Seeking Wholeness: Collecting the Limbs of Dionysos

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Good evening,

This video is the second in a series of three. We will continue to explore aspects of Dionysus along with specific amplifications of concepts that will aid us in understanding how we can heal the dismemberment and fragmentation of Dionysos and approach him as a unity and whole. This will set us up for the last video in the series.

Bibliography:
Greek Hymns vol. 1 by Furley and Bremer
The Orphic Poems by M.L. West
Dionysiaca by Nonnus of Panopolis
Ancient Philosophy, Mystery, and Magic by Peter Kingsley
On Poetic Imagination and Reverie by Gaston Bachelard

Music Credit: Farya Faraji “Glory of Persepolis”
Adrien Von Ziegler “Relaxing Roman Music”

#theurgy #alchemy #greekmythology

We will now begin the second part of the series on diis by reminding The Listener that in our last video we briefly described the orphic story of how fragmentation emerged from the tearing apart of dionis in this video we will explore the deeper nature of diis as well as introduce the relationship with

The god of Apollo to eventually show how the unifying forces of Apollo can reather the fragments of dinis the human inherits the primordial sin of Dion isis’s destruction since the substance of the human is fashioned by the soot of the Titans who ate his flesh our corporeal bodies are therefore under

His domain there’s an orphic poem that can be quoted here the smoke from the Blasted Titans deposits a soot from which Zeus creates a new race of Mortals so how does one reather these fragments of diis in order to reconstitute him and therefore attain that higher synthesis of the monad of the material

Realm a monad that represents the next level of ontological being as the totality of Multiplicity before we can suggest an answer to this question let us look more closely at diis as Savior the previous video left us facing the enigmatic expression of a diis his face like a mask displaying only its

Most visible and outward features this mask both reveals and hides the esoteric aspect of His eschatological function what this means is that he provides a key role for salvation as a unifier of all the dispersion and fragmentation of our Souls as the suspected Pythagorean and confirmed atomist Democritus says opon

The phenomena phenomena are the vision the visible aspects of things that are not revealed to view so when we gaze at the mask of diis we are looking simply at the phenomena beneath this phenomena is the drian life involving wine ecstatic dance and banol rry beneath this mask is a

Cathic diis who maintains prominence in the afterlife alongside ponei who is sometimes understood as a cathic Aphrodite these underworld goddesses sometimes also include HEC and Deiter they were woried in certain locations particularly prominent in southern Italy for example in the towns of thur hipon and thess let us briefly amplify the

Esoteric connection between diis and pran the most recent excavations in thessaly have Unearthed inscribed gold plates cut in the shape of ivy leaves which is one of the symbolic plants of diners these discoveries confirm that there was a bakic imagery integrated into the worship at these SES which is

Also intertwined deeply with oric theology in fact bakik and orphic images were so integrated in ritual practice and theology that it is incredibly difficult to tease them apart Peter Kingsley says abundance of milk is a characteristic feature of Bak imagery but very typically it is mentioned alongside a reference to Wine on the

Overtly bakic plates from thle we find a bull and a ram rather than a kid rushing for milk immediately followed by a reference to why the baby goat or kid rushing to its mother’s breast is a very esoteric Motif that appears in the context of the initiate’s death and

Rebirth but it is rebirth not in the sense of regeneration into the same cycle of creation and D destruction but rebirth is immortalization I have made straight for the breast of her mistress Queen of the underworld it is to the breast of pany that the initiate imitating and embodying diis and sometimes even

Heracles is brought to immortality hence the line from one of the plates from thurai exclaiming that the initiate is about to become quote a god instead of a mortal in the same plates we find the statement I am a kid who has rushed for the milkos is gal

Epon to finally confirm the association between diis and pran let us refer to ml West’s the orphic poems quote the other continues the motif of Zeus mating as a snake he mates in this guise with Kore in CR and she gives birth to diis who after being

Killed by the Titans and restored to life becomes her partner in helping men to escape from the cycle of reincarnation here we can clearly see the eschatological function that diis plays along with the association of his mother pran the queen of the underworld even nonos spanopoulos the

Late Greek poet in the 5ifth century ad who composed The diaka Preserves the ancient image of diis in book 45 of this tone as he sat there laughing not falling in the dust the boy begged the back hunt for milk as if she were his mother pawing at her chest in the

Unmarried maiden’s breasts spontaneously gushed with milky moisture unfolding her woolly tunic for the hungry boy she extended her nipple newly flowing to his young lips and the Virgin satiated a child of unusual liquid drops many women hoisted away the babies of a Shaggy chested lioness who had just given birth

And nursed them another striking the dry Earth with her sharp thus smoked the top of the mountain splitting it in two rough Rock turned red as it gushed wine all by itself or smitten from Stone white Fountains of milk flowed on their own in streams the blood red wine that flows

Through our veins is superposed onto the baby goat’s milk of initiation I am deliberately using the word superposed to signify a vertical relation rather than justop which suggests something horizontal and I will shortly explain why the wine can represent a liquid of Vitality in life and the milk that of a

Postmortem life that guarantees immortality we can imagine the sacred procession led by diis Leading us through the chaos of the daylight World dancing and singing diams while he Twirls the thus and that same procession also leading the soul in a triumphant March past the barrier between life and

Death into the L lands of darkness in the nether regions of the underworld it should be noted here that the diam which is the main Hymn of the god dionis actually means born between two doors this is very interesting given the movement from life to death for the

Briefest of moments I’d like to amplify the imagery of milk by quoting from a chapter by Gaston bashad that he called The Secret of milk an example of imaginative synthesis this suggests the way forward toward integration of fragmented nature which will be the topic of the next video in this series

Bashar distinguishes between the dialectics of jux Theos to the dialectics of super position and argues that juxtaposition seeks to reconcile contrary appearances while superposition looks towards reconciling depth and surface appearance the imaginative faculty uses a superposition of images to comprehend the whole based on this mode of imaginative perception he can

Better understand the French poet Jac ‘s statement that milk possesses a secret Blackness bashad says quote the poet who communicates immediately with the Deep material image knows well that an opaque substance is necessary to sustain such delicate whiteness similarly an aorus states that quote snow composed of water

Is black despite our eyes bashard continues indeed what credit would snow deserve for being white if its matter were not black if it did not come from the depths of its hidden being to crystallize into its whiteness what this seems to suggest to me without falling too deeply into the

Metaphysics of color is that the immortalizing drink is already an accomplishment a liquid representation of the removal of all impurities similar to the aletto stage of alchemy but the impurities that are being removed are the accumulated draws of the life that has lived and suffered and therefore requires purification the secret Blackness of

Milk is the Prima Materia into which the soul has descended it represents the human’s existential State prior to the reception of this pharmacon it is because of his presence in both worlds among the living and the dead that dianis is called so or savior I want to push back against my

Many commentators who claim that the ancient world did not have a notion of Salvation that true salvation only emerged in the man God Jesus Christ in the Advent of Christianity this is rather a narrow pical approach to Discount the reality of citology among the Greeks and other peoples of the

Mediterranean this notion of Salvation is especially strong among the orphics what I submit is the fundamental difference between the Pagan and Christian religions is that the universalizing tendency of Christian theology seeks to escape regional and local customs and tradition and provides a single theological Avenue by which Redemption and salvation can be

Achieved just as Christ descended to Hell through his katabasis a similar descent occurred of diis where his leg was licked by the poly calos kbros thus marking his journey to the Nether world importantly this indicates that one cannot descend to the underworld without having received such a wound see here

Also that Pythagoras was known to have once exposed his thigh revealing that it was made entirely of gold and Adis who was fly wounded by wild boar specifically in his thigh these seem to be indications of a descent to the underworld I’m not making the claim that

Some academics have made in the past that dinis is simply Christ there are indeed fundamental differences despite the many layers of similarity Christ as a symbol acts as a conduit that has subsumed and Incorporated a tremendous number of qualities and attributes that were once the domain of a multitude of interacting and dynamically

Differentiating gods and beings this radically new conception destroyed the polytheistic notion of the particular and unique and granted it a universalized ability that incorporated all things under its domain personally I do not deny one nor the other but I believe that an oscillation between the universal and particular perspectives is

Incredibly important to apprehend the nature of reality in embodiment no perspective is fundamentally fixed next I want want to quickly address the sense of fear embodied by dinis what perpetuates this fear of danger of the Dinan the God who always perceived as the great other the Exotic God that is always outside the

Established Pantheon of divinities is his reputation as the great D stabilizer the one who loosens bonds there is clearly a whiff of death that a mortal trembles at when a Divinity promises released from the Mortal coil additionally the tragedy by ureides expresses this natural anxiety and unfortunately makes Central the

Dangerous aspects of dionis especially when he is rejected by penthos philodemus portrays dionis more in keeping with how the Greeks would have generally seen him the the scholars furly and Bremer elaborate explaining that there is quote an important distance between on the one hand the Mythic portrait of wild and dangerous

Diis and the way in which ureides exploited its tragic potential and on the other the mild dinis venerated in cult both in the city and the country it should be reminded that most worship of dianis was met with joy and exaltation and met with his benevolent smile and his shining

Eyes the last thing I would like to clarify is that dianis has been appropriated by certain cultural political movements in the 21st century that seek to make of him a representation of sexual license Lous and transgression none of this isn’t true and as for transgression it would

Would be more appropriate to speak of transcendence since he encapsulates both the feminine and the masculine in higher synthesis furthermore there is hardly an image that depicts dionisis engaging in promiscuous sexual activity in fact he’s frequently depicted facing the viewer in an elevated calm detached from the orgiastic activities that are

Surrounding him once again from a neoplatonic perspective he unifies the world of generation and destruction but his Essence is above it since an axiom of neoplatonic metaphysics is that the cause transcends the effect his mads also deny the sexual advances of the animalistic saers there is a strong aloofness and rejection of

Sexuality in his female devotees something perhaps akin to celibacy let us quote Walter fto at length on this point quote there is nothing so foreign to the orgiastic dancers of the God as unrestrained erotic sensuality if an a occasional off-color scene shows up among the countless representations of

The actions of dinis the remaining scenes demonstrate in a most convincing manner that the manads are characterized by stateliness and a hoty aloofness and their wildness has nothing to do with the lustful excitement found in the half animal half human companions who whirl around them further down the page he

Continues quote on V’s paintings they Brusly wave off their forward loves with torches and snakes according to nonas each has wound a snake around her body beneath her clothes to protect herself from the lustful desires of men even when she is asleep or defenseless their

Love is of a higher type end quote later in this video we will find out what happens to these manads and how they are in fact related to the apollonian muses expressed in the poem by filus because we already find ourselves at the furthest end of cosmic unfolding

And differentiation we must reverse our Direction and following theorist like yamus incorporate synnemata from all levels of the great chain of being in order to once again link the Divine and the human Realms by a sacralization of the world of materiality this builds a bridge or conduit allowing for things to bond

Through ailia with one another in this sense the theorist is Redeeming the world fundamentally this vertical axis this connection between the upper and the lower the imminent and the transcendent eliminat all the distinctions which these words imply spatially so that amus can say quote for this reason the gods have sent the souls

Down to this realm in order to call them back therefore there is no change arising for s from such an Ascent nor are descents and asense of souls opposed to each other this image of the cosmic Axis or bridge between the up and down or down

And up can be found not only in Egyptian imagery with the Jed pillar but also the staff most enduring image being that of the cad IUS of hermus which derives from Indian and other Eastern symbolism along with the sacred tree like the Nordic yrail or the cosmic Mountain Mount KF of

The Arabs or Mount meu of Hindu and Buddhist cosmology to return for a moment to the cadus in the Jed pillar an ancient Egyptian the word for protection along with the word for the back or the spine was sa and it is through the sa that the two opposing snakes of Hermes

Travel presumably one female one male that demonstrate two movements and oppos directions up and down this may strike you as very familiar to the Kundalini and you would not be wrong rebirth was envisaged as the sun rising from the top of the staff to emerge as kepri depicted by the

Scarab to amplify this imagery it is important to remember that snakes move in a particular way neither straight as an arrow nor diagonally but strangely undulating like waves this is how the world of becoming operates through an oblique movement movement forward that encompasses a rightward shift followed shortly by a

Leftward shift and so on this is also the underlying movement of the metallurgical God heos the exoteric reading is that he is crippled and lame due to his deformed feet that point in opposing directions suggesting that he moves in a crab-like manner however his activity is not of slowness but of incredible rapidity

Embodied also by his cunning intelligence for that reason and many others that we cannot get into now he has been associate of magicians and theorists in line of the imagery of the cadua poery quotes an oracle of Apollo quote the stream separating from Fus of Splendor on high and enveloped

Into pure Air’s sonorous breath Falls Enchanted by songs and by ineffable words about the head of the blameless recipient it fills the soft tigent of the tender membranes ascends through the stomach and Rises up again and produces a lovely song from the Mortal pipe what imagery is evoked here is that

Of the human body acting as an air-based musical instrument perhaps something akin to a pipe the highest point is the head in our comparison of the caducus it is the topmost portion of the staff where the sun emerges and descends after the air has made its way through all the

Membranes and Sachs of the vital organs including the stomach to emerge into a Pion for the god foyos Apollo hming creation while exhaling the Divine Numa back to its ethereal Source in the Sun having brought Apollo into this video on dianis I want to draw an interesting connection between the two deities that

Will Aid Us in setting the stage for the final video there has been a strong Assumption of the polarity between Apollo and dianis perhaps influenced in part from nich’s the birth of tragedy which contrasted the two gods in his theory of art as either daian or apollonian in a similar vein Pythagorean

Tradition has always been associated with appolloni and upward movement and Ascent to the Luminous characterized by the fifth to Fourth Century BC poet scenus who sings of Apollo he brings all nature into harmony The Splendid Apollo of Zeus hit’s beginning and end in the pleum of his liar is the bright Ray of

The Sun but more recent excavations from hipon in the late 1960s convincingly demonstrate that iach esotericism was directly linked to pythagoreanism Herodotus confirms this when he states that quote so-called oric and bakic burial rights are quote really Egyptian and Pythagorean Herodotus attributes orphic ideas to the influence of pythagoreanism but Peter Kingsley in

His excellent work entitled ancient philosophy mystery and Magic explains that the evidence suggests that the mode of influence is precisely the reverse it is the pythagoreans who are influenced by the orics Apollo is always associated with his Oracle ad Delphi and those who worship Him and seek to maintain a

Communicative link with God composed and seeing what are known as pons the original meaning of the word p is healer or savior with the implication that those who sing the Pion to Apollo or his son Es scapus at a healing Shrine will deliver the supplant from Pain and diseases perhaps both physical and

Spiritual what is astounding is that we have rare evidence indicating that diis was also worshiped alongside Apollo a deli sharing in the offerings between the two Gods we have a few fifth century vases one of which is stored in the state Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg dated

To 42 5 BC that depict both diis and Apollo adelfi both gods are holding their respective symbolic objects diis his thus and Apollo his Laurel Branch Apollo has just returned from his travels from the land of the hyperboreans furly and Bremer state that quote it was custom during the three

Months of winter in Deli to perform diams in honor of dinis from Spring onwards Pion were performed in honor of Apollo but what we have is a rare P composed by the poet philodemus for dionis who extends the period of celebration for this God beyond the prescribed winter season and celebrates

Him as a healing God typical for Apollo and Es scapus well into the spring not only that but philodemus also mentions in the Pion that Apollo made it law that both Gods would share the honors given them by the worshippers and that a statue of diis along with a grotto would

Be installed in the new Temple what we are seeing in this poem is diis acquiring the functions of inat rantic or Physicians here panus corroborates this unique aican cult by saying quote the inhabitants of AA maintain that this God is both a profit for them and a Healer in sickness

Whereby he heals their illnesses and those of their neighbors through dreams his priest functions as his Mantic mouthpiece prophesying when possessed by the god and forth with did the muses Crown themselves with Ivy they all sang and danced around you proclaiming you to be forever Immortal and famous pile furly

And Bremer note that what is happening here is a moment of trans quote before singing in his honor the muses Adorn their hair in Bic fashion quoting Fairbanks they say the muses become manads in their greeting to diis they then proceed to engage in a circular dance what Bremer calls aukio

Goros I.E ADI he continues the poem insists on the exchange of attributes dianis is given the appoline attributes of a glorious birth in Epiphany at Deli and he’s addressed as Pion in a song called the p on conversely Apollo’s female companions dressed with daic paraphernalia and perform a diam in an

Essay by James ey Porter entitled why are there nine Muses we can begin to ask ourselves how we are to approach the reassembled dianis to the transformation of apollonian Muses into manats this will be discussed in the next video at last let me conclude this video with a brief thought on our divided

Nature one of the main difficulties we face is divided beings is that our very sense organs as well as the intellectual tools we use to discursively arrive at knowledge are themselves divided procus says it is therefore appropriate that Soul should have the function of the vision and of seeing things discursively

It is no wonder then that whereas the Divine forms exist primordially together and unified in the demiurgic intellect our soul attacks them separately it does not help that our short attention fans ated by powerful Technologies also allow us to be perpetually distracted but we cannot just simply blame technology we do not

Know what our senses are and how to use them i’ spoken of this in an earlier videos on edic and Parmenides and their mystical use of the senses through incubation practices in appoloni and and orphic cult but I want what I want to explore in the next video is the

Synesthetic use of our senses to help gather our divided selves into something that approximates the Damian wholeness take care for now