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Dionysian Rebirth of the Feminine

Dionysian Rebirth of the Feminine

The closing chapter of Marion Woodman’s woodman-owl-bakers-daughter (1980) is titled “The Mystery Cult of Dionysus” and reads the eating disorder as a Dionysian phenomenon — the binge as ritualized frenzy, the anorexic restriction as the phallic-Apollonian counter-pole, dance as the maenadic recovery of the body the patriarchal-daughter cannot inhabit. In Addiction to Perfection and again in Conscious Femininity she returns to the figure: “You often describe the behavior of people with eating disorders as ritualistic — the special clothes they wear, the ‘icy altar’ of the refrigerator, the Dionysian frenzy accompanying binges” (Peay, in Woodman 1993, p. 124). The clinical vocabulary is mythological because the underlying structure is.

Woodman’s reading takes the Dionysian sparagmos — the dismemberment of Pentheus, the rending of the maenads’ victims — as the somatic metaphor for the dismemberment and re-membering by which the patriarchal daughter is undone and re-born. The mystery cult of Dionysus, in which women left the city to reclaim the body the polis had asked them to refuse, is the classical structure within which her clinical theory finds its mythological seat. The thread therefore links Woodman’s post-Jungian feminine school directly to the Lineage’s own classical headwaters, and to Walter walter-otto and Karl karl-kerenyi‘s readings of Dionysus as the god of women.

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