Author: Maggy Anthony Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 0429879695 Category : Psychology Languages : en Pages : 132
Book Description
Women and Dionysus links repression of the Dionysian spirit in Western culture with the rise of the patriarchy over the course of two millennia. It effectively draws aconnection between Dionysus and women throughout history, with examples from cultures both past and present, and the author’s own experiences. Maggy Anthony explores Dionysus’ role as god of the vine, creativity and passion, and his impact on art and literature. The book examines the Dionysian influence on creative older women, including Georgia O’Keeffe, Martha Graham and Marguerite Duras; examines Dionysus in mythology, history and religion; and considers connections to mysticism and the Renaissance. Anthony goes on to explore how women’s expressions of creativity through healing, wine-drinking and dancing were condemned in history, and how modern African and Latin American rites contrast with Western traditions. Finally, the book looks at ‘outbreaks’ of modern Dionysian spirit - from Haight-Ashbury to the Burning Man festival - and speculates on its future. This unique study will be essential reading for academics and scholars of Jungian and post-Jungian studies, and for analytical and depth psychologists, particularly those with an interest in female individuation, creativity, and spirituality.
Author: Frank Palescandolo Publisher: iUniverse ISBN: 0595130429 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 146
Book Description
A novel about the reappearance of the Greek god Dionysus in the modern world in the aspect and form of Priapus. Imagine the combined Wellesley and Smith College Field Hockey teams as his Baccantes. The novel, in sequences, is indebted to the play, The Baccae, by Euripides. Laetitia Lowell, a philologist at Wellesley College, on a solo field trip to the ruins of Pompei and Herculaneum, on the slopes of Vesuvius, lost, she falls in with a procession of dreamy-eyed women dancing to the music of tambourines, flutes, drums and cithars, in barbaric dress of blue chitons, bare legged, bare breasted, and holding what appears to be a thyrsus. Bacchantes! After two thousand years! She follows what she believes to be masquerades, hoping to find her way back to Pompeii. Suddenly, she is hemmed in by the hennaed and kohl eyed women, to witness what appeared to be a rite. When the troop stops before a grotto, a venerable man who appeared to be a high priest, summons a young man from the grotto who is attired in a golden robe. His hair is Doric blonde. A magnificent Greek kouros. The young man sits on a plinth at the entrance of the grotto. The women chant choral dithyrambs out of the Bacchae of Euripides. He opens his robe to disclose a huge flaccid male member that gradually becomes erect with the intensity of the dancing and singing -- then with a moan he ejaculates, spurting semen in a fountain spray in which the women dip kerchiefs and phallic ornaments to empower the objects as symbols of fertility. The young man is imprisoned in the grotto. Later, she escapes with the young man, Demetrius Angeli, who is worshipped by this recondite and remote sect in time, as Dionysus in the aspect of Priapus. For his sanity and safety, she brings him to the USA. He and his Wellesley and Smith College new world bacchantes (field hockey players) are then persecuted as a dangerous cult by a lady Attorney General. What ensues is the eternal confrontation and dynamism of Dionysan and Appollonian opposites. * * * Myths have no life of themselves. They wait for us to give them body. Let but one person in the world respond to their call, they offer us their vitality unimpaired. From Albert Camus, 1946.
Author: Walter F. Otto Publisher: Indiana University Press ISBN: 9780253208910 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 300
Book Description
"Who is Dionysus? The god of ecstasy and terror, of wildness and of the most blessed deliverance, and the mad god whose appearance sends mankind into madness. In this classic study of the myth and cult of Dionysus, Walter F. Otto recreates the theological world of ancient Greek religion. Otto's provocative starting point is to accept the immanent reality of the gods. To understand the cult of Dionysus, it is necessary to reimagine the original vision of the god. Otto challenges us to understand the power of this vision not as a bloodless abstraction but as a force animating belief, to see the myth and art of Dionysus as a passionate search to regain the power of the lost gof."--Back cover.
Author: Ginette Paris Publisher: Spring Publications ISBN: 9780882140674 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 180
Book Description
The gift of grace, coming to us as beauty, cannot be ordered or owned, only acknowledged and served. When events take on a mythical dimension and reverberate in the soul, then we feel grace. The three images of divinity guiding this book express the often unconscious pagan grace present in our daily lives. With this book, Ginette Paris continues the work of Pagan Meditations in reviving individual, cultural, and social life by reawakening their archetypal roots.
Author: William Storm Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 1501744879 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 207
Book Description
William Storm reinterprets the concept of the tragic as both a fundamental human condition and an aesthetic process in dramatic art. He proposes an original theoretical relation between a generative and consistent tragic ground and complex characterization patterns. For Storm, it is the dismemberment of character, not the death, that is the signature mark of tragic drama. Basing his theory in the sparagmos, the dismembering rite associated with Dionysus, Storm identifies a rending tendency that transcends the ancient Greek setting and can be recognized transhistorically. The dramatic character in any era who suffers the tragic fate must do so in the manner of the ancient god of theater: the depicted self is torn apart, figuratively if not literally, psychologically if not physically. Storm argues that a newly objectified concept of the tragic can prove more useful critically and diagnostically than the traditional and more subjective tragic "vision." Further, he develops a theory of the tragic field, a model for the connective and cumulative activity that brings about the distinctive Dionysian effect upon character. His theory is supported with case studies from Agamemnon and Iphigenia in Aulis, King Lear, and The Seagull. Storm's examination of the dramatic form of tragedy and the existential questions it raises is sensitive to both their universal relevance and their historical particularity.
Author: Susan Rowland Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1317209621 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 202
Book Description
Dionysus, god of dismemberment and sponsor of the lost or abandoned feminine, originates both Jungian psychology and literature in Remembering Dionysus. Characterized by spontaneity, fluid boundaries, sexuality, embodiment, wild nature, ecstasy and chaos, Dionysus is invoked in the writing of C. G. Jung and James Hillman as the dual necessity to adopt and dismiss literature for their archetypal vision of the psyche or soul. Susan Rowland describes an emerging paradigm for the twenty-first century enacting the myth of a god torn apart to be re-membered, and remembered as reborn in a great renewal of life. Rowland demonstrates how persons, forms of knowing and even eras that dismiss Dionysus are torn apart, and explores how Jung was Dionysian in providing his most dismembered text, The Red Book. Remembering Dionysus pursues the rough god into the Sublime in the destruction of meaning in Jung and Jacques Lacan, to a re-membering of sublime feminine creativity that offers zoe, or rebirth participating in an archetype of instinctual life. This god demands to be honoured inside our knowing and being, just as he (re)joins us to wild nature. This revealing book will be invigorating reading for Jungian analysts, psychotherapists, arts therapists and counsellors, as well as academics and students of analytical psychology, depth psychology, Jungian and post-Jungian studies, literary studies and ecological humanities.
Author: Sue Prideaux Publisher: Crown ISBN: 1524760846 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 474
Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES Editors’ Choice • THE TIMES BIOGRAPHY OF THE YEAR • WINNER OF THE HAWTHORNDEN PRIZE A groundbreaking new biography of philosophy’s greatest iconoclast Friedrich Nietzsche is one of the most enigmatic figures in philosophy, and his concepts—the Übermensch, the will to power, slave morality—have fundamentally reshaped our understanding of the human condition. But what do most people really know of Nietzsche—beyond the mustache, the scowl, and the lingering association with nihilism and fascism? Where do we place a thinker who was equally beloved by Albert Camus, Ayn Rand, Martin Buber, and Adolf Hitler? Nietzsche wrote that all philosophy is autobiographical, and in this vividly compelling, myth-shattering biography, Sue Prideaux brings readers into the world of this brilliant, eccentric, and deeply troubled man, illuminating the events and people that shaped his life and work. From his placid, devoutly Christian upbringing—overshadowed by the mysterious death of his father—through his teaching career, lonely philosophizing on high mountains, and heart-breaking descent into madness, Prideaux documents Nietzsche’s intellectual and emotional life with a novelist’s insight and sensitivity. She also produces unforgettable portraits of the people who were most important to him, including Richard and Cosima Wagner, Lou Salomé, the femme fatale who broke his heart; and his sister Elizabeth, a rabid German nationalist and anti-Semite who manipulated his texts and turned the Nietzsche archive into a destination for Nazi ideologues. I Am Dynamite! is the essential biography for anyone seeking to understand history's most misunderstood philosopher.
Author: Ann Ward Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing ISBN: 1443865044 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 275
Book Description
Socrates and Dionysus engages and seeks to redraw the boundaries between philosophy and poetry, science and art. Friedrich Nietzsche argues in his work The Birth of Tragedy that science conquers art, especially the tragic art of the Dionysian poet of ancient Greece. Appealing to the natural, primeval self that is suppressed but not extinguished by the knowledge of culture, Dionysian tragedy establishes contact with our bodies and their deepest longings. Science and philosophy, associated with the ‘Socratism’ of the theoretical man, celebrate the human mind in particular and the mind or rationality of the universe more generally. According to Nietzsche, it is Euripides who destroys the Dionysian entirely. Euripides celebrated the unadorned individual because only the individual, separated from their god, is intelligible or accessible to human reason; he insisted that art be comprehended by mind or that it be rationally understood. Euripides was possessed of such a rationalizing drive, Nietzsche claims, because his primary audience was Socrates. It is Socrates, therefore, who is the true opponent of Dionysus. Following Nietzsche’s bifurcation between philosophy and art, postmodern political philosopher Richard Rorty rejects the tendency of philosophy to posit absolute, universal truths and turns to the concept of ‘redescription’ which he associates with the ‘wisdom of the novel’. The novel is wise because it posits the relative truths and perspectives of the various individuals, societies and cultures that it represents. As an art form, it can therefore include every possible perspective of every particular situation, event or person. New interdisciplinary fields in politics, literature and film are giving rise to an expanding community of scholars who disagree with the approaches taken by Nietzsche and Rorty. These scholars are shedding light on the ways in which philosophy and art are friends rather than enemies. They seek to bridge the theoretical and ethical gaps between the world of ‘fiction’ and the world of ‘fact’, of art and science. There appears to be a fundamental tension between literary-artistic and scientific projects. Whereas the artist seeks to recreate human experience, thereby evoking basic ethical issues, the scientist apparently seeks ethically-neutral, evidence-based facts as the constituents of our knowledge of reality. Chapters in this volume, however, will reconsider how artists, philosophers and film-makers have addressed and attempted to reconcile the artist’s language of normativity and the scientist’s language of facticity.
Author: Eva Pohler Publisher: Green Press/Eva Pohler ISBN: Category : Juvenile Fiction Languages : en Pages : 241
Book Description
He is banished from Mount Olympus through no fault of his own. After roaming the earth for decades in search of a purpose, Dionysus creates his own magical vineyard on the island of Naxos, where he falls in love with Ariadne. But their marriage is doomed from the start and, broken-hearted, he creates a group of female companions to fight his loneliness and despair, and he begins his tradition of drinking and dancing on Mount Kithairon. But the women return home and tear their husbands and children limb from limb, and the only thing that can repair this horrific toll on humanity is human blood; thus, the first generation of vampires is born, and Dionysus finds himself their lord. His hopes of using this new purpose as a means for respect among the other gods is dashed when the vampires destroy Athens and become the scourge of the human race. Dionysus neglects the vampires and spends his time drowning his sorrows with wine and dancing until . . . Desperate to fill the ache in his broken heart, he searches for love again, but his second love story ends even more brutally than the first, leaving him gutted. Then, seventeen years later, he learns that Philomena’s child—their child—did not die with her, and although he’s slow to allow himself to hope, everything changes.
Author: Michael Ewans Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. ISBN: 9780754660996 Category : Music Languages : en Pages : 244
Book Description
Michael Ewans explores how classical Greek tragedy and epic poetry have been appropriated in opera, through eight selected case studies. He examines the issues through a comparative analysis of significant divergences of plot, character and dramatic strategy between source text, libretto and opera.
Author: Maggy Anthony
Author: Frank Palescandolo
Author: Walter F. Otto
Author: Ginette Paris
Author: William Storm
Author: Susan Rowland
Author: Sue Prideaux
Author: Ann Ward
Author: Eva Pohler
Author: Michael Ewans