative illness.” [43]
He had painted his first mandala in 1916 and began to understand it in
1918.
Something similar to the mandala coincided
with this emergence from the darkness: Psychological Types. This
work was the first major fruit to be published after this dark phase. [44]
We may look at the typological system with its eightfold structure
within the psychological context of Jung’s life. Psychological
Types is also a mandala in conceptual form, performing a similarly ordering –
and defensive – function. [45] Autobiographically in Jung’s case and in
the sequence presented in Psychology and Alchemy the
mandala appears against the background of the “Dionysian experience” (i.e.,
Nietzschean Wotanic experience) and is a response to it.
The upshot of all this can be put in a series
of conclusions. First, the experience – as Jung himself observes in several
places that we cited – should not be named “Dionysian” but “Wotanic.” Second,
as Dionysus and Wotan differ, so must our psychological measures for connecting
with them differ. A defensive order against Wotan may be appropriate; against Dionysus,
it may be altogether inappropriate, as the tales of Lycurgus and Pentheus show.
Third,
although the mandala and typology may serve as useful defenses against Wotan
and Nietzschean disintegration, these very same abstractions may block an
appreciation of the “Dionysian experience.” For psychotherapy to misperceive
Dionysus would be worse than folly. After all, this god plays a central role in
tragedy, in the transformational mysteries of Eleusis, in the instinctual and
communal levels of the soul, and in the development of the kind of culture related
to wine. [46] Moreover, there is the profound importance of Dionysus for the feminine psyche.
Fourth, if this god is the archetypal dominant expressing life itself (zoe) as
some commentators have said, then to misread his manifestations could seriously
mislead the very processes of healing. Yet, until the ghost of Nietzsche be
laid to rest, every Dionysian event in therapy will tend to be seen as a herald
of Wotanic eruption. We will tend to protect ourselves and analysands in the
manner of the movement to the self that is depicted in Psychology
and Alchemy, which model, on closer look, may turn out to be a centering in flight
from Dionysus.
The
Second Dionysus
Nilsson and Guthrie [47]
have said that Greek myths are described according to the personal bias
of the writer and according to the spiritual horizons of a period. Dionysus, a
most paradoxical figure, offers commentators upon him a variety of perspectives
and attributes. Which of these we choose to make our starting-point for
understanding the “Dionysian experience” reveals, according to Guthrie, the
writer’s essential concern as much as it reveals the god’s essence.
For instance, Nietzsche stresses the
ecstatic, excessive, barbarian, titanic, even criminal aspects; Harrison, who
considers herself in this regard a disciple of Nietzsche (in the preface to the
second edition of Themis), takes the suffering, intoxicated Dionysus
first, but identifies him with Bergson’s instinctual life-force; Kerényi seems
to go also along this path, pointing again and again to the wine, the vegetative life and zoe; Nilsson lays
stress upon the child; Rohde emphasized the connection with Hades, the
mysteries and the cult of souls; Otto places the madness foremost but takes it
as the expression of an inner antithesis: Dionysus, the god who holds life and
death together; Grant considers him the “irresistible irrational” and
integrates the tales and cult of him around this perspective; Dodds and Guthrie
place freedom and joy in the foreground, forgetting oneself, one’s station,
one’s differences; Jeanmaire combines joy with festivals, wine, and an agrarian
cult of the people by means of an archaic tree or vegetation cult. One could
also start with the god’s non-heroic bisexuality, or with his thiasos, i.e., he does not
appear alone, but is a god with a community.
Jung
stresses dismemberment and draws attention to the dismembered Dionysus in the following
additional passages so far not mentioned here: CW
7: 113 (2nd. ed.); CW 8: 162; CW 11: 53, 387, 400; CW
14: 365, p. 259n. In these passages, Dionysus emerges less contaminated with
Wotan, though Nietzsche still hovers in the background as exemplary of
dismemberment, for it was with the dismembered Zagreus-Dionysus that Nietzsche
was identified, signing himself “Zagreus” in his later letters. [48]
In CW 7: 113 (2nd. ed.), Jung writes of the “divine punishment of being torn
asunder like Zagreus,” still with Nietzsche in view, “This was what Nietzsche
experienced at the onset of his malady. Enantiodromia means being torn asunder into
pairs of opposites …”
But then dismemberment loses the background
of Nietzsche and even of the rending by the opposites, and begins to take on a
wider archetypal significance. Jung writes, “The classical world thought of
this pneuma as Dionysus, particularly the suffering Dionysus Zagreus, whose divine
substance is distributed throughout the whole of nature”; [49]
“… so his worshippers tore wild animals to pieces in order to
reintegrate his dismembered spirit.” [50] In Aion, [51]
dismemberment is again placed against the background of the Neoplatonic
Dionysus: “The divine powers imprisoned in bodies are nothing other then Dionysus
dispersed in matter.” Thus, dismemberment becomes a way of
discovering the puer spirit, for “Dionysus, youngest of the
gods” belongs to the theme of the “renewal of the ageing god.” [52]
The
movement between the first and second view of dismemberment compares with crossing
a psychic border between seeing the god from outside or from within his cosmos.
In this respect, Dodds speaks of white and black Maenadism, and Kerényi writes,
“The God sends his madness, the dark counter-image of the Dionysian, not to his
devotees who give themselves to his miracle, but to his enemies who defend
themselves against him.” [53]
Although misperceptions of the god through
Wotan may well produce the darker side, there is no surety that upon entering
his cosmos all shall be well. As Dionysus supposedly comes into civilized
Greece from “borderlands” (Thrace, Asia-Minor, Crete, Egypt), so, as Kerényi
says: “… where Dionysus appears, there appears also the border …” [54]
The Dionysian experience thus refers to a borderline state in which the
black and white aspects of dismemberment meet. If we leave the “malady” of
Nietzsche as our model for dismemberment, we may also leave the view of it as
only rending by opposites and violent enantiodromia. Instead we may understand
the violence in a new light. If we take our clues from Jung’s exploration of
the theme in alchemy (“The visions of Zosimos,” CW
13), dismemberment refers to a psychological process that requires a body
metaphor. [55] The process of division is presented as a
body experience, even as a horrifying torture. If, however, dismemberment is
ruled by the archetypal dominant of Dionysus, then the process, while beheading
or dissolving the central control of the old king, may be at the same time
activating the pneuma that is distributed throughout the materializations of
our complexes. The background of the second Dionysus offers new insight
into
the rending pain of self-division, especially as a body experience. Jung
reminds us that Dionysus was called the divided one. [56]
His dismemberment was evidence of his divisibility into parts. In each
part he lived as the pneuma that is distributed throughout the materializations
of our complexes. Jung reminds us that Dionysus was called the divided one. [56]
His dismemberment was evidence of his divisibility into parts. In each
part he lived as the pneuma dispersed in matter.
Bits of the Dionysian spirit are like sparks
shining in the terra foetida, [57]
or rotten stench of the decaying body as it dissociates into pieces. We
experience this process in psychosomatic
symptoms, in hysterical conversions, in specific sadomasochistic
perversions, in cancer fantasies, in fears of ageing, in horror of pollution,
or in disintegrative incoherent conditions that have a body focus. This
experience has its other side. The dismemberment of central control is at the
same time the resurrection of the natural light of archetypal consciousness
distributed in each of the organs.
Jung describes this organ consciousness in a
footnote on Joyce’s “visceral thinking” in Ulysses: “… an abaissement
du niveau mental constellates what Wernicke calls the
‘organ representatives,’
i.e.,
symbols representing the organs.” [58] The context for this remark is the leitmotif
of body parts – kidneys, genitals, heart, lungs, esophagus, etc. – in
each of the chapters of Ulysses. [59]
From this perspective of dismemberment, our rending can be understood as
the particular kind of renewal presented by Dionysus. This renewal describes itself
by means of a body metaphor. The renewal that goes by way of dismemberment is
not a re-assembly of parts into another organization. It is not a movement from
integration to disintegration to re-integration. Perhaps it is better to
envision this renewal not as a process at all. Rather, the crucial experience
would be the awareness of the parts as parts distinct
from each other, dismembered, each with its own light, a state in which the
body becomes conscious of itself as a composite of differences. The scintillae
and fishes’ eyes of which Jung speaks in regard to the multiple consciousness
of the psyche [60] may be experienced as embedded in physical
expressions. The distribution of Dionysus through matter may be compared with
the distribution of consciousness through members, organs, and zones.
Freud, who began his construction of
psychology on the base of hysteria, used this kind of
Dionysian
metaphor. The zoe, the child, and the bisexuality that are
Dionysus reappear metaphorically in erogenous zones and in the polymorphous
perverse child described by Freud.
Adler,
too, went in this direction when deriving character from organ inferiority. The
structure of each individual’s consciousness was intimately linked with the
psychic representatives of particular organs. Ultimately, renewal (cure) for both
Freud and Adler find an archetypal background in the second Dionysus of Jung.
Conceptual fantasies such as “visceral thinking,” “erogenous zones,” and “organ
inferiority” refer on another level to the psychoid Dionysus. Here, we make a
distinction between zoe, or life-force of the body, and the pneuma of that
lifeforce.
By attributing a “god” to zoe, the life-force is
given psychic interiority and a specific kind of consciousness which might
partly be characterized as an awareness of self-divisibility into many parts.
Finally, if we draw the implications fully,
dismemberment becomes necessary for awakening the consciousness of the body.
The second Dionysus in Jung’s work gives to the first Nietzschean “Dionysian experience”
another meaning than Wotanic eruption and disintegration. It means an
initiation into the archetypal consciousness of the body. Through Dionysus, the
body may be re-appreciated as a metaphorical field and not only in behavioral
interaction with the world of other bodies. Dismemberment severs the only
natural connections, the habitual ways we have “grown up” and “grown together.”
It disconnects the body’s habits at the animal-vegetable level, releasing a
subtler appreciation of the members and organs as psychic
representations. Religions speak of the resurrection of the flesh and
the construction of the subtle body.
This movement seems possible only when the
dominant organization lets go its hold. The abaissement du niveau mental results
in the activation of the psychic life of the organs. Or, perhaps, these events
occur in reverse order: Dionysus constellates through the dissolution into
parts, thereby bringing about what we subsequently call a lowering of the
mental level. The ageing god we call “ego” loses his support in the body’s
organization as it dissociates. The Dionysian experience would then be
essential for understanding what Jung meant with the fundamental dissociability
of the psyche and its multiple consciousness. It also becomes clearer how this
experience and that of the mandala tend to exclude each other, since the latter
would integrate what the former would loosen.
Dionysus was called Lysios,
the loosener. [61] The word is cognate with lysis, the
last syllables of analysis. Lysis means loosening, setting free,
deliverance, dissolution, collapse, breaking bonds and laws, and the final
unraveling as of a plot in tragedy.
Returning now to Psychology
and Alchemy, [62] we may conclude that the voice’s declaration
“Everything must be ruled by the light” may be understood in two ways. (Therapeutic
considerations would not play a part in determining between the two ways, since
Jung presents the material there not as a case but as empirical evidence for
the centering process. [63] On the one hand, the light may mean
changing consciousness through opposites, where the active intervention of the
intellect, the symbols of the self and the mandala become the counterpoise to the Wotanic
experience. As Jung’s intention is to present precisely this kind of centering
imagery, the light is understood in this way.
On the other hand, the light may mean the
light of nature, and changing consciousness through sames where like works upon
like. Then fragmentation would be imagined not from within the viewpoint of
centering, but from within Dionysian consciousness itself working within dissolution.
The dispersed pneuma of the second Dionysus that emerges through dissolution would
be the light called for by the voice, implying the lysis of the Dionysian
experience.
I suggest that if we miss the possibilities
for light in experiences of dissolution, we then tend to emphasize, as a
defensive compensation, centering and wholeness. So, it has seemed to me useful
to work out this Dionysian background to the important idea of wholeness in
Jungian
thought.