PMoondancer wrote:
Dear lostsalior,
What is your pre-Socratic understanding of Apollo's and Dionysus's characteristics?
I'm at work and doing this between my boss' door closing
This is something that I've been reading abotu and contemplating for 10 years now. I did a presentation at a deadhead academic conference on the topic.
Really my understanding kind of starts with socrates' time, and anyways we can't go much farther back than socrates all that much, as far as the greeks conception of Dionysos. I'd have to double check the books at home on the topic before venturing very far here, but I would add a few things: most of the roman/greek gods, it is believed, started out as vegetative gods. God of the harvest being just one, and with time their personalities became more complex. Dionysos was originally a simple vegetative god. He became the god of wine and I assume people would get drunk to commune with him. And since the mysteries of the socratic time were secret (Thyrascian? I am spacing the name of the mystery right now- there are two) we don't really know much. But we do know that they would go into a dark chamber/temple, light fires, beat drums and take wine infused with mind altering substanvces, like opium laced fermented wine (Read the odyssy- several references about having to dilute the wine- wine can be only fermented to about 15% alcohol. They were watering down opiates, not alcohol). there are french caves dating 5,000 years that are similar. some have argued the french cave paintings were part of religious ceremonies. THey would burn marijuana plants whole in the cave and hold their ceremonies.
secondly, Mckenna has a wonderful book, food of the gods, where he goes all the way back to homo sapiens being hunter/gatrherers, following herds of wild animals across grass plains. Assuming his theory is correct, we were ingesting magic mushrooms long before religion came about. I tried to apply that to evolutionary theory- was tripping a benefit??? , but professor Boyle at UCLA (he has a college text book titled "human evolution" and is an expert on evolution) kind of killed it- evolution is a blind tinkerer he said, so drugs won't have had an effect. But I still think the idea just needs to be tweaked. If language had an effect on our evoluton, and they certainly think it did, then a drug that creates the "I" in the ego def. could have had a chance. Assuming McKenna is right- I certainly think our need to find a place in the cosmos was done in a dionysian way, versus apollonian method of meditative. We can certainly see this in the Yanomamo- the Brazalian tribes who cultivated (and in some respects still do!,multiple forms of psychedilic plants and would trip out every night.
Thirdly the shamans. Deadheads are not shamans, though. Let's be clear about that. But the concept sure does play a similar role- their initiation rites certainly were very diionysian- they would starve themselves, take powerful drugs and dissolve themselves "to the bone". During the rite of initiation, they would meld back together into a new form- the holy shaman- and be a cleaner, holy form of their prior selves. But they would use drugs to trip out for visions.
Lastly of course is the 10,000 year old tradition of the hindu soma cult. I was just rereading an article by the Wasson couple the other night abotu their time down in Mexico- they found that soma was the mushroom [I can't mremember the name of the shroom- it's the one that is bright red with white spots... ]. The priests would consume the mushroom, and the drug would metabolize in their urine, so the followers drank their shroom'd pee. But I think that cult was or could be dionysian as well. Like the Grateful Dead's growing popularity, the soma cult became way too popular and the Wassons believed that the priests intentionally blotted out what soma's true identity was so only the select few would know. THey rediscovered it I think in the 1940s. For centuries people had no idea, or had some pretty wrong idea (like a certain woody branch...) Too many were into it and the priests probably saw sacrilege and mass use as bad for the gods. Of course, Teneonatl [spelling] which is a 2,000 year old Mayan mushroom cult (and probably dionysian) is probably not predating socrates but in the new world and seperated by oceans.
Back to the Mayan mushroom cult: they beleive we hippies used it sacriligiously and they stopped using it
