Caught in the Net of the Divine

ABSTRACT

The drama of King Pentheus, ritual adversary and victim of the god Dionysos in Euripides’s Bacchae, bears striking resemblance to the drama of the alcoholic-addict in the progression of his or her disease. The chorus of the Bacchae sings of the holy rites and ancient wisdom that could cure the “madness” of Pentheus, in which resonances with the tenets of Alcoholics Anonymous can be found. In a larger context, the Bacchae is also the nightmare of the end of what the Greeks called the Age of Zeus, our present age, characterized by the increasing hemispheric lateralization of our cerebral cortex and the hyperdevelopment and dominance of our left-hemispheric powers of abstract reasoning. This neurological evolution transformed human consciousness and reality according to its logos, rejecting and banishing to the unconscious the mythos of the knowing body: the heart, the gut, and all our embodied, direct, holistic powers of perceiving. This transformation of consciousness is described archetypally in three myths of the god Dionysos’s birth. These depict how the god of life was dismembered to become an abstract, deathless Olympian; the soot and ashes of the Titans from which humans were made; and the literal form of the god, that is, wine. In our Western psychohistorical and cultural history, these myths depict the rescue of the idealized, masculine, impenetrable hero/ego from the vicissitudes of mortal life. Over time, the archaic meaning of initiation and of “hero” as initiated human embedded in community and the lineage of ancestors, was lost in the glorification of the ideal Apollonian hero’s power to escape the limitations of embodiment by making others (or the unconscious/body) suffer and die for him. This article explores the necessity to re-member the dismembered incarnate god from the shadows of the abandoned body of need and desire for communion. AA offers a template for the acceptance of essential limitation and personal suffering as initiation into experience of the embodied divine in and through community as well as in individual relationship with a greater reality. Such initiatory practices constitute rebirth in a divine self and world, described by Jung as the inauguration of the Age of the Holy Spirit.

KEY WORDS:

• Age of the Holy Spirit
• Alcoholics Anonymous
• Apollo
• Bacchae
• Dionysos
• Euripides
• hemispheric lateralization
• human development
• individuation
• initiation
• latency
• neurobiology
• patriarchy
• Titans
• twelve-step programs
• Zeus

Note

References to The Collected Works of C. G. Jung are cited in the text as CW, volume number, and paragraph number. The Collected Works are published in English by Routledge (UK) and Princeton University Press (USA).

Notes

1. It is deeply ironic, as we will see in the course of our exploration, that Glaser’s critique is fueled by her perception that women, already disempowered in patriarchal culture, are especially wronged and damaged by the prescription of admitting powerlessness over alcohol.

². Guthrie quotes the Neoplatonist Damaskios’s account of the fragments of the Theogony according to Hieronymos and Hellanikos. There are many version of Orphic Theogony known to us from different sources; here I have selected what makes sense for my story.

³. Discussed in Jung, Psychological Types (CW 6, 1921/1971, ¶228).

⁴. James Hillman in The Myth of Analysis (1972) traces the conflation of Dionysos with the misogynist shadow of Apollo in nineteenth-century classical scholarship and explores the Dionysian nature of psyche.

⁵. The atomic bomb is another external literalization of the solar deity. (See Weishaus’s review of Joseph Masco’s The Nuclear Borderlands [2019]).

⁶. Christianity absorbed facets of the Dionysian archetype of the savior god (connected with wine and animal sacrifice) who dies and resurrects, and then translated it into the abstract/literal terms of the new age, for instance, splitting the incarnate god into Christ and Satan (the latter bearing the sooty shadow of need and desire), literalizing the humanity of the god as a historical person, and so on.

⁷. The Titans are connected in function and meaning with the initiatory Kouretes, young divine male warriors who perform armed dances around the infant Zeus to protect him from his father Chronus. Thomas Singer (2004) has explored the meaning of the Kouretes in a larger cultural context as symbols of the archetypal defenses of the personal spirit that arise out of early trauma.

⁸. In Aion Jung discusses the early church dogma of the Monophysites: “since Christ, as a man, corresponds to the ego, and as god, to the self, he is at once both ego and self, part and whole. Empirically speaking, consciousness can never comprehend the whole, but it is probable that the whole is unconsciously present in the ego” (1951/1968, CW 9ii, ¶171).

⁹. Here, Kurtz cites Kant (1970) and Goldmann (1973).

¹⁰. See Kingsley (2018, 418–422), citing Marie-Louise von Franz’s interview with Suzanne Wagner in March 1977 for the video series Remembering Jung, produced by George Wagner and directed by Suzanne Wagner (3 DVDs, C. G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles, Los Angeles 1991), 41:33–45:40.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Frances Hatfield

FRANCES HATFIELD, PhD, LMFT, is a poet and senior analyst in private practice in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She teaches in the analytic training and public programs at the C. G. Jung Institute of Santa Fe and the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, where she was certified. Her essays and poetry have been widely published and anthologized. Her book of poems Rudiments of Flight (Wings Press, 2013) won the 2013 Gradiva Award for poetry from the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis. She is currently writing a book based on her doctoral work on the archetype of Dionysos. Correspondence: [email protected].