Hercules vs Dionysys
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I really don't see what you are getting at here. I always thought it was Apollo vs Dionysus.
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In practice, one finds that these archetypes are personable. In other words, when we encounter them as an objective other, they seem quite self-aware. There are a number of theories to account for this, but it is immaterial for the purposes of my essay. It's enough to note than it makes sense to talk about these powers as if they were actual people who could be offended, cajoled, flattered, bribed, and otherwise engaged as a real people. This is the accepted method of Archetypal Psychology, a term coined by James Hillman, a protege of Jung's, and the accepted next generation of that school of psychological investigators.
That's why, in terms of this thread, it makes sense to say that Hercules and Dionysus do not get along, which is only what you might expect from children of the same father, but with different women. They despise each other, though to be fair, the irritation is more one-sided—Hercules being the more intolerant and inflexible of the two. Dionysus is simply a much more relaxed, broader, psychic structure than his brother, much less worried by the possibility of degenerate behavior, or morality. It's Hercules who is always fuming bout the evil of the world, and the necessity for hard measures of control. If they were politicians, Dionysus would be a liberal, and Hercules would be a Conservative.
Hercules is the type of activist who sees evil, and seeing it must subdue it with his club, a blunt weapon that is blunt not only in form, but also in its ability to really understand what is going on—it is not subtle. As the son of the mother—Hercules actually means Hera's man, or glory—he is a materialist. Hera as the most political and authoritarian of the mother goddess, she is a type of the material, mater of the universe. As such, Hercules will always insist on the most material and physical interpretations of reality. In his world there is no grey, only black and white, right and wrong, true and false. He is also a vindictive and violent god, taking after his mother the way he does.
One of the most important and telling stories about him has to do with his descent to the underworld. Hercules could not abide the dead, he was threatened by them as you might expect and tried to hit them with his club—a futile gesture. He is fine with 2 + 2 = 4, and the myth of materialism as it relates to science, but the dead are images and these will not willingly conform to the reductive interpretations of physical science. In art, 2 + 2 can equal almost anything! It was Hermes who had to tell him to chill, put down the club and try to learn something new, different. But that didn't happen. You see, he just doesn't get it. As far as he is concerned it's all so threatening, so best to start swinging the club again!
Dionysus is a very different kettle of fish. It's interesting that in the Bacchae, the enemy of Dionysus was Pentheus, who is little more than a petty form of Hercules—someone who believes in cold, hard reality and can only see the wild, untamed energies of Dionysus as dangerous and needing to be shut down. He put Dionysus in prison. But it was Pntheus' own mother who, being inflamed by the ecstasy of the god ripped the head from the shoulders of her own son—poor Pentheus.
Okay, it's late and I want to start drinking heavily. Next time I add to this thread I will have something to say about Dionysus.
Love and Will
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Looking forward to it.
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I'm not really qualified to take the next logical step in this thread. There are many, more qualified people who will probably read this, and who have spent much more time than I have contemplating, researching and actively exploring the Dionysus mythic structure/type than I have. And still, I feel my simple observations, in the context of the whole thesis I am putting forward are valid. They could be expanded on and corrected at points, but the thrust of the whole is sound.
Mythic stories of the effeminate male are the background stories most revealing in terms of those inner psychic structures that define what it means to be an artist. Well, this is not universally true, but as a type of hybrid the male variant is the one most often singled out, so it is usually put forward as a cipher for all the others, which include the masculine female, not the warrior, but the poetess who falls in love with other women, counting them as her muse. Dionysus falls into this broad category of mythic types—incorporating both sexes—he just happens to be a particularly virile variant. Regardless, he is the 'soft man' who dances, loves poetry, smells good, an who has known the world—much beloved by women in general. Hercules, by contrast, has no feminine characteristics.
By virtue of this feminine admixture, Dionysus is already a law-breaker; he is transgressive, and morally corrupt, by virtue of his physical type if nothing else, or so Hercules would have us believe.
The temples of Dionysus in classical Greece were the birth locations for western theater! The two main genres of theater are equivalent to the two aspects of the God: Tragedy and Comedy. As such, he is not a beautiful god in the traditional sense, like Apollo. On the contrary, he is a god of the sublime because his trance includes the experience of terror—picture Ariadne, abandoned on the island of Naxos by Jason, and hearing the train of Dionysus approach— the cymbals, the wild dancing, the utter disorientation. His is not the learning, or morally driven play designed to teach us to be good, but the satyr play, the tragi-comic attempt to envision the unknown beyond all knowns.
In this regard, it is significant that he is the son of Zeus. (The oracle of Zeus at Dodona is a sacred tree. The oracle priestess listens to the seemingly chaotic sound of the wind rushing through the branches and leaves, or in some accounts the clanging of many brass vessels hung from the branches, and in this cacophony she hears the voice of the god—picking out the meaning in the nonsense.) Dionysus is the type of direct, unmediated experience, intense and profound, destroying all categories and assumptions. It is this experience that is in fact an initiation into a larger framework—a larger reality.
Pentheus puts Dionysus in prison, but these constraints cannot hold him, and despite these measures he manages to attend the revels in his honor. Hercules would forbid these excesses, killing everyone with his club if he had to, and in short, do anything necessary to enforce the rules and uphold the traditional values, the old authority.
At this point it would be useful to find and present a recent, historical example of the these archetypes. Luckily I have just the thing in mind. It is the infamous split between Freud and Jung. In this story Freud is acting out of the Hercules myth type, and Jung is our Dionysus.
The story goes that Freud tried to get Jung to accept his theory of sexual repression as absolute—he specifically said he wanted to make it a dogma. (Now, my bringing this event up isn't a critique of Freud's theory, but rather it is about showing Freud's need for a stable universe where everything is explained and can be counted on to behave—classic Hercules behavior—not all that different in spirit from that branch of psychology that sports the word 'behave' as part of its name: behaviorism.) The story goes that Jung was taken aback, and when asking Freud to explain his intent was told, in almost hushed tones of dread, that is was a necessary stratagem to fend off the black tide of occultism! In other words the realm of Dionyisan experience, beyond the accepted boundaries of established science!
Returning to the story of the Bacchae, it is significant and worth noting that Dionysus can control Pentheus' mother, Agave, and not be controlled by her. As a gesture of emancipation this show of superiority can also be lumped in with the escape from the prison as well. It seems he does not suffer from a mother-complex, and can simply, effectively avoid any and all of the fatalism, and gross limitations of spirit that is associated with the materialistic cult of the great mother in her manifestation as the physical laws of nature—matter, elements, atoms and such...
Simple statement: Dionysus is the type of the real truth, deep and inexpressible, the image of the Holy Guardian Angel, while Hercules is the counterfeit and lie of the experience represented by his brother.
My next installment will focus on simple lists—what kinds of behavior and beliefs belong to who? To which god is the neo-fascist beholden, and who watches over the visionary?
Love and Will
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I am improvising. This fact means I am acting in the spirit of Dionysus. I don't know where this writing will lead exactly, but that does not stop me from entering into the dark space of possibility and letting it happen. As a theater artist this is my favorite way to create, as opposed to those directors/actors/designers who must know in advance what they should be doing and how they should do it, which is essentially what they learned in school or from a book (or the equivalent of a book, essays on the internet, etc) and involves no real creative effort or experimentation other than that of blindly following an ideology to the bitter end. These later practitioners are totally directed by theory, a theory they believe to be the fact and the measure of all things.
If we amplify what I am saying we arrive at another simple statement: Dionysian energies tend toward anarchy; Herculean method tends towards totalitarianism. These are, in my opinion, the two, absolute poles of political thinking and possibility.
Of course its a lot messier than this in practice. Agents intent on establishing an absolute world order will encourage, predict, or warn against anarchy as a way to encourage people to embrace fascist solutions—the way out of chaos ("...in a few years we will be eating our neighbors"). It's more than coincidence that Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini was described by his followers as the strong man of Italy (Hercules). By contrast, the ideal of the anarchist is often imagined at the end of a long process of control, the goal of which is the defanging of those forces that would dominate the rest of us if left to their own devices—that is the theory of communism; though it should be noted this has never been honestly put into practice because all historical attempts to do so were ultimately unmasked as totalitarian regimes only pretending to be progressive, like Stalinist Russia. They saw the rhetoric of 'freedom from exploitation' useful, and would invoke it without any intention of following it in truth.
The danger here is that I will be mistaken for promoting something other than what I am trying to get at, which is only a general set of ideas it might be useful to think about. The fact is, the Great Mother is primarily an ordering archetype, and can manifest in many different ways. Still, for the sake of this writing I am mostly concerned with the pathological, and in this respect it can be seen that it is the goddess who is behind both a Jeffry Dahmer and an Alexander the Great.
Dahmer's psychopathology could only express itself in murder and cannibalism because that is the only way he could imagine relating to the world around him, through the most physical and objective aspect of the people he killed and ate—again, the theme of mater; physical fact; the one, real world we are all supposed to share, and which has all the spiritual and emotional dimensions expunged from it as unreal and unsatisfying!
For Alexander, the complex played out in a somewhat different, but predictable way. As the son of Philip of Macedon and Olympia—Alexander's mother, Alexander was plagued with a profound discontent that manifested in his need to conquer and subdue. Again, the most concrete, physical manifestation of control was seen by him in terms of actual territory, and the promise of the next empire just beyond the visible horizon lured him on, never quite fulfilling and always cheating him of that sense of connection with the mother he desperately craved. It was no less a pathology than that of Dahmer.
So Hercules is incapable of this warmth, this experience of fulfillment, while Dionysus on the other hand is(!), perhaps because he is a manifestation of the generous spirit of generation itself! At the same time, he is, according to Heraclitus, identical to Hades, the god of the underworld and death. It is through his myth-type that a true transformation is actually possible.
The next and last installment might be something of a confessional, but I'm not sure at this point. So I guess it's time to stop and let the problem ferment in my imagination.
Love and Will
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My biological father is a singularly uninspiring man. For many years I did not own him as my father. Only recently have I been able to accept him as the nominal cause of my biological existence, but not the spiritual cause. The absence of this figure in my life has been a major distress for me throughout most of my life. It is in part, out of my desire to resolve this distress, and also to align myself to my inner necessity that I have embraced the time honored tradition of filling in the blanks as I would. Like the scientist, who having hit a dead end or blank wall, I have given the problem over to my imagination. It is my conviction that the fiction I ended up with has been tested, and like many theories resulting from this method, proved true in practice.
In One Star in Sight, it is claimed that Crowley, as a Master of the Temple was cast out, into the heaven of Jupiter. In this respect I cite the fact that Crowley was the first person I found who told me things about how to live that ordinarily would have been the responsibility of a father. If I feel his paternity, I am certainly not the first or only one. It may seem a stretch, even a muddling of the planes for me to claim that Crowley as Zeus is my true father, and that I was nurtured in his thigh until my term was up, but let me remind you that this is an effort of the imagination and the rules of fiction apply and the connections I make in this regard are what's important, not the orthodoxy of the connection itself.
How many others of us are appropriately his children, accepting the 'next step' solution to heal the woes of the world? Doesn't that make me/us Dionysus, or at the very least Ariadne?
But even if this fiction is rejected, I can still lay claim to the identity of my true father by a simple extrapolation of the first principle in this essay. I have a major father complex, to use the psychological designation—I hate authority! And coming to know and appreciate this bias of mine I have at times submitted to authority, not because I needed it or believed unthinkingly in it, but because I could see it's limited usefulness, because 'he who has seen me has seen the father' and I know no law that is above that. There are many other bits of evidence I can cite, but one of the most important from my perspective has been my instinctual dislike for the Hercules-type of person.
The last of the archetypes is the glittering image of ones own divinity. I don't mean this in an ego-inflating way, but in the real sense meant by Crowley as Magister and Magus. It is this image, when installed in the heart, that will force the other archetypes to serve you. Certainly, one is possessed by this master no less than they would be by any other power, but in this instance, it is not a foreign occupation or alien set of rules that forces submission, but your own true self.
I did not dwell much on the father complex, not to the degree that I focused my attentions on the mother complex, but I can be forgiven for this omission in so far as I offer myself as the prime example, standing-in now for the father. My mother? She has never been a problem in my life, and anyone who knows her would readily confirm the connection between her person and Semele, daughter of Cadmus and Harmonia.
And yes, it's just a fiction when all is said and done, but a damn useful fiction nonetheless—all hail art. So, I'm finished.
Love and Will
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Robert, 93,
I'd say you're hardly alone in looking to the archetypes to resolve parent issues. And Crowley, as Magus, is as much archetype as man. His Magus-self (if we can speak of a 'self' at that grade) is both Herculean by means of his attainment, and Dionysiac by means of the ecstasy of that attainment. I don't, however, accept your word 'fiction' here because I think the emotional content is far too real for that term to apply.
Oddly, my own biological father's tendency to be emotionally absent led me to seek out authority, not reject it. I therefore found a different pair of opposites arose within me, to both address the need and to help resolve it. But that topic unlike you, I prefer, to keep behind its own veil, other than to say it's a lifelong process. However I think you've produced a very useful analysis of one person's situation here, that other people can apply in their own way.
93 93/93,
Edward -
@Edward Mason said
"Robert, 93,
I'd say you're hardly alone in looking to the archetypes to resolve parent issues. And Crowley, as Magus, is as much archetype as man. His Magus-self (if we can speak of a 'self' at that grade) is both Herculean by means of his attainment, and Dionysiac by means of the ecstasy of that attainment. I don't, however, accept your word 'fiction' here because I think the emotional content is far too real for that term to apply.
Oddly, my own biological father's tendency to be emotionally absent led me to seek out authority, not reject it. I therefore found a different pair of opposites arose within me, to both address the need and to help resolve it. But that topic unlike you, I prefer, to keep behind its own veil, other than to say it's a lifelong process. However I think you've produced a very useful analysis of one person's situation here, that other people can apply in their own way.
93 93/93,
Edward"Thanks for your thoughts.
I had hoped to imply that fiction was as real as non-fiction, and at times more appropriate as a tool to help us understand subjective experience, like emotions.
Now that the impulse is exhausted it becomes easy for me to feel detached from the writing. I'm still prepared to defend it for what it is, but I'm not really worried about whether it says anything real about me or the world. I was more content to have made the gesture.
By way of a nominal apology to Hercules I will admit that I too can get pretty Herculean at times, though it tends to leave me with a bad taste in my mouth. The evil of the world worries me too. I accept the fact that there are moments in life when only a strong man or woman with a big club need apply, but maybe those times are fewer than we 'imagine.'
Love and Will
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Your are descriptions confusing.
You say Hercules = mother-complex, Dionysus = father-complex. Yet Hercules is the masculine figure, and Dionysus the feminine figure. The role of the mother is key to understanding both male archetyples. Hercules is the hero, fighting evil, etc, but all for the sake of the Mother. His father Zeus probably felt a little competiton coming from his upstart half-human son.
Hercules is about righting injustices for the Glory of Hera (plus his mother would no doubt be proud of him). One of Parsons big mistakes is that he never freed himself from the influence of his mother. He envisioned a New Aeon where women were powerful and witchy, had equal rights to men, etc (that's the Hercules phase). But in the end due to his reckless Babalon Working, he was blown to bits (that's the Dionysus phase).
Dionysus is free from all this dualism and represents a far more terrifying (and older) archetype. Remember he ultimately gets torn to pieces by the maenads.
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@he atlas itch said
"Your are descriptions confusing.
You say Hercules = mother-complex, Dionysus = father-complex. Yet Hercules is the masculine figure, and Dionysus the feminine figure. "
Yes, it's confusing, but only on a superficial level. The connection between over-achievers, or people who can never be good enough at what they do, and the mother is well established. I refer back to my example of Alexander the Great. Also, Hercules is the myth-type, not the resultant human manifestation, which we would expect to take any number of forms based on this relationship: the goddess as mother makes demands on the son, who keeps extending himself, heroically, to realize them. I think it makes all the sense in the world that mommy's little man will act like a mission-from-god reformer.
Dionysus is equally the son of his father, the father being the liberal source, the plenitude, the libertine Zeus. It would be a mistake to assume Dionysus should somehow behave like a clean cut American youth—decadence is an expected, necessary excess or dark side of this archetype.
But to address what I think is the root question in your post, that I should tie down these two mythic, larger than life personages to rather banal psychological disorders... This is standard psychological practice. Consider my effort an excursion into the Q'lipoth of these two archetypes.
In any event, the connections and associations you are inclined to make is ultimately a question of what works for you. You shouldn't let my writing trip you up in this regard.
I will just add that what I did was not strictly a scholarly effort, though I did cite stories that have some basis in fact. It was an associational exercise.
Love and Will
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@RobertAllen said
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.... Dionysus .... he is, according to Heraclitus, identical to Hades, the god of the underworld and death. "this is very interesting!
could you point out to the specific fragment where he (Heraclitus) says this? -
@danica said
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@RobertAllen said
"
.... Dionysus .... he is, according to Heraclitus, identical to Hades, the god of the underworld and death. "this is very interesting!
could you point out to the specific fragment where he (Heraclitus) says this?"Searches for Heraclitus and fragments will turn up numerous hits. Here is a link to one from the top of the stack—it looks complete:
classicpersuasion.org/pw/heraclitus/herpate.htm
The fragment in question is #127 on this site:
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For were it not Dionysus to whom they institute a procession and sing songs in honor of the pudenda, it would be the most shameful action. But Dionysus, in whose honor they rave in bacchic frenzy, and Hades are the same."May familiarity with the fragments is through James Hillman, who asserts Heralcitus to be the first depth psychologist because his work is ultimately concerned with the character of soul.
Love and Will
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When I was learning Greek and roman mythology, and came across Hercules, I felt like I had hit a wall.
It seems that there were pages And pages of all the glorious things he did, how heroic and good he was to vanquish evil.
But I only ever found scant info on the fact that before all of that, he was married and had a family, that for some reason he brutally, savagely murdered them with out cause.
Part of this mother complex, would be what appears at face value. But if we look deeper we may uncover a little Peter Pan........who also was a glorious hero.
He was selfish, he did all those deeds for redemtion, not because he wanted to help mankind.
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Veronica, 93,
"He was selfish, he did all those deeds for redemtion, not because he wanted to help mankind."
And ... ? I don't believe anybody wants to "help mankind" as a thing on its own, though self-redemption may well benefit others. Read Cap II of the Book of the Law in this regard.
93 93/93,
Edward -
@danica said
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@RobertAllen said
"
.... Dionysus .... he is, according to Heraclitus, identical to Hades, the god of the underworld and death. "this is very interesting!
could you point out to the specific fragment where he (Heraclitus) says this?"The identification of Dionysus with Hades is indeed interesting. It identifies Dionysus with Osiris, who was cut to pieces by Set, then remembered by Isis, to become the king of the underworld and death. Hence Dionysus = Hades.
But keep in mind the Greeks writers were completely fascinated by, and often misread, Egypt and the Egyptian system, the remains of which existed as a far older and more sophisticated civilization to the south of the much younger Greek civilizations. This gave rise to a kind of pseudo-Egyptianism - similar to Renaissance scholars attempting to make sense of the Kabbalah.
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@RobertAllen said
"In this respect I cite the fact that Crowley was the first person I found who told me things about how to live that ordinarily would have been the responsibility of a father. If I feel his paternity, I am certainly not the first or only one. It may seem a stretch, even a muddling of the planes for me to claim that Crowley as Zeus is my true father, and that I was nurtured in his thigh until my term was up, but let me remind you that this is an effort of the imagination and the rules of fiction apply and the connections I make in this regard are what's important, not the orthodoxy of the connection itself"
I would suggest that feeling that one's biological father is not one's real father should not be regarded as a fiction but as the real orthodoxy of gnosis. Think of the first line of the Lord's Prayer. Or any of the other countless legends of mythical characters being secretly fathered by gods on hapless females. The question to ask is, what part of myself feels there is something "more" to who I am? Children often feel shame at the deficiencies of biological parents, and dislike talking about it to others - the sense of injustice is too personal. But in fact this dissatisfaction/revulsion/rebellion against one's inherited enviroment is a necessary part of evolution and awakening that leads to discovery of True Will. Once this occurs, we can reassess our biological parents and be able to accept them for who they are, not how they should be.
As a Christian gnostic once said, there are many usurpers but one true Father.
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@Edward Mason said
"Veronica, 93,
"He was selfish, he did all those deeds for redemtion, not because he wanted to help mankind."
And ... ? I don't believe anybody wants to "help mankind" as a thing on its own, though self-redemption may well benefit others. Read Cap II of the Book of the Law in this regard.
93 93/93,
Edward"And........
Being selfish is not a bad thing,But I think maybe what I am banging up against here, is the idea of being good an heroic (helping mankind) for the sake of being good and heroic ( was it his true will to shovel shite).
And the false pretenses that have now been projected onto his archetype, of being the good ol boy, Because of that.
Or being good because you have too.
Does it matter who cleaned out the stables, as LNG as they got clean?
The devil made him do it, made him slaughter little babes.
Made him loose himself to madness, and commit the worst of the worst.And no matter how atrocious, how wrong, how bad a man can be.....
He deserves the chance to redeem himself,
To return to the motherI never liked the fact, that the hideousness of crime is buffered and down played.
Reminds me of what I hear in the news about how environmental British Petroleum is. Now
Will my grandkids ever hear about the devastation and destruction that forced them to act in accordance.
That daughter that Heracules killed was someones daughter, and she will never get to hold her hand again, no matter how many monsters are slated, nor how much shite is shoveled.
I believe that fact should not be down played in history books.
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Veronica, 93,
Ancient myths have a particular quality of their own. I read all of The Odyssey a few years ago, and was fine with it until the end, when Odysseus hangs the serving maids for, basically, being disrespectful. He had the right to do so as ruler of Ithaca, but that sequence almost spoiled the book/poem for me. It forced me to step back and remind myself this story was 3,000 years old.
Hercules is an archetypal figure, not a man, and Homer makes Odysseus into something close to an archetype, too. The strenuous nature of their efforts is beyond human comprehension. Hercules' story is told within the context of a warrior society, with strict codes, such as we have not had for many centuries. Its significance for us now lies beneath those cultural overlays. For the archetypes never die, but keep on expressing themselves in new forms. For the Greeks, Hercules. For boys as I grew up, it was super-hero comics, and for many people today, the character they adopt in video games. Or, as the practitioner in a magick circle.
93 93/93,
Edward -
The significance of the Mother vs the Father vis-a-vis mythical archetypes misses the point. The crowned and conquering Child should balance Justice (= the Mother) and Mercy (= the Father) within him/herself while following their star..
It takes a hero to fight a monster because the hero is quite monstrous themselves. Only the winners become remembered in history and legends as heros, their sins swept under the carpet, while the losers are demonized as monsters...
Personally I don't care for the concepts of heros or monsters because both suggest individuals who are extraordinary and beyond the laws of reality. Sooner or later we discover the same laws apply to everyone. Its natural for children to latch on to hero characters, but later in life we discover that 1) these stories for children contain a grain of truth and 2) that it is simply a matter of consistent and hard inner work.
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93 Mr. Mason
I appreciate you clarifying your insight for me.
I know that I would do well to get a grip with the fact that the way I view things is not typical, and runs contrary to popular beliefs. The world is not sunshine and lolipos, rainbows and fairy dust, even if I am.The world really is a hard cold place isn't it. And it does want my warmth and softness doesn't it.
Little boys and girls need heroes, always. And I guess it is best if they are not privy to the commonnality of the hero, for that would completely destroy the purpose of having one in the first place.
Storey time:
My father really liked GWBush, and often tried to engage me, in conversation about what it was that I didn't like about him. It got rather exhausting for me, and I don't like to talk politics. One day it came to me, on how I could stop this.Dad......why don't you like gw.
V..........after all he's done and said, good and bad....it comes down to this simple, fact....I would never want to have sex with him. Nothing that he has ever said or done has made me think....I wanna screw that guy. He should get a blow job......I do not find him attractive in anyway, shape or form. I do not think that he should be able to reproduce, and that is it.Dad kinda shuddered a bit and said simply oh.
And I have never had to talk about gw again.
Silly story, but I would not have sex with Heracules either......he isn't attractive to me, now Dionysus.....he is a hottie and. I hope he gets some luvn everyday.