This conversation got me thinking about this passage from Origen:
And accordingly he likens us Christians to those who in the Bacchic mysteries introduce phantoms and objects of terror. (Contra Celsum 4.10)
Which in turn got me thinking about Leviathan and labyrinths:
The god I serve in this world and yours. The god of flesh, hunger and desire. My god, Leviathan! Lord of the Labyrinth! (Hellbound: Hellraiser II)
Which finally got me thinking about a conversation I’d had a while back.
Circles.
Courtney wrote the following in response to my post It’s important to prepare yourself:
When I tried to describe this to my husband, he said it sounded less like a religious ritual and more like a stupid frat boy prank. He also said he doesn’t understand how being afraid has anything to do with liberation. Would you care to comment on this?
Great question!
Objectively there is no difference whatsoever between the initiation rite I described and a stupid frat boy prank.
Subjectively, however, they are worlds apart.
Ever go through something with a friend and afterwards as you’re comparing notes it slowly starts to sink in that your accounts don’t quite line up? How can you recall the same sequence of events so differently? It’s because what we bring to an encounter determines what we take away from it. Our brains are wired to find associative patterns in the constant barrage of random phenomena that makes up life and this in turn helps us navigate through our world. A lot of things influence how we form those patterns but one of the strongest is culture, particularly the stories that shape and express a culture. These stories not only inform our values and behavior but are the very substance out of which our choices are made.
A person who is raised from infancy surrounded by a vital living tradition where the stories are passed down from generation to generation and shared by the whole community, stories so well known that a person need only make the slightest allusion for the rest of it to rise up from the well of memory is going to see and interact with his surroundings in a way that someone reared with different stories or no stories at all simply would not.
As an example – what would you say if I invited you to attend a Thyestean feast?
If you know your Classics and aren’t a cannibal you’re probably going to turn me down but if not, boy are you in for a surprise!
Even more relevantly, through their stories people have recorded what it’s like to encounter gods and spirits, giving us a sense of these beings’ personalities and behaviors, how we can recognize and communicate with them, the etiquette of such interactions, etc. so that we can use all of this as a framework during our own encounters and afterwards when we try to make sense of the experience.
As I showed in a later post each step I described was taken from ancient accounts of the enthronismos ceremony and the mythology associated with it. If this information is in the person’s head while those things are happening to them each act will take on special significance causing them to respond to the stress triggers radically differently from someone who went into it with a blank slate. Having personally gone through it will also change their relationship to that material – it will take on a new life within them: they will know that the myths are real because they have lived them after a fashion, which is going to spill out into how they interpret everything that happens to them afterwards.
As for the second part of Courtney’s husband’s question – I don’t think liberation is possible without the involvement of fear.
Everything in our hi tech modern secular capitalist culture seems devised to make us numb, apathetic and disconnected – disconnected not just from the gods and spirits and the world and other people, but from ourselves and especially our physical bodies and our emotions. There are folks clamped so tight that they’ve never danced or screamed in their life. Every authentic impulse within them has been deeply, deeply repressed.
Fear has a way of cutting through all the stifling walls of ego and societal pressure to reveal us at our most vulnerable, primal core. Once the crack appears all that pent-up toxic shit can spill forth leaving room for the good stuff to take its place.
Furthermore, fear is always present when we approach the threshold of liberation. Fear of what other people will say, fear of all the things we risk losing, fear that we’re making a horrible, irredeemable mistake and countless other fears swarm about us in that decisive moment.
You embrace your fear or you pass through it and the choice you make is the person you become.
But you never really know who you are until you’ve been pushed to your limits – and beyond.
Dionysos exists at the extremes – we must be willing to travel far to find him.
Tagged: dionysos
