Ritual - Understanding Ecstatic Archetype

Ecstasy. It was once considered a favor of the gods, a divine gift that could lift mortals out of ordinary reality and into the higher world. The transformative fire of ecstasy would  burn away the barriers between ourselves and our souls, bestowing on us a greater understanding of our relation to ourselves and to universe.

Ecstasy  - the Dionsysian experience - may be intelectually unfamiliar. But in ecstatic expression  we will recognize a long-forgotten part of ourselves that makes us truly alive and connects us with every living thing. In  Greek myth that part of ourselves is represented by Dionysus

It is the great tragedy of contemporary Western society that we have virtually lost the ability to experience the transformative power of ecstasy and joy.  This loss affects every aspect of our lives. We seek ecstasy everywhere , and for a moment we may think we have found it. But ,on a very deep level, we remain unfulfilled.

Our materialistic society teaches us that the only reality is the one we can hold onto, the only thing of value what we can «take to the bank».  Our spirits need nourishments as much as ever. But, having excluded the inner experience of divine ecstasy from our lives, we can look only for its physical equivalent.  And no matter how hard we look, or how many low-grade ecstatic experiences we accumulate, we crave more.

This craving has led to the most characteristic symptom of our time: addictive behavior. 

The successful young entrepreneurs who need a cocaine for a competitive edge, the supermoms who can’t get through the day without a tranquilizer; the harried managers who need two or three drinks every night after work to unwind, the young children who try street drugs because they are already touched by our society’s bankruptcy of feeling, the college students who solely go to parties to get drunk or stoned; the dangerously fast drivers who are addicted to the thrill of speed; the insider traders who make illegal deals on the stock market because they are addicted to the kick of making money; the perpetual singles who go from lover to lover, addicted to the first glow of romantic love.

Addiction is the negative side of spiritual seeking. We are looking for an exultation of the spirit; But instead of fulfilment we get a short-lived physical thrill that can never satisfy the chronic, gnawing emptiness with which we are beset.

Our first step to fill this emptiness is to understand the nature of ecstasy.  In Ancient Greece the Archetype of Joy was represented by Dionysus - God of Wine and Ecstasy. The myth of Dionysus , and the rise and fall of his cult, describe our loss of the ecstatic experience. Then this relay race was taken over by Jesus in Western World. 

In Vedic myth this Archetype is represented by Krishna, who is the most romantic and adventurous god and partly by the lord-Shiva.   One of the forms of Shiva is called Nataraja, which translates as - King of Dance.

Myth of Dionysus

Dionysus the personification of divine ecstasy, who can bring transcendent joy or madness; Dionysus the goat - the capricious, unpredictable thrill of joy that make us jump and click our heels; Dionysus is the personification of wine and its ability to bring either spiritual transcendence or physical addiction.

Trice Born and Born of Fire 

His father’s name Zeus means «shower of light» 

Zeus was always traveling and enjoyed many love affairs with mortal and immortal women.  

Once Zeus was traveling on Earth - he wore a disguise, so no mortal could look at hime and live.  He came to Thebes, an ancient city of Greece, where he fell hopelessly in love with Semele, the daughter of King Cadmus. Their passion was great and before long she become pregnant.

Semele wanted nothing more than to look into the true eyes of her lover. She was urged by her nurse ( who happened to be the treacherous Hera in disguise) - to ask Zeus to grant her a boon. Foolishly, he swore an unbreakable oath on the River Styx that she could have whatever she asked. Note how we can trace this pattern - vows become the cause of all troubles through various myths   - we can notice this in Ramayana and Mahabharata as well.

She asked Zeus to see him without disguise, but mortals couldn’t bear it and thus she was almost completely incinerated, except the womb, around which she wrapped some ivy. 

Zeus was furios, he plucked fetus from womb, cut an incision in his own thigh, and tucked the child into it.  Then he gave birth to infant Dionysus. 

The child of fire was a brand new force to be reckoned with - even Titans, who represented the instinctive masculine qualities - were troubled by this, so they tore baby to pieces and boiled him for good measure. 

But Dionysus would not stay dead- a pomegranate tree, symbol of fertility, sprouted from the earth where a drop of his blood had fallen; And Zeus’s mother, Rhea, made Dionysus whole once again. 

Young god was born three times: once from his mortal mother’s womb, once from his immortal father’s thigh and once from the wisdom of the earth, represented by his grandmother. 

Semel’s sister and her husband Ino raised Dionysus as girl, so that Hera would not recognize him.  But Hera was not deceived and Zeus ordered to Hermes  to transform Dionysus temporary to the young goat and bring him to the beautiful Mount Nysa.  There he was raised secretly by nymphs, the joyous female spirits of the forest and the mountains. 

The nymphs loved their young charge. They housed him in a cave and fed him on honey. Dionysus spent his childhood gamboling freely over the mountainside, surrounded by the glories of nature and learning the sensuous pleasures of the earth.  His years passed happily and he learned many things - he invented the winemaking and understood its power perfectly, which would bring humanity so much potential joy and desperation. 

As Dionysus revealed himself - that was exactly what vengeful Hera had been waiting for - she cursed him with madness. 

He left his home and start traveling - mad as he was, he was still a powerful god- wherever he went he spread the art of wine-making and his own worship. 

He was accompanied by a startling array of followers: old, drunkard Selin, grinning satyrs, joyous nymphs, prancing centaurs, and other woodland spirits capered and danced alongside, for human followers he had Maenades. These wild women of the mountains, initiates of the ancient women’s mysteries, worshiped their god with singing, dancing, and bloody feasts.

In time Rhea, his grandmother purified the young god of his madness and imitated him into her mysteries, the very secret women’s mysteries. The Power of Dionysus was then unparalleled. 

In ancient Greek mythology, Rhea is a Titaness - the daughter of Uranus (Sky) and Gaia (Earth) - and one of the most important mother-figures in the Greek cosmos. She is the wife of Cronus and mother of the Olympian gods: Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, Poseidon, and Zeus.

She is known for that she hid Zeus in a cave on Crete, and gave Cronus a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes instead. He swallowed the stone, believing it to be the baby. Zeus later grew up, forced Cronus to disgorge his siblings, and led the Olympians in overthrowing the Titans. In this way, Rhea becomes the great preserver of divine life - the mother who saves the future.

Symbolically, Rhea embodies The Great Mother archetype, fertility, continuity, and the flow of life across generations.

Her name is often linked to the idea of flow or ease (Greek rheo - “to flow”), which aligns her with the primordial movement of life itself.

So then wherever Dionysus went he invited people to join in his celebration. One thing soon become clear: Those who chose to worship him experienced divine ecstasy; those who opposed him chose madness. 

King were especially prone to oppose Dionsysus, who seemed the antithesis of law and order. 

We can see it our culture as well, on the example of underground raves.

Why do we like raves ? For experience of freedom and joy. But in the countries, where tyranny exists - they are illegal.

King Lycurgus of Thrace fought violently against him and captured the god’s army. Dionysus went into hiding deep under the sea with Thetis, and ocean nymph.

Rhea struck Lycurgus with madness and the raving king hacked his son Dryas to death, believing him to be a grape-vine. 

At this moment Dionysus emerged triumphantly from the sea and announced that Thrace would not flourish unless Lycurgus was killed. The people of Thrace rushed to obey. They tied horses to the king’s arms and legs and pulled him limb from limb. 

The tales of Dionysian ecstasy and madness spread across the world, and soon the power of Dionysus was recognized from Asia to Africa to Europe. Eventually, Hestia and respected goddess of the hearth, stepped down and gave him her seat on Olympus. He sat thereafter at the right hand of his father, Zeus. 

He was happy, but for one thing - he wanted to see his mother, whom he had never known.  He decided to make one more voyage - braving death, he rescued Semele from underworld and brought her to Olympus to live with the immortals. He renamed her Throne, which means «ecstasy» 

Here the myth officially ends. But Dionysus did not live happily ever after. He was eventually ejected from Olympus by mortal politicians, suppressed by Romans, Jews and Christians alike. 

What is Ecstasy ?

Dionysus has been called the most important of Greek gods and the most misunderstood. He is not straightforward as all other gods.

Dionysus embodies the continual, unpredictable changes and transmutations of nature. Like the wine he is born of fire, torn apart seemingly dead, and always reborn.  ( Something familiar ? ) At once tragic and heroic figure like the wine he represent he brings humans both madness and ecstasy. 

He represents the continual rebirth of life in the spring, the irrational wisdom of the senses, and the soul’s transcendence. 

Western civilization praise orderly live. We have healthy skepticism about «seeing is believing»  Our world is build upon thinking, logic, progress and success - and within this limits we feels secure.  But today even our scientists tell that this limits are illusory. 

We completely forget about  spontaneous, guilt free experience of our emotional and irrational natures - like shouting for joy and feel positive and invigorating energy changing every cell in our body. 

Dionysian ecstasy is found in the sensuous world, the world of poets and artists and dreamers, who show us the life of spirit as seen through senses.  Do not confuse this with the sensual world, the materialistic world of pleasure that is destitute of spirit. 

Also we have confusion and misunderstanding of terms referring to the Dionysian experience? 

What do you think when you hear the word Dionysian? 

Do you think: « Ah, the ecstatic principle! Or the transcendent nature of soul?»  

Or most probably - wild, drunken orgy. 

Word orgy originally meant «ritual worship of the god Dionysus»  It was sacred not profane expression of love of god. 

Irrational 

Dionysus and his world we describe as irrational, which we usually take to be a negative term. We think of irrational person as strange, offbeat and insane. 

But! We have to understand and specify to what exactly we are relating.  

We are emotional creatures, first of all, and if we exclude the emotions from our life we become automatons.  

Or if we follow only the prescribe rules and routine - we can achieve some progress, but our life will become dry and grey at some point, we can loose our sense and purpose at some point.  

All Emotional and are not always bad. 

Original meaning of irrational knowledge is simply knowledge gained through our senses rather than through our rational process. 

Our Western Culture praise the masculine style of thinking, which is more rational, and feminine which is based more on information from senses.

However, all the greatest scientists have displayed a powerful mix of the masculine and feminine styles.

Masculine tends toward focussing on what separates phenomena from one another and categorizing them. It looks for contrasts between things to better label them. It wants to take things apart, like a machine, and analyze the separate parts that go into the whole. It thought process Is linear, figuring out the sequences of step that go into the event. It prefers to look to things from outside with emotional detachment. It prefers to dig deeper, to uncovering the order in the phenomena. It likes to build structures, wherever in book or a business. 

 Feminine likes to focus on the whole, how the part connect to each over, on the overall gestalt. Instead of freezing phenomena it time in order to examine them, it focuses on the organic process itself, how one things grow into on another. In trying to solve the puzzle, the feminine style will prefer to meditate on several aspects, absorb patterns and let the answers and solutions come to individual over time, as if they are needed to be cooked. This form of thinking leads to insights when the hidden connections between things suddenly become visible in intuitive flashes. 

Dionysian way to the world is on a sensuous , intuitive level rather than in an abstract, logical way. 

Meaning that you can get knowledge through dreams, trips, insights, meditation.

In classical Greek thought there were two fundamentally different ways of knowing:

1. Logos – knowing by reasoning, argument, abstraction, and calculation.

2. Aisthēsis (αἴσθησις) – knowing by direct perception: sight, sound, touch, smell, taste, and the felt immediacy of experience.

Aisthēsis is the root of our modern word aesthetics. It originally meant “that which is known through the senses.

It is not against reason - it is prior to it. Reason analyzes. Irrational knowledge reveals.

Kant (18th c.) in In Critique of Pure Reason:

1. Aesthetic = the science of sensibility (space & time)

2. Understanding = concepts, categories (Logos).

He formalizes the split:

“Thoughts without content are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind.”

Neither Logos nor Aísthēsis can stand alone.

Nietzsche Revolts against Logos-dominance.

In The Birth of Tragedy:

1. Apollonian = form, clarity, Logos

2. Dionysian = ecstasy, body, rhythm, aísthēsis

Greek tragedy was born from their union.

Modern culture, he says, is sick because Logos devoured Dionysus.

We have:

• Knowledge of the body

• Knowledge of image and symbol

• Knowledge of music and rhythm

• Knowledge of feeling and atmosphere

• Knowledge that comes as recognition, not deduction

Jungian psychology inherits this directly. Jung spoke of:

• Thinking – rational function

• Sensation – direct perception

• Feeling – immediate valuation

• Intuition – direct apprehension of patterns

Only one of these is “rational” in the modern sense. The others are “irrational” not because they are wrong, but because they do not proceed step-by-step.

There is a kind of knowing that comes through the eyes, ears, skin, heart, and imagination - and it does not need to explain itself in words to be real.

Myth, music, dream, ritual, and art live in this domain.

They do not argue.

They show.

In Indian tradition they are reffered as vidya and prajna.

Vidyā (विद्या) - Knowing through form

From the root vid- “to know, to see.”

In India, the Vedas themselves are called vidyā.

So are music, grammar, medicine, astronomy, yoga.

Vidyā is knowledge you acquire.

Prajñā (प्रज्ञा) - Knowing through direct insight

From pra- (“before, beyond”) + jñā (“to know”).It is not accumulated - it awakens. You do not learn prajñā the way you learn geometry. It appears when mind becomes clear.

Vidyā prepares the ground.

Prajñā opens the eye.

One builds the map.

The other lets you see the landscape.

• When you study ragas, archetypes, texts - that is vidyā.

• When a myth suddenly speaks about your own life - that is prajñā.

• When sound becomes meaning without words - that is prajñā.

Ecstasy and Joy 

In the West we associate ecstasy with X-rated movies. 

But the root ex stasis means - to stand outside oneself.  

I am ecstatic - I am simply beside myself.  I mean that I am filled with an emotion too powerful for my body to contain or my rational mind to understand. I am transported to another realm in which I am able to experience ecstasy. 

We are rarely stand outside ourselves these days. The world is too much with us - we are constantly working, thinking, planning, doing etc. All the responsibility and power we burden ourselves with.  We need some relief from all that strength - to be for a moment in a timeless, spaceless, primal place which has no responsibility, which isn’t going anywhere. 

If we will look closely to the definition of the word happiness and joy, we can find that:

Happiness - defined as «a happening of chance, luck, fortune» 

Joy  - « an exultation of spirit, gladness, delight, the beatitude of heaven or paradise» 

Ask yourself: 

Do you want happiness, which is luck or fortune? 

Or do you want joy, which is the beatitude of paradise?  

One is short-lived, another one is transcendental.

The Rise and Fall of Dionysus 

How did we lose Dionysus?  Psychologically, the story of his loss is the triumph of rationality over irrationality; thinking over feeling; the concrete «masculine» ideals of power, agression, and progress over intangible «feminine» values of receptivity, growth, and nurturing.  As the patriarchal religions gained in power, the old matrifocal ways of Dionysus were diminished and finally lost. 

Dionysus’s worship spread across the Europe at 3 century BC and he received official approve at 6th century BC when he replaced Hestia on Olympus. 

Ancient Greeks celebrated festival of Dionysus during spring time and it was celebration like no other - everything stopped for 5 days and even they same prisoners were released during  this time.  The most unusual was that this celebration was not confined to temple ritual, instead they honored him with sacred play - and it gave birth to theater.

The joyous celebration of his resurrection gave birth to comedy, and bemoaning of his death - the singing over the sacrifice of the symbolic goat ( the tragoidia ) - the goat song - became the tragedy - drama as sacred intoxication and catharsis.

Beyond the cities, Dionysus’ cult retained its ecstatic, initiatory form:

• Maenads in the mountains

• Wine as sacrament

• Possession, dissolution of ego, rebirth

But his glory was not long. The patriarchal religions of Romans, Jews and Christians who succeeded the Greeks did not take kindly the irrational antics and intoxications of Dionysus. 

When the Romans get hold the capricious and goat-like qualities of Dionysus they perverted it quickly - instead of god of wine they made god of drunkenness - Bacchus.  And around 186 AD they started repress the followers of the Dionysus. It was madness same as Salem in colonial America - the government executed thousand of innocent people. 

At this stage, Western civilization turned toward distraction rather than healing. Much of Western culture became a culture of alcohol - not of sacred intoxication, but of drunkenness.

At the same time Romans elevated Apollo,  the god of light, who has been honored equally as Dionysus at Delphi.   Apollo gradually come to represent analytical thought - preservation of law and order.  The unpredictable, ecstatic Dionysus had no place in this scheme and in fact became an enemy of it. 

The chief god was now officially up there in the sky, and here down on Earth Dionysus was shorn of his power. 

Jews and Christians treated the Dionysus no better, and turned the goat image of his into the face of the devil. 

This history represents the evolution of our collective consciousness, our collective inner world, our collective psyche.  For us western people it’s really hard to understand how we can discuss the devil - but the great sages, who composed Vedas - didn’t divided world for good and bad - it’s just different qualities of our life.  

Psychologically it is necessary to set one quality aside so another may be adequately rooted. The collective human psyche need to suppress irrational before it get completely out of hand to nurture the rational.  Without this probably we could never achieve the discipline required for scientific progress our rational culture made, however the cult of rationality has gone as far as it could go -we have lost our spirit, connection with it and the spiritual ecstasy.

The void which left we can feel with only way we know - danger and excitement. 

The Other Side of Ecstasy 

Dionysus lives in some strange places these days. He lives in the thrill we experience when we read about the latest terrorist coming, the latest arson fire, the latest political assassination.   When we hear a screech of brakes and a crush of the car- we say « ah how awful» and rush to see the accident.  

This is poor-quality Dionysus - what happens to human drive that has not been live out for a nearly thousand years. 

When Lycurgus drove the armies of Dionysus out of the country - he thought that he god rid if troublesome god - but Dionysus has merely gone into the hiding depth beneath the sea.  And when he re-emerged with the violence terrifyingly powerful, because it is other side of another powerful quality of ecstasy, which is madness.

Like Lycurgus we can refuse to recognize the archetype for as long as we wish, but like Dionysus hiding under the sea it will not disappear. If we do not invest in humanity it will return in dehumanized form, still charged with same archetypal energy, but manifesting itself in much more primitive way. 

You cannot kill a god, who is by definition immortal. 

Neither you can kill an archetype, for an archetype is a base human drive. 

This happened not only on the individual level, but on the level of the collective unconsciousness, the psyche of whole society. 

Carl Jung wrote about this most clearly in his 1936 essay “Wotan.” There he tried to understand the sudden, irrational surge of collective passion that swept through Germany in the 1930s.

Jung argued that beneath modern, “civilized” German society there lay an unlived archetype - the ancient god Wotan (Odin):

a figure of storm, frenzy, wandering, war, poetry, possession, and ecstatic rage. For Jung, Wotan was not just a mythological character. He was a living psychic force in the collective unconscious of the German people. Christianity and rational modernity had pushed this archetype underground. It was not integrated, ritualized, or consciously worked with. It remained unlived.

When an archetype is repressed for centuries, Jung said, it does not disappear - it returns in distorted and dangerous forms.

“Wotan, the god of storm and frenzy, the unleasher of passions and the lust of battle, has taken possession of a whole people.” - Carl Jung

Instead of appearing as sacred ecstasy, trance, poetry, or initiatory madness (as in older cultures), Wotan erupted politically and collectively: as mass rallies, hypnotic charisma, collective possession and as warlike intoxication.

In this sense, World War II was, in Jung’s view, not only a geopolitical event, but also a psychic catastrophe: an ancient god returning without a temple, without ritual, without consciousness - returning as destruction.

What he warns us about is universal:

When a culture loses its sacred channels for ecstasy, trance, and transformation, those forces do not vanish.They return as mass movements, violence, and collective madness.

In 2022 we can the same thing happening with russia starting another world war attacking Ukraine. For decades, post-Soviet Russia lost: a coherent identity after empire collapsed, a meaningful future narrative, symbolic channels for grief, humiliation, and transformation.

When a culture has no living myth for renewal, no ritual way to mourn loss, and no shared vision of becoming, psychic energy does not vanish. It condenses in the shadow. That shadow often takes the form of: nostalgia for imperial grandeur, mythologized past (“we were great, therefore we must be great again”), mythologized past (“we were great, therefore we must be great again”).

In this sense, Ukraine becomes a projection field: the place where unresolved inner collapse is turned outward.

Ukraine, by contrast, is living through a different myth:

the birth of identity through suffering, choice, and self-definition.

That is why the conflict is so charged - it is not only about territory, but about two psychic futures colliding.

The war in Ukraine is the biggest conflict since WWII, involving millions of people fighting from both sides.

Looking for an Ecstasy in All the Wrong Places 

So what we are choosing?  

Collective paradise or the collective madness?

Now we are watching the conflicts from all around the globe in the real-time in tik-tok and instagram - about this kind of «entertainment» the ancient romans could not dream about with their Colosseum.

Our society esteems thinking and doing, process and success above everything else. If a given thing does not have a momentary value or not showing a concrete return we will place it lower on the scale.  We tend to like things we can control and dislike things we cannot control or understand. 

Craving for spiritual ecstasy, we mistakenly seek material fulfillment - we chase after phantom - and when we catch it - in the form of more money, more sex , more drugs, more food, more oblivion - we find out we have been chasing ephemeral happiness, when we should have invited lasting joy. 

And as with any addiction - we need more and more- because we are craving for the divine joy and didn’t satisfy it- we crave it’s opposite ; Thus robberies become muggings, muggings become beatings, beating become shootings, shooting become bombing - and where will it ends? 

Sensation and Materialism 

Our society chose to follow the erratic footsteps of the degraded Bacchus instead of the joyful dance of Dionysus, it began to confuse materialism with sensation. As the result we are the citizens of 21st century have lost the contact with our senses.

Even our clothes - is aimed for success - by wearing ties - separating our heads ( thinking), with the rest of the body, thus symbolically cutting the sensation below our neck.  

When we take our ties off - at the end of the day we go wild, all that bottled up sensation comes up rushing out looking for somewhere to go. 

At first glance our society is terribly sensation oriented - the flashing neon signs, almost naked bodies on the billboard, our obsession with food and exercise.  Originally maybe we want this things for pleasurable sensation they give us, but after a while we develop a crave for sheer quantity and lose sight of quality all-together.  We want more things( cars, money, clothes etc), but we are frightened of making real contact with another person. We are more likely to get naked in front of the stranger, when lower the emotional defense in front of someone we love.  This unease with human contact is a reflection of the absence of the good-quality Dionysus. 

We have a fear to hug a stranger - nice people don’t do that.  You may have feeling, as long as they are very discreet and totally under control. 

There is an oldest tradition in Christianity which is called «Passing of the Peace» 

Close your eyes for a moment and find your piece. 

Open your eyes and pass the piece to the person next to you - touch or hug, or as you wish. 

Intimacy

In our society the often bemoan the «loss of intimacy» - we are quick to take a stranger to bed, but we are loathe to be touched emotionally.  When we lost the concept of touch as a way to contact the god, we became ashamed of our natural urges and guilty even for our fantasies. 

Perhaps we fear mostly about this experience - is the lost of control. Surrender, even to the divine, is something our cultures does not encourage.  Surrender to divine means crossing over from well-defined roles into the realm of the gods, where everything is possible and nothing is explained. 

We run after sex, chasing the god again, but so often we get dehumanized, poor-quality Dionysian experience. And this is terrible thing to behold - instead of love-making we get rape, or sexual acts completely devoid of spirit.  Just as we try to cut off our heads from the rest of our bodies, we have tried to separate the sexuality from the rest of our lives. We have even given sex its own section in town.  The low-grade ecstasy is enough to keep us going, but it does not lead to transcendence. 

To drown our guilt and shut down the voices we anesthetize ourselves with alcohol and drugs - ironically, in other times and places these substances were divine sacraments used to bring visions of God.  So as you can see we are doing all other way around.  With no sacred means of expression, we can express our need for Dionysus only symptomatically: through substance abuse, child molesting, and domestic violence, muggings, wars, terrorism, madness. 

Ecstasy. A New Stage

Why do we find this transcendent ecstasy so difficult to achieve?  

Perhaps because the concept is relatively new - the psychological archetype of ecstasy, reprinted a new stage of human development.  The mightly Titants which never seen something alike tried to destroy him before it even started. He was the last god added to Olympus and the first to be torn down.

Another example - color of blue was the last color added to our senses, and one of the most missing in color-blind people. 

It’s not mentioned in Old Testament , even Aegean Sea- the most vividly blue of all the seas of the world is described by Homer as the «wine dark sea» 

A faculty is so new and so easily lost means that human race is only just evolving that capacity into something like stability. 

Some people burst spontaneously into this experience - Hippy movement for example, but less than a year it degraded from innocent Woodstock to the violence of Altamont. 

We cannot simply move from the realm of rationality to the irrational realm of Dionysus and think that everything will be solved. 

This is either/or thinking. 

We need -and- 

This is the burden that is on us now. To keep the fine points of our patriarchal world - its order, form, care and structure - and bring Dionysian back in to enliven it without doing flip-flop and going to pieces.  

Man was thrown out of paradise - a state of original oneness with nature - cherubim with flaming swords block his way, if he should try to return. Man can only go forward by developing his reason, a human one, instead of  the pre-human harmony which is irretrievably lost.

 A door inviting us to the paradise is the Dionysian experience. 

Jesus and Dionysus

Strangely as it is - Jesus has become the enemy of Dionysus principle. 

Our religion became very dry and sterile - we don’t have any more celebration of ecstasy and dark night of soul.

But if we don’t contact with this parts of souls - it can have terrible consequences. 

What before was called possession - now is neurosis, we have chosen to express this through psychological symptoms.  

Neurois - actually is low-grade religious experience. 

If understood the Communition service - exactly as he is - inner meaning, not outer structure - we would be thrilled and transformed - exactly that is required from ritual; 

Betrayal, murder, crucifixion - god become wine. 

Followers of the Dionysus also drank blood of the god as wine, and also consumed his flesh symbolically in the form of goat. 

Christ was twice-born, Dionysus - thrice-born. Both were born from mortal-mother and divine father. 

Semele has ascendent to Olympus and Virgin-Mary to Heaven.

The Antioch Chalice mentions Christ engaging in the favorite Dionysian activity -swinging on grapevines, between two worlds.  

Dionysus and Jesus both were hailed as King of Kings. 

Like Jesus, Dionysus was usually not believed when he claimed to be the son of God. Both suffered at the hand of local politicians; both retinues comprising of outcasts and women of questionable repute. And both showed a disregard for the established modes of worship. 

Both die and reborn, symbolizing the life that does not end - Dionysus ascended to Olympus and Jesus to Heaven and both sit at the right hand of their father. 

Of course wine- turning water into wine - something what Dionysus was doing on daily basis. 

Christ is the god of love, the god of ecstasy and the visionary god.  

Anyone who loved another human being knows what incarnation is - godhood or goddesshood walking before us. 

To experience the love of God through our senses by loving another human being - is just as good as through any other faculty, although Christianity has recently downplayed it. 

Jung observed that we distorted our principal mandala - the cross. 

Cross represents - intellectual and sensuous world. Rational and Irrational.

We value the intellectual more than sensuous. The Greeks had better senes and valued all  points of cross equally. 

We make the bottom longer - because we diminish our senses ,we overcompensate the earthly dimension of the cross. 

Western Christianity is out of balance in this matter of sensation.

Jesus was equally spirit and matter, but we tend not to believe that way.  

Unity of Spirit and Matter is also the principle which we can trace across the Vedas. This is union of Shiva and Shakti, Consciousness and Energy, Feminine and Masculine principle.  

Tantra teach us that the we can ascend to spiritual realm honouring the body as the temple.  

Christ was god of Love, but we took only «Suffering» from his story- thinking that if we suffer enough - we might be as good people as he was. 

Jesus was misunderstood so totally that he has became the chief enemy of the Dionysian element in the Christian world.

Women and Dionysus. Celebration of Life.

On the west we have an strong stereotype what is considered to be male sexuality, which more related to Greek God Apollo - blond, bronze and made of muscles.

So we feel uncomfortable with Dionysus ambiguity.

As we remember he was raised as a girl by nymphs.

But this indication of androdgyny - is in my opinion indication of the high-level of this Archetype. If we make analogy with Vishnu ( who is androgynous - he took form of the most sexiest goddess in the galaxy) for example. Vishnu is the highest deity in Hindu cosmogony, representing the Being itself. Another highest deity Shiva also has the androgynous form. So we can make a conclusion that the Being is androgynous by its nature. So as our Psyche. We are not rigid characters, but we both have male and female qualities, what myths are trying to tell us.

But just as we separate our head from our body with our ties, in our society we try to allocate men with one set of psychological experiences - logic, the finding of facts; and to women -emotion and intuition. ( This is the realm of Dionysus, perhaps that why he was loved by women)

The Maenads

The original worshippers of Dionysus, where Maenads. Wild women of the mountains - who were the last devotees of the Great Goddess, the ancient matrifocal religion that the new patriarchal order was beginning to replace. They took their god, Dionysus, off into the woods to do their night revelry , the women mysteries into which Rhea initiated them, and they were so secret that nobody really knows what actually was going on.

Here we can clearly see parallel with Krishna and his ritual Rasa-Leela.

Krishna grows up in the pastoral land of Vrindavan , among cowherds.

The Gopis (milkmaids) are the village women - simple, earthy, human. When Krishna plays his flute at night, the sound reaches them like a call from the deepest layer of the soul. They leave everything - homes, duties, even social rules - and follow the music into the forest. There, in a moonlit clearing, Krishna dances with them in the Rasa-Leela, the “dance of divine play.”

The Great Goddess

The idea of the primal female deity, first adored, then brutally side-lined by male deity is a consistent theme in mythologies around the world.

About what it can tell us? Transition from emotional to intellectual and rational world?

Gaia is the earth-mother in Greek mythology, was abused by Uranus (sky). Only way for her son Kronos to escape, was to castrate his father. Then Zeus his son, kills Kronos and declares himself father of gods of men. Gaia remains as earth-mother, respected by distant.

Tantrik tradition speaks of the primal one - Adya, who took the form of a bird and laid three unfertilised eggs from which were born Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva.

In mythological stories around the world, the male deities compete for the female prize. This can be traced by nature, where all wombs are precious but not all sperms. Animals have alpha-males, who keep females for himslef. Bird-female selects the best one with the best feathers.

This selection of only the best males creates anxiety amongst the not-so-good males and translates into fear of invalidation in the human species. To cope with this fear of invalidation, social structures such as marriage laws and inheritance rights come into being, often at the cost of the female.

In Bronze age we can see that man have to fight for women, or simply submit for women's choice, we can see the many stoires in Hindu-Puranas. In such-female dominated cultures, the male could not refuse the woman: in the Mahabharata when Arjuna refuses her advances, Urvashi curses him to turn into a eunuch. Any man who forces himself upon a women was killed.To ensure the dominant males did not have exclusive rights for a women, the ritual of killing the chosen males at regular intervals emerged. So the women could chose her lover, but her choice was fatal. The only way to escape this - to become a eunuch.

The close association of women with sexual pleasure and childbirth on one hand and death on the other is made explicit in the stories of Yama and Yami, the first living creatures in the Rig Veda. Yami, the sister, approaches Yama, the brother. He rejects her advances on moral grounds and eventually dies and finds himself trapped in the land of the dead as he has left no offspring behind in the land of the living. Thus rejection of sex turns him into the god of death. Yami mourns for him, turning into the goddess of the night, Yamini, as well as the mournful dark river, Yamuna.

The connection of death with sex ( Interesting that in Jyotish astrology sex and death are connected in 8th house as well) , sex with pleasure and pleasure with women resulting in men associating women with immorality, misery and vulnerability.

And becuase of this great anxiety men invented many things to overcome it and control women - starting from celibacy or religious and culture codes.

In Bible Samson loses his hair and strenghts when he succumbs to the charms of Delilah. He regains it when he rejects her and turns to God. Rejecting women granted freedom from suffering. In Buddhism, the daughters of Mara, god of desire, are associated with decay, disease and death; in rejecting them, Gautama Siddhartha of the Sakya clan finds freedom of suffering and comes to be known as Buddha, the enlightened one. Rejection of women even granted the freedom of death. In the Yogic tradition we hear how semen shed into a womb creates the son, but weakens the father, however in one is able to achieve urdhva-retas, reverse movement of semen up the spine towards the head, one can get siddhi, magical powers. This ideas led to the rise of monastic and mystical cults that sought to either control nature or escape from it.

Another form of control which quite real is cultural, after men took over all the economic activities of the society, women became popular commodities with high demand and low supply. Women which have no other choice, but to trade their bodies for pleasure. Prostitute became pejorative term as only reach could afford the most beautiful of women. Gradually the word was used for all women who freely chose and discarded her lovers for a price. Eventually it come to the condition when women were denied to ownership of their bodies, it belongs to the father, brother or even son.

Mahabharata tells us about the times when women had a rights to have up to 4 husbands.

Also term whore means a prostitute - this is pejorative term today, but long ago before the idea of property became a cornerstone of human culture, it simply meant are women who was free to go to any man. And virgin was a women who was ready to bear a child. ( That's why the term virgin-mother was not ironical at that time).

Diana of Ephesus was considered a whore and a virgin.

Over a time meanings had changed and virgin become a word of praise while whore became in insult.

All this ideas to control and dominate women by man, are coming from fear and anxiety of men related to women. Also fear to be cuckolded by women and raise the offsprings of dominating men ( we also find many stories where Zeus always secretly seducing wives of mortal kings)

Anxiety births aggression and desire to control every detail.

Phenomenon of aggressor tap:

The more power they get, the larger empire they create, the more points of vulnerability they have - this sparks in them need to be more aggressive and gain more and more power.

In Iran - then they afraid of women so much, so when the women wants to take off the hijab - they shoot them with machine-gun.

But we Christians did all the same- the men afraid of the women so much, that they called them all witches and burned them on the pyres. Only those subservient remained.

Also there is a fear of a woman's excessive sexual appetite. Mahabharata tells the story of one Bhangashwana who was cursed by Indra to live half his life as a man and half his life as a woman. When asked what he preferred , he said a woman's life because the sound of "mother" is sweeter, and because a woman has greater pleasure during sex. Same story we can find Greek mythology, where seer Tieresias has lived life both as a man and a woman, and when Zeus asks him who gets greater pleasure during sex, he answers woman, angering Hera, wife of Zeus, who takes away his eyesight.

In Chinese mythology, where two natural forces work in harmony to create life: yang and yin. The masculine yang is like a dragon in the sky. The feminine yin is the earth, which like a phoenix rises from its own ashes, regenerating itself. There is no superior or inferior force in nature, say Taoist traditions, but in Confucian traditions, which favor culture over nature, hierarchy emerges, where the man becomes more important. The Emperor is given the Mandate of Heaven to sit on the Dragon throne in the Forbidden City, and asked to domesticate the earth, bring order where there is chaos. A patriarchal society links women with nature and men with culture. Just as culture domesticates nature, men asked to domesticate women.

In the cities battle for women continues, men are fighting for power, rival tribes want to break city walls to gain all wealth, but not only wealth, but also their women; So the isolation of women becomes stronger behind the city walls "for their own sake"

So the honour of the society becomes located in women's body- we can see this in the Greek epic of Troy. (Helen of Troy)

Orestes, son of Agamemnon, avenged his father's death by killing his mother, and her lover, Aegisthus. For the crime killing his mother, Orestes was pursued by the dreaded female spirits known as Erinyes. The story reveals a shift from matriarchy ( when the lover of the queen was ritually murdered and killing the mother was the greatest crime to patriarchy when killing women who challenged male authority and dishonoured family was justified.)

Same story of assigning honour to women we can trace in Indian epics - In the Ramayana, after Ram rescues Sita from the Ravana -he says " I rescued you not because you are my wife, but to protect the honour of my family.

Also women deem to be dangerous force, because they value desires more than rules. That's why Greek democracy valued only men. Also in Bible women Eve is tempted by the serpent to break the law of God by eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and compel Adam to do so. For this act of transgression, both Adam and Eve are cast out of Paradise and Eve made subservient to Adam. Before the creation of Eve, God said to have created Lilith, of hairy legs, but she refused to be subservient to Adam and so was cast out: she become the mother of monsters.

We have another story in Puranas about this Tree - it's called Parijata.

The Parijata Tree was one of the gift emerged after churning the ocean.

It was placed in Indra's garden ( Indra is named a King of Gods)

Krisna while travelling to Dwaraka comes to Indra's garden to rest with his girlfriend.

Girfriend bites an apple and wants this tree in her garden, but Indra forbides and declares war to Krishna. Girlfriend says - that no one can stop Krishna.

Relationship Goals

Or what you did for your girlfriend ?

Or we can interpret as the woman "makes" a man.

Krishna of course thumped Indra.

Krishna is symbol of Tantra - superlover.

Compare this with Adam, who instead of protective Eve, he is blaming her to protect oneself in front of God.

Excessive urbanisation also resulted in disgust for all things material - meaning was sought beyond city walls and the open sky above.

Before those who looked at the earth saw it as the Goddess - Ishtar, the fertile and Ereshkigal, the barren, in Sumerian mythology. Kali and Gauri in Hindu. Hathor and the lioness Sekhmet of Egyptian mythology. World was seen in feminine terms. But gradually gaze was turned upwards to the sky. Gravity became a fetter, and earth the trap and women bondage. Escape was sought. The serpent, messenger of the goddess, was rejected in favour of winged beings or angels who take humanity to "higher" realms above the earth.

In biblical mythology, the serpent becomes the symbol of the Devil, he who disobeys and tempts others to disobey. God, who makes all the rules, becomes male and resides in the sky.

Prophets who carry his words to earth are mostly male: Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Mohammad.

They overshadow female prophets: Miriam, Deborah, Anah

In Islam there is a folk tradition how the Devil tries unsuccessfully to include in the Koran through Muhammad a verse that makes the three goddesses of Mecca - Urs, Mannat, Lat - mediums to Alah. These were the infamous Satanic verses. Still feminine finds the presence as the hand of prophet daughter - Fatma.

In the early days of Buddhism - Buddha refused to include women to his monastic order, until his mother cried upon death of his step-father, thus he realized that women also suffrer. Early Buddhist saw wisdom in intellectual terms only, but later made room also for emotional.

Compassion was seen to be as important as knowledge. And the compassion took form of the Buddhist goddess called Tara.

For men it is difficult to accept that the Wisdom is the feminine archetype. But is it so in any culture: Athena ( Greek), Saraswati (Hindu ), Sophia ( Christian )

In the old days Jews valued Dionysus and Jehovah ( Yahuva originally ) equally - coins found in Gaza picture them on the both sides. But around this time Collective Unconscious of Jews - decided to establish a patriarchal society based almost exclusively on masculine laws and ruled by the vengeful, judgmental Jehovah (Yahuva - YHWH ) . We are living in legacy of this decision up to this day, our reasonableness and sense of discipline is based on Jewish genius of setting up a patriarchal society, but they could do this on almost total suppression of Dionysus, the other side of the coin. Interesting, but as culture Judaism never lost its spontaneity, love of dance, and humor. But the Jews had so much of this quality that, subconsciously, they felt danger of being overwhelmed by it. So they put a lid on it. But we in the Western world have forgotten spontaneity and brightness and have taken only Jenovah (YHWH), the god of vengeance who thunders the law.

There is a jewish tradition - all the sins of the Jewish people were heaped on the back of the goat - the goat was driven of into the wilderness, taking all the evils away with it. To this day we "scapegoat" certain groups of people, blaming them for all the ills of the society.

The goat now is far-away and we took the new symbol, which is quite opposite - The Sheep "The Lamb of God who taketh away our sins"

It's not a mischievous goat - it is docile and eternal victim. The ecstatic quality, the capriciousness of life that Greeks enjoyed so much, was discredited. The goat became a scapegoat - it was given a very bad name - so bad that it came to represent the worst evil - Dionysus of the Black Goatskin - was an ancient scapegoat satyr form - medieval Christian notion of what the devil should look like.

In later Puranic Hinduism three branches emerged, who worshipped at particular deity :

• Shiva who is the ascetic who attacks Brahma for coveting and trying to control Devi, he shuns worldly life until Devi transforms into Gauri and makes him a householder and father.

• Vishnu the householder who looks upon Devi as Lakshmi, goddess of auspiciousness and abundance; taking various avatars to enable Brahma and his sons to cope with Kali.

• But Devi is divinity in her own right, independent as the earth, responding to the gaze of Brahma who seeks control her, Vishnu who enjoys her and Shiva who withdraws from her. She is their mother, daughter, sister and wife. She allows them to dominate but never lets them have domination over her. She enables everyone to outgrow the anxiety that creates patriarchy as well as anxiety created by patriarchy.

The Life Force

One day some pirates sailing near Greece spotted a young man sitting near the shore. He was so handsome that they thought he must surely be a nobleman and worth a hefty ransom. Filled with greed, they captured him and brought him on board.

They tried to tie him up to prevent his escape but found, that the ropes would not hold their knots. Only one crew member, the helmsman, realised that they must have captured a god. He begged the others to let him go. But the rest of the crew refused.

Then something extraordinary happened.

Wind blew and filled the sails, but the did not move. In a terrifying yet glorious moment, rivers of win began to stream over the deck; grapevines grew in wild profusion over the sail; and ivy, fruit and flowers twined up the mast. Dionysus transformed himself into a lion. The terrified crew members jumped overboard. Only the helmsman, who had recognised the god, was spared.

Dionysus continued sailing the waters near Greece. One day, on the island of Naxos, he found Ariadne, the daughter of King Minos of Crete. The beautiful young woman had been abandoned there by her husband, Theseus. Ariadne and Dionysus fell in love and soon married, and their wedding was attended by the gods. Their marriage was a perfect union. They never quarrelled, and they had many children. In the end, however, the mortal Ariadne died. In her memory Dionysus placed her crown among the stars, where it can be seen today as the Corona Borealis.

Where do we go to find the repressed Dionysus in our lives ? He live a hole-and-corner existence, searching out those places where we have only partial or no control. Certainly the anima and animus is one of those.

The Pirates who tried to bind Dionysus - they tried to bind the ecstatic principle of organic growth - found they could not do it.

Our ancestors so greatly respected the qualities of mother - home, birth, empathy - and prized them as life sustaining. Role of father in procreation was barely understood. They nurtured this qualities for a long time and sensuous Dionysus was a new twist to a long tradition. Our society emphasize the tangible "masculine" values - aggression, power, winning, success, facts, intellectual abilities, concrete proof. The less tangible "feminine" values - carry little weight.

As a result many women today feel that there is no place for Dionysian in their lives. But in fact, if we remember - Hestia was the original carrier of the ecstatic principle, and there is very essence of ecstatic life in the most ordinary so-called feminine activities.

A woman who cooks for their family - sustains their lives. A woman who cleans the home and keeps it safe makes an environment that encourages growth.

And in the ultimate female function of giving birth to another human being, a woman ensures the continuance of humankind.

With the exception of giving birth, there is no reason why men cannot enjoy the sensuous life.

When we no longer relegate on set of values to men and another to women, when we can be equally male and female, we will touch Dionysus, the divine androgyne.

Semele and Ariadne

Dionysus is a complex figure who symbolises the irrational world of our senes as it interacts with the rational world of rules of limitations.

Half-mortal, half-god, Dionysus had more manifestations than any other Greek god, certainly as last god added to Greek pantheon he represents more a Vedic deity in it's multitude of forms and avatars. He could change his shape from lion to stag to goat to panther to man to god.

The characteristic of an Olympian god (patriarchal) in contrast to a mystery god (matriarchal) is that the Olympian form is rigidly fixed, and always human. The Olympian is idealised, rational, aloof, deathless - and so ultimately he seems to geometric to move us...

The Olympian does not evolve, he apotheosises... He represents a static perfection, in human form, incapable of transformation or ecstatic change; as a god, he is an intellectual concept.

Dionysus in contrast is ever changing - represents the qualities of Life itself.

In the myth, Dionysus descends into the Underworld (Hades) to rescue his mother, Semele, who had died as a mortal. He brings her back to the world of the gods, and she is reborn as Thyone, an immortal.

Dionysus is the god of ecstasy, transformation, and life-force that overflows all limits. His descent shows that this living, vital energy can penetrate even death.

Semele represents the mortal, fragile human soul. By bringing her back, Dionysus transforms what is mortal into something eternal.

The journey mirrors an inner psychological process: descending into the “underworld” of one’s own psyche - pain, grief, shadow, trauma - and retrieving something precious that was lost there.

In this sense, the myth says: true rebirth is not achieved by escaping darkness, but by entering it consciously and returning with what has been lost. He shows that even what has “died” in us can be restored and transfigured.

One may ask, why did he not rescued Ariadne in the same way ?

Because Ariadne is not meant to be “rescued”

Semele belongs to the realm of death: she is truly lost, burned by Zeus’ light, swallowed by Hades. Dionysus’ descent is a heroic act against finality itself - against the idea that what has died is beyond return. It is a myth of rebirth from absolute loss.

Ariadne, however, is abandoned, not dead.

Her story unfolds on the human shore of existence. Theseus leaves her on Naxos, and there she sleeps in despair. Dionysus does not descend into Hades for her because she is still in the world. What she needs is not resurrection, but reorientation of destiny. Dionysus appears to her, awakens her, and takes her as his bride. He gives her a crown that later becomes a constellation - Corona Borealis.

Semele represents what has died in us: the mother - the origin, the vulnerable core that was destroyed. Healing requires a descent into the unconscious.

Ariadne represents what is left behind: the part of the soul, sub-personality abandoned after betrayal or disillusionment. Healing here is not descent, but encounter - a new presence that says: “You are still worthy of love and destiny.”

Dionysus does not rescue Ariadne from death; he rescues her from meaninglessness. He does not pull her up from Hades - he crowns her under the open sky.

Touching Ecstasy

It's not longer the question if we should honor both the lamb and the goat together, our rational and irrational aspects, just as Greeks once equally honoured Dionysus and Apollo at Delphi. Unlike, Greeks or more ancient cultures such as American Shamanism or Hinduism we don't have established ritual to which we can turn.

We like to think of ourselves as individuals, but on the deep level we are really plural beings - we are one being made of distinct personalities, archetypes all looking for expression. When we first dip beneath the surface in search of these personalities, we may feel insecure because we are in uncharted waters. That's why the first appearance of the god can be terrifying, and your first response may be to run for your life.

You don't have to run, because everything comes from one source, and the unity of that oneness can be restored.

Credo in Unum Deum: I believe in one God - psychologically means that there is only one source, one unity, out of which all life flows and to which returns. Same thought we can find in the philosophy of Vedanta.

According to Jung, humanity holds a special role in creation: to contribute to the act of consciousness, and the point of view of morality, in the highest sense. Raw archetypes, like tornadoes, are amoral. A tornado doesn't care where it touches down or what it destroys; it is simply acting as it is meant to act. We have no control over the actions of a tornado. We can, however, come to terms with an archetype - because, in a real sense, it is us.

We have an influence in the archetypal world. Dr. Jung observed that the ego has the same relationship to the collective unconscious as a cork does to the ocean on which it floats. But because ego has consciousness, it can make a dialogue of equals with the unconscious. In the same way the "I" and Dionysus are equals; but the "I" has inestimable value of being conscious. Because both the "I" and the archetype arise from the same source, the collective unconscious, they can find a common ground and strike a common chord.

We can connect with Dionysus in three main ways:

1. Active Imaginary

2. Dreamwork

3. Ritual

Active imagination is a psychological method developed by Carl Jung for entering into a conscious dialogue with the unconscious.

Instead of letting images, fantasies, or emotions remain vague or suppressed, we give them space to unfold through: inner visualization, writing, drawing, music, or movement - while staying awake and aware. You do not “fall into a dream”; you meet what arises and respond to it.

In active imagination, an image, feeling, or inner figure appears, and you engage with it:

• You might see a landscape, a person, an animal, a symbol.

• You allow it to speak or move.

• You answer, ask, react - without forcing the outcome.

In essence, active imagination is:

Letting the soul speak in images, and learning to listen without losing consciousness.

Shamanism is no doubt an ecstatic tradition of knowledge. The spiritual journey of the shaman is intended to heal the human spirit and bring wholeness. To do this shaman learns to live both in "ordinary" reality and "non-ordinary" reality.

Dreams is a complex subject and lot of volumes have been written upon this subject, and about which very few people agree. In the end, dreams are meaning something to you.

And because they are your dreams, your interpretation is the most important.

Robert A. Jonhson author of "Ecstasy. Understanding the Psychology of Joy" gives this short framework:

1. Make associations. What meanings can you give to images in your dreams?

2. Connect dream images to inner dynamics. What emotional or spiritual parts of yourself do the dream images represent ?

3. Interpret. Put together steps 1 and 2 and arrive to dream's meaning for you.

4. Ritualise the dream to give it reality.

Ritual

The point of ritual is not to make magic, to dominate someone or something and make it bend to our will, but to make a divine connection, to experience a momentary unity of the two worlds. Greek artists often portrayed Dionysus and his followers with their heads thrown back in the ecstatic pose, and engaged in their pastime, swinging. Swinging is the symbol of being poised between two worlds.

No drunkenness was permitted in the ancient Dionysian revels, because one had to be aware and conscious to avoid evil spirits that came along with aroma of the wine. The worshippers sipped the wine in full consciousness that the wine was god; and in taking the wine into their bodies they took the divine ecstasy into their spirits.

Today, however, we have forgotten all this. Our models are no longer gods but technology. We speak of "man as machine" and "cybernetic models of thinking", even "artificial intelligence." These images have turned us away from the irrational realm and left us with only our rationality. Half of our potential reality is unlived.

No doubt, that in the Western culture we have lost the connection with the ancient wisdom of the rituals. There are few remained, like Halloween for example, where the "good" and "evil" qualities are honoured. We can equally honour all of our sub-personalities and for a moment feel "wholeness"

Creating Our Own Rituals

There is a great story coming most likely from Baal Shem Tov, jewish mystic, healer and spiritual leader of Hasidic Judaism in Ukraine ( Kingdom of Poland that time)

Anyhow, the Jews there without their own land during that times during a time of great danger for a Jewish community, a revered rabbi knew a sacred ritual that could avert catastrophe.

The rabbi and all the community went to a particular tree, in a particular forest, in a particular place, on a particular day, and performed a highly prescribed ritual.

Then, there were terrible times. A whole generation was scattered and the ritual was forgotten.

The next generation’s rabbi no longer knew which particular tree it was, but he has remembered the general structure. Still the miracle happened.

More hard times came, and another generation was excluded from the ritual. Somebody remembered that in the old days their ancestors had gone into the forest and done something, so the rabbi and the people went out into the forest and made up a ritual.

Still the miracle happened.

Every new generation had forgotten something, and every new generation had to improvise again.

Rituals are vessels, but presence is the power. When outer forms are lost, inner sincerity can become a new form. Even remembering, even telling, even feeling-can itself become sacred action.

In this sense, every generation is invited to recreate ritual from the living core:

• from attention,

• from memory,

• from intention,

• from the story we dare to tell.

No matter what you do, whether you do it "right" or "wrong," it will be sufficient as long as you do it with consciousness and in the best way that you know how.

Through the ritual you manifest you psychic world into the reality.

We have defined sensuous as "the life of the spirit as see through the senses." This is the world of artists and poets, and this is the world of Dionysus, whose teachers were the Muses. Through works of art we can glimpse the spirit.

However, only contemplating at them we are not fully participating.

Only recently we have separated "art" from the rest of human expression.

We don't think that we can call ourselves "artists" and deprive ourselves from the joy of singing, dancing, and drawing.

You don't have to be anyone to express yourself.

This work is based upon the following main sources, and I invite you to explore them for further reading:

Robert A Johnson - "Ecstasy. Understanding the Psychology of Joy"

Robert Green - "The Laws of Human Nature. Anima and Animus "

Devdutt Patanaik - "7 Secrets of the Goddess"

Michael Harner - "The Way of the Shaman"

Nikita Ierisov,

Philosopher, Jyotish Astrologer

Dharma Station, Vancouver Island, Canada