Apollo and Dionysus
After reading Hillman, I began to wonder about how Dionysus became overshadowed by his brother Apollo and his cool distant reason? And how ever since the Rational Enlightenment, the Apollonic consciousness seems to have become one of our preferred modes of consciousness? And in some wider sense the Apollonic consciousness seems to be running many of our institutes and quite a lot of our thinktanks and most of the ‘normal’world (and could be one of the main ‘dominants’ of the dominant culture).
And whilst the Apollonic consciousness loves to analyze things from a far off distance, I have some sympathy for Dionysus because he is a ‘god of the vine’ and a ‘god of moisture’ and seems to be a little closer to the ‘zoe’ of a more natural life force and the earth and the body and nature. And also because it seems like he could be more sensitive and poetic. And also because the Dionysian consciousness doesn’t seem to be as much in the head, and also leaves some room for some ecstatic mystery and something óther’.
And I have been working on a theory that some gods and goddesses have been more repressed than others, and some have been more lost or forgotten, or maybe denied and sent into exile, and I think Dionysus has been more repressed than Apollo with his reasonable mind. And in the Pantheon of goddesses and gods and mythic figures Eros and Venus and Dionysus could have all be repressed more than Apollo(who let’s face it loved the Rational Enlightenment and has pretty much been running almost everything since then).
And I think there might be something in remembering some of the lost and forgotten goddesses and gods, because the world reveals itself in different ways through them, and in each god a different kind of world shines through, and a different way of seeing the world, along with a different imagination, And the Pantheon means that the world is full of many gods. And they are all legitimate in their own way. Hestia is just as legitimate as Apollo. And it is hard to be monotheistic after reading Hillman, because he draws you into a polytheistic world.