Zoe and Bios

The Greek language distinguishes two words that English lumps under life: ζωή (zoē), the bare fact of living shared by every living thing, and βίος (bios), the particular contoured life an individual lives — the word that gives us biography. Kerényi’s Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life (1976) is built on the claim that Dionysos is the god under whose image zoē is apprehended. The book’s subtitle is its thesis: zoē is what does not die when a bios ends.

The distinction is cosmological before it is personal. Kerényi traces the image to its Minoan-Cretan proteron — the sub-stratum confirmed after 1953 by Ventris’s decipherment of Linear B, which found Diwonusos already at Pylos by the second millennium B.C. (Kerényi 1976, preface). The Cretan mystery-formula “the bull is father to the snake and the snake to the bull” names zoē’s self-engendering passage through the animal kingdoms: “The identity of zoe in the lowest and in a higher animal world, in the snake and in the bull, was also embodied in a more secret myth” (Kerényi 1976, p. 117). The Orphic supplement — Titans dismember and consume Dionysos; Zeus destroys them; mankind is fashioned from their vapour — is read through Olympiodoros’s Phaedo commentary: “Our body is Dionysian; we are a part of him, since we sprang from the remains of the Titans who tasted of his flesh” (Kerényi 1976, p. 241). Because every bios is compounded of Titanic substance and Dionysian remainder, the tearing and eating of the god lives on as the dismemberment every individual life suffers — and as the indestructibility every life partakes of.

Relationships

Primary sources

dionysos-archetypal-image (Kerényi 1976, preface, p. 117, 241)