On the Centrality of Dionysus in Nietzsche’s Philosophy

Abstract

Despite the widespread influence of Nietzsche’s iconoclastic works on twentieth-century intellectual and literary culture, there has been a surprising lack of academic focus on the parallels between his philosophical trajectory and the anthropological literature on the mysterious god Dionysus. The striking correlations between ancient Dionysian worship with Nietzsche’s oeuvre revalorise the celebration of ecstasy. In Twilight of the Idols, he states that the Dionysian is “beyond pity and terror, to realize in oneself the eternal joy of becoming.” By elucidating some of the mysteries surrounding this enigmatic god, this article aims to re-establish the central importance of Dionysus in Nietzsche’s work, and to suggest that if we are to understand Nietzsche at all, we must first undertake an anthropological reading of Dionysus.

An earlier version of parts of this article appeared online as “Nietzschean Shamanism” at www.academia.edu.

Notes

1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols: Or How One Philosophizes with a Hammer, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1990), 88.

2. Jill Marsden, After Nietzsche: Notes towards a Philosophy of Ecstasy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 34–35.

3. Jane Ellen Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1908), 425.

4. Walter F. Otto, Dionysus: Myth and Cult (Dallas, TX: Indiana University Press, 1986), 7–8.

5. Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, 364.

6. Daniel Ogden, ed., A Companion to Greek Religion (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 341.

7. Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, 364.

8. Ogden, A Companion to Greek Religion, 339.

9. Ogden, A Companion to Greek Religion, 340.

10. Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, 84.

11. Ogden, A Companion to Greek Religion, 42.

12. Nietzsche, Twighlight of the Idols, 56.

13. Robert Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, and Carl A. P. Ruck, The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries, 1st ed. (New York: North Atlantic Books, 1978), 19.

14. Wasson, Hofmann, and Ruck, The Road to Eleusis, 19.

15. Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, 412.

16. Ogden, A Companion to Greek Religion, 49.

17. Otto, Dionysus: Myth and Cult, 141.

18. Otto, Dionysus: Myth and Cult, 50.

19. Hakim Bey, The Temporary Autonomous Zone (New York: Autonomedia, 1991), 40.

20. Otto, Dionysus: Myth and Cult, 50.

21. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. D. Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 91.

22. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 68.

23. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 88.

24. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1992), sec. 4, aphorism 9.

25. Nick Land, “Shamanic Nietzsche,” in Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987–2007, ed. Robin Mckay and Ray Brassier (Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic, 2011), 223.

26. Marsden, After Nietzsche, 45.

27. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 2003), 312.

28. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Untimely Meditations, trans. Anthony M. Ludovici and Adrian Collins (Digireads.com Publishing, 2009), pt.4, sec. 8.

29. Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries: The Encounter between Contemporary Faiths and Archaic Realities (London: Collins, 1968), 71.

30. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 137.

31. Marsden, After Nietzsche, 13.

32. Kocku Von Stuckrad, “Utopian Landscapes and Ecstatic Journeys: Friedrich Nietzsche, Hermann Hesse, and Mircea Eliade on the Terror of Modernity,” Numen 57 (2010): 87.

33. Heraclitus, The Cosmic Fragments: A Critical Study, trans. Geoffrey Stephen Kirk (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

34. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 31.

35. Marsden, After Nietzsche, xii.

36. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 72–73.

37. Karl Löwith, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, trans. J. Harvey Lomax (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978), 122.

38. Löwith, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, 62.

39. Löwith, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, 63.

40. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 102.

41. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 10.

42. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 24.