Apollo and Dionysus

with excerpt from Ginnette Paris

Ever since the Rational Enlightenment, the Apollonic consciousness seems to have become one of our preferred modes of consciousness and seems to have been running just about everything and most of our institutions and our thinktanks and educational facilities. And the Apollonic mode and its style and taste might be a 'dominant' of our dominant culture.

But after reading Hillman, I began to wonder about how Dionysus became overshadowed by the cool distant reason of his brother Apollo. And sometimes i think about King Pentheus(who I always imagine living high up in some elite penthouse where he can look down on things in the world below). And the main thing about him was that he wouldn't honor the god Dionysus. And that didn't work out that well for him, because he got ripped apart by the maenads. And it is like there is something deep within our psyche(like a deep emotional and feeling and instinctual life that needs to be honored).

And whilst the Apollo consciousness loves to analyze things from a far-off distance. Dionysus was a ‘god of moisture’, and a ‘god of the vine’, and a little closer to the ‘zoe’ of a more natural life force and the earth and the body and nature. And these are things that often seem to be repressed or lost or forgotten in our culture(and maybe even sent into exile in the so-called 'normal' world). But these are the things that also need to be honored. And if you look at the world through the Pantheon of many different goddesses and gods, each is legitimate within its own right, and each has their own style and taste and a different world shines through. And Dionysus is just as legitimate as Apollo.

Ginette Paris - Excerpt on Dionysus - Bringer of Madness

Dionysos brings madness to King Lycurgus and to his cousin King Pentheus, because they won’t recognize his divinity. The story is worth telling. One can read it as a fable about the danger of having an exclusively rationalistic point of view on life.