Dionysos

Dionysos (Διόνυσος) is the Olympian whose domain is wine, theatrical performance, ecstatic possession, dismemberment, and the resurrection that follows dismemberment — the god whose rites admitted what the rational civic order could not: intoxication, mania, collective possession, the dissolution of ordinary boundaries between self and other, mortal and divine.

For depth psychology Dionysos is load-bearing as the figure of the psychic energies that the civic-rational order represses and that return in ritual, in possession, in art, in religious ecstasy, in certain pathologies. Kerényi‘s Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life (see dionysos-archetypal-image) reads him as the god of zoē — the indestructible life that runs under the particular lives, that the tragic rite both acknowledges and contains. Seaford‘s [[otto-dionysus-myth-cult|Dionysus]] reads him through the historical-ritual record. The dismemberment of Dionysos — the sparagmos enacted at his rites — is the paradigmatic mythological figure of the death-and-return the individuation process requires. See mania and divine-madness.

Relationships

• mania
• dionysos-archetypal-image
• dismemberment