I have reading like a fiend the last couple weeks. On the one hand, I just finished reading Euripides’ play, The Bacchae, for school, which is a play about what happens when we actively try to suppress Dionysos. On the other hand, I have been exploring the three major time periods of Greek civilization with my students, which includes the idea that the Hellenic Athenians were striving for balance between the archetypal forces of Apollo and Dionysos. And on the third hand (the hand of Shiva), I have been listening to selected speeches from the Democratic and Republican Conventions. So the question is this:
Just how well balanced are Apollo and Dionysos in our country at this time?
September 7th, 2008 at 3:09 am
Priscilla; would you tell us what you mean by “the third hand(the hand of Shiva).”
September 8th, 2008 at 4:41 am
Hehe. In my “on the one hand fever,” I ran out of hands. In the West, we argue 2 halves of the issue. Now, if we were identified with Shiva, who is depicted with at least 4 hands, then we would have the physical language to explore more aspects of an argument.
September 8th, 2008 at 8:27 am
OOOOOOOH! Yeah, I see what you were saying. I was thinking along the lines of “Ok, #1-Apollo, #2-Dyonisus, #3-Shiva? Huh? How is Priscilla going to work Shiva into a discussion with a bunch of ACC students? Maybe I don’t give community colleges enough credit.”
But I went with my miscomprehension for a couple of days there. I read in Campbell that when the Greeks were in India, they synchronistically identified Shiva with Dionysis. Was that what Priscilla was talking about? So I thought you were offering Shiva as a symbol of a third option- a transcendent function- to go beyond the duality of Apollo and Dionysus; as when the accomplished yogi says “I am Shiva.”
I read in The Bacchae where Dionysus is called “the bull-horned god” and remembered that Nietsche was a big fan of Dionysus and that he offered the third option of rather than getting impaled on one horn or the other of a problem(in this case the Apollo and Dionysus horns) that one could go between them; I was trying to make Dionysus somehow a third, or transcendent function like Shiva but I couldn’t make it make sense because Dionysus was already represented as one half of a polarity. At that point I decided to get some clarification.
Henceforth I’ll try to read a little more light-heartedly. But it was interesting to see where I could go, as well as could not go, with my misreading.