Dionysian vs. Appollon

Unlike last month’s computer systems or microwave cook books, religion never really goes out of style. Daoism dwindled almost out of existence in the far east, but now is on the upswing, especially in the west, where the ideals of natural order, and insight into the balance of the world and the cosmos, are very appealing. Likewise, western nature-based religions, from that of the Native Americans to Celtic religion to the ancient Greeks are enjoying renewed and broad popularity. And among the pantheon of Greek divinities, two of the most compelling, dramatic and fascinating are Apollo and Dionysus.

For almost a thousand years they were two of the most famous, most important gods in religious history. People knew how they looked—immediately recognizable on vase paintings and reliefs and statues. People knew when to ask their help and how to worship them, and where and with whom. They were much more explicit than the unnamable god of the Jews, much more distinct than the trinity of Christianity… and still, now, are nearly buried in the sands of time and human belief.

Who was Apollo? He was the son of Zeus, the King of the Gods, and Leto, a minor goddess. Poor Leto, according to an ancient Homeric hymn she wandered over much of Greece in her labor pangs before finally finding relief, and birth of her male son while hanging on to a palm tree on the sacred island of Delos. Her son was a twin; his sister was Artemis, the virgin goddess of the moon and the hunt.

Apollo was the ‘Lord of Light’, the god of the sun and of music, of archery, rationality, medicine and of oracles. His Pythian oracle at Delphi was the most important oracle in the ancient west, considered the spiritual center of the cosmos. Apollo was a star-crossed lover, nearly all his love affairs, most but not all with women, failed before they even got started. Perhaps the most famous was his pursuit, literally, of the nymph Daphne. Daphne is the Greek word for Laurel or Bay and as she fled Apollo, the nymph’s prayers to have her enticing beauty changed were answered; her river god father changed her into a laurel tree, which Apollo adopted as his tree from then on. Some of his tragic loves are settings for him to practice medicine, attempting to save such beloveds as the youth Hyacinthus from death, but even Apollo was unable to defeat sure death. Indeed part of his association with medicine comes from his being the father of the famous healing god Asclepius, who is one of those Apollo loves and yet cannot save with all his medical skill when Zeus executes Asclepius with a thunderbolt.

Apollo was generally depicted as handsome, clean-shaven and often holding a distinctive prop like a lyre. Many myths tell of contests in music between him and others: mortals, satyrs, even the god Pan with his pipe. Unsurprisingly Apollo always won and was not a graceful victor: often the loser suffered more than just the loss itself. He was a prototype for Jesus: as the good shepherd, and as depicted with a halo. Apollo was often shown as a kouros, young male figure with a lamb draped over his shoulders. And the halo surrounding Jesus’ head was directly derived from the sun disc framing the head of the sun god Apollo Helios. He was associated with animals from the crow to the tortoise to mice with miraculous healing powers. He was a glamorous and sometimes violent figure, for instance in the Iliad when he comes in response to the anguished invocation of his priest in Troy against the Greeks:

“Pheobus Apollo…came down from the peaks of Olympus, angered in his heart, wearing on his shoulders his bow and closed quiver. The arrows clashed on his shoulders as he moved in his rage, and he descended just like night. Then he sat down apart from the ships and shot one of his arrows; terrible was the clang made by his silver bow. First he attacked the mules and swift hounds but then he let go his piercing shafts against the men themselves and struck them down.”

Even with such potent descriptions of his might and danger, Apollo was best known for his association with rational thought and balance. As Robert Graves notes, poetry, philosophy, astronomy, mathematics ans science also fell under Apollo’s patronage in Classical times. Apollonian maxims: ‘nothing in excess’, and ‘know thyself’ were inscribed on the walls of his temple in Delphi. He was even known for bringing the muses down from their home on Mt. Helicon to Delphi and ‘taming their frenzy’ (Graves), leading them in calm, public dances in his sacred precinct.

Part of the advantage of a pantheon, a passel of gods, is you get a lot of variety. No theological stone is unturned when you have a range to choose from: young, old, male, female, violent, peaceful, intelligent, stupid, sexual, chaste, powerful, weak, airborne, earthy, intellectual, simple, beautiful, ugly, generous, jealous...all these qualities were possessed by one or another of the gods. Frequently they stood against each other, or together, in myth, to frame a story, ground a tradition, highlight a moral lesson, or an element of human psyche. Really, most stories of the gods and mortals do all that each time - those elements were wound inextricably into the Greek world view. Much of Greek religion and mythology explored the poles of human qualities and experience, and gave license to even the darkest aspects of humanity.

Just where did ancient Greeks go for deep, emotional experience - for vulnerability and expression and freedom? Well, the more we explore their faith, the more we learn there were opportunities for unusual and deep experience in the traditions associated with most of the Greek gods. But most of all, the Greeks went to the cult of the youngest deity in the Olympic pantheon, Dionysus, the ‘Lord of the Soul’.

Most religious scholars place Dionysus as joining the other Greek gods late, coming as they all did, out of precursor deities in ancient Greece and its neighbor cultures and countries. This is his background as Graves offers it:

“At Hera’s (philandering Zeus’ jealous wife) orders, the Titans seized Zeus’ newly-born son Dionysus, a horned child crowned with serpents and , despite his transformations, tore him into shreds. These they boiled in a cauldron, while a pomegranate tree sprouted from the soil where his blood had fallen; but rescued and reconstituted by his grandmother Rhea, he came to life again. Persephone (Goddess-Queen of the Underworld of the Dead), now entrusted with his charge by Zeus, brought him to King Athamas of Orchomenus and his wife Ino, whome she persuaded to rear the child in the women’s quarters, disguised as a girl. But Hera could not be deceived, and punished the royal pair with madness, so that Athamas killed their son Learches, mistaking him for a stag. Then on Zeus’ instructions, Hermes temporarily transformed Dionysus into a kid or a ram, and presented him to the nymphs...of Mount Nysa. They tended Dionysus in a cave, cosseted him, and fed him on honey, for which service Zeus subsequently placed their images among the stars, naming them the Hyades. It was on Mount Nysa that Dionysus invented wine, for which he is chiefly celebrated.”

Heck of a childhood. Understandably he went mad for a while, and then spent a lot of years wandering different countries, being persecuted and denied as a god. His typical response involved bewitching those who rejected him so that they often suffered or killed loved ones in an induced madness that kept them from seeing people for who they really were. On a larger scale, his typical response involved commanding armies of faithful followers who would win him victories and recognition of his godhood.

Eventually he returned to Greece, and took his rightful place among his peers, his worship prominent and respected. He was most famous for his female followers, called Maenads. Maenads were girls and women from Greek society, which was fairly repressive to its citizen females. But when they were transformed into maenads for a Dionysian holiday or festival, they were liberated to the point of danger. Mythic accounts told of maenads dancing, drinking and running wild in the hills beyond the cities and towns of Greece. In their most extreme moments these women were supposed to have killed animals in the wild with their bare hands, even tearing them apart. And occasionally—usually in conjunction with a punishment from Dionysus—with killing a person whom they perceived through the haze of the god’s madness as an animal. It’s unclear how much violence occurred in actual Dionysian celebrations, but there’s no question that women and men both ran together out of doors, freed of all society’s usual requirements and rules, and that drinking and licentious behavior were the order of the day. A portion from the writings of the ancient Greek historian Demosthenes shows that Dionysian rituals occurred in urban environments. Here Demosthenes writes of a young man’s role in the rites:

“On attaining manhood, you abetted your mother in her initiations and the other rituals, and read aloud from the cultic writings. At night, you mixed the libations, purified the initiates and dressed them in fawnskins. You cleansed them off with clay and cornhusks, and raising them up from the purification, you led the chant “The evil I flee: the better I find.”… In the daylight you led the fine Thiasos through he streets, wearing their garlands of fennel and white poplar. You rubbed the fat-cheeked snakes and swung them above your head crying “Euoi Saboi” and dancing… .”

How does this relate to what we get, and what we wish to get, out of our religious experience here? It seems a little ridiculous to talk about UUCSS practically in the same breath as hearing about people rubbing fat-cheeked snakes and swinging them above their heads - how do you rub a snake’s cheek anyway, and can you really tell a fat-cheeked one from just a regular one? What does any of this really mean in this enlightened day and age?

Or if any of it has to mean anything, let’s go with Apollo, right? If we have to give our time or even just lip service to ancient ways of Greece, his fit fairly well: reason, music, order, philosophy, astronomy, math… we can do that. It’s fairly comfy for us—and we’ll just downplay the whole archer who brings down an army part—we’re working towards peace anyway, so he should cut us some slack.

Well, there are a few problems with that solution. Here’s one wrinkle; as Dionysus was famous for proving, it’s a kind of hubris to say that we’ll just dispense with the dark side, or the emotional side, or even the violent side of human nature. We all need a way to deal with and work through what we struggle with, and it’s a common critique of Unitarian Universalism by only focusing on the good, we let people down. We leave ourselves without resources when it comes to suffering, evil, injustice prevailing. Dark and light are bound together, like night and day, like hurt and love. If we’re pretty good at lifting up one aspect, then we need to turn our attention to the other. And that’s my point this morning. We need reflection but also feeling, air but also earth, light but also dark, order but also catharsis. Without chaos there is no opportunity in a system for change and without change, a system is static; the future is only stagnation. I’m not at all concerned for the rational, controlled, reflective aspect of our faith: that is clearly thriving. And it’s not just us. Western religion generally is still the place for aspiration, prayer, exploration, working toward the public good and striving with personal desperation. But with the exception of charismatic faiths like Pentacostalism, religion isn’t connected any longer with deep, apparent emotion, with communal catharsis. Apollo and the Muses would approve: most of us spiritual folk are a lot more about effect than affect these days. What is missing is Dionysian experience, any wildness, feeling, catharsis, motion, religious opportunities to release that in our souls which is spiritual and deep but not rational or careful.

I hardly know how I can say that - it’s so alien to the UU tradition I was raised in, the tradition we’re all familiar with here. But I truly believe this. I believe it, of course, in a rational, careful way. I’m the last person to advocate draping ourselves in skins, waving long wands, getting drunk and running down whatever we find in the nature path. Those stories are acceptable as part of our past in a way that just as much invalidates them for our present. I’m not talking about the means, I’m talking about the end, about catharsis and openness and sharing and unselfconsciousness. What would happen if we had a moment in our experiences here at UUCSS that was not careful and self-conscious?

Perhaps more tellingly, at his most important religious site, Delphi, Apollo shared dominion. Most of the year it was his, but for a couple of months each year the god went on vacation to the land of the Hyperboreans. And while he was away, guess who took over at Delphi while he was gone? Dionysus. They shared the holiest, most important site in Greece. That sharing was reinforced in similar stories in their myths about events in their youth, about the important role of women as priestesses and religious followers. The dichotomy of these two gods is also a kind of relationship.

Of course there’s a lot we have grown beyond in Greek religion. But there is also, as in all religions, a lot of truth for our consideration. Two closely entwined truths in particular. One is that the soul yearns for expression, for freedom. Unitarian Universalists are good with words, we care a lot about them; we use the latest language. You must have heard the joke about why we’re not the greatest hymn singers: because we’re always reading ahead to see if we agree with the words. That’s honest, responsible, respectful - but also a little uptight. The other truth is that the soul yearns for shared experience that is beyond words. Not only for free unselfconscious expression for its own sake, but also because some aspects of faith are not about words, they transcend words. The ancient Jews forbade the naming and speaking the name, of God because they believed in the power of words to define and in so doing to limit. And the divine was by its nature beyond all definition and limits. What in our faith, and in our faith experience here in this congregation, reaches us at those deepest levels so often beyond language? What connects us at those levels? How do we honor what is beyond language?

(9/11 story—most powerful religious experience so far—extinguishing all the candles—like snuffing lives—wanting to stop—having to go on—having to snuff the last one.) What else is like that for us here? What else can we do to make room, to allow freedom for the wordless, the unselfconscious, the eternally true, the unforgettable and unnamable?

These are questions I hope we will answer together in our ongoing life as a congregation. It’s a challenge I feel myself and that I offer to all of us, to find ways to make time, in our Sunday services sometimes, and at other times, to allow expressive religious experience that is not about words. What forms that will take, how it will happen, I don’t know. I don’t know yet, but I want to find out and I’m looking forward to adding this element in our experience together and the journey we share, that we begin again with a new church year. It is good to be together.

Amen.