I
Dionysos and Apollo
Dionysos and Apollo shared one sanctuary: Delphi, located on a ridge of the Parnassos mountains overlooking the Valley of Phokis and the surrounding hills, near the town of Krissa north of the Gulf of Corinth in today’s region of Sterea or Central Greece. Dionysos was worshiped there in the winter, whereas Apollo returned to Delphi every spring.
Plutarch suggests that the two gods were one: a single god with two names or – one may infer – faces, with Dionysos’s symbolising nature’s becoming and Apollo’s symbolising being. The distinctiveness of Ancient Greek culture is that it affirmed both.
Dionysos was in Ancient Greece the god of life’s continuity. For life can be said in two different but complementary ways: as ζωή (zoe) and as βίος (bios). The former is pre-individual: it names the anonymous and impersonal life that lives in each of us, which will continue living and taking other forms after we all die; the latter is individual instead: it is this and that life forms, you and me. While Dionysos symbolised ζωή, his half-brother Apollo symbolised βίος, or the shining forth of X, Y, and Z as X, Y, Z.
Dionysos, the masked god, was for the Ancient Greeks a compassionate god who disclosed life’s delivering truth to us, mortals: the truth that life qua ζωή is immortal. This truth did not function in Ancient Greece as a nihilist revulsive against any configured form of life, since the shining forth of something as something was, for the Ancient Greeks, life’s ultimate purpose rather than a deceiving illusion. At most, it could help to moderate any excessive pride thereof – thus Dionysos eventually-burlesque features. For the main purpose of such truth was to comfort us, as much as possible, when we lament the death of everything mortal, including those we love and finally ourselves. Falling back into darkness and oblivion after having been in the light is a terrible thing for which there is no remedy: one must face it and cope with it. But, at the same time, one must not forget that life continues, that new living forms shine forth when others relapse into non-being, and that, most importantly, the impersonal life that we carry in our veins will flow through them – like the wind blows through Dionysos’s instrument: the flute, and the sap runs through the leaves of the vineyard.
Whereas Dionysos task was to enforce life’s oneness and continuity beneath the spatial and temporal discreteness of all living forms, Apollo’s was to prevent these from clinging to their being in a manner that they could deprive others from their equal right to shine forth into, and thus become present for a while in, the realm of being. Thus Apollo’s loftiness symbolised compassion too, but in the form of justice. In fact, Apollo’s name possibly derives from ἀπέλλα (apella, “boundless” in the sense of “lacking” any delimiting “stones” around it) which designated the empty space at the heart of the Spartan polis (a symbol of political freedom and justice against any attempt to submit the political to particular interests). By means of his all-encompassing vision, on the one hand, and his fairness and tenderness, on the other, Apollo brought – like the sun – all beings evenly into the openness of their unconcealed standing-there, allowing them to acquire their distinct forms and forcing them to assume their limits with his arrows – shot from afar by the god with a bow that resembled a lyre – if they did not show mutual esteem to one another.
In other words, both Apollo and Dionysos protected life’s rhythm, but did do so in two different, if complementary, ways.
II
Earth and World
It is in fact possible to connect the two gods – which, as Greek gods, are to be viewed ontological glitterings rather than “persons” – to the ever-living Earth, i.e. the oldest and the “greatest,” as Sophocles says, of all the Greek deities, of whom, as B.C. Dietrich suggested some time ago, Dionysos, and possibly Apollo as well before the two came to be fully distinguished, might have originally been the “child” and “sacred partner” (that is to say, the ἱερός-γαμος [hieros gamos], a mythological figure which was widespread throughout the ancient cultures of the Mediterranean Basin and the Near East).
A hint to this is the Delphic sanctuary itself, in which a life-giving Goddess was worshipped before Dionysos and Apollo ever appeared as such in the mind of the ancient Greeks.
This is not to say, however, that such earthly component is the key to interpret the roles of the two gods, even if it may help to explain their (different forms of) compassion. If Dionysos remained a chthonic god capable of shining forth from within the earth’s womb to invite us to return to it, Apollo, in contrast, is a heavenly god – a god of light, if not the god of light par excellence.It is the light, moreover, that brings forth into its realm what lives (the gods included, as they are the “shining ones”), caring for it and signing to it before and after it silently goes back to the earth to dissolve in the earth’s ever-living but impersonal or pre-subjective life to which Dionysos leads it back.
For earth and world neither formed in Ancient Greece an empty unity nor did they simply oppose to one another. As Heidegger says – inspiring himself, to be sure, in Heraclitus and Hölderlin – world and earth are essentially different, yet not separated from one another.(*) The earth becomes world through language, in the sense that it becomes meaningful – and needless to say there are as many “worlds” as there are languages, as proponents of the so-called “ontological turn” in anthropology have it today. And the world in turn, despite our obstinacy to forget it or to overlook it, is grounded on the earth – where else indeed could it be grounded?
III
Forgotten Primeval Twins
Ultimately, all this goes as far back as our Proto-Indo-European memory does… with its twin gods (who are paradoxically, therefore, one being two and two being one), of which one, apparently, symbolised the earth (Nature), while the other one symbolised ourselves (Culture). Let’s then pay with this a little homage to Lévi-Strauss:(**)
Although the various Indo-European groups exhibit different creation myths, there appear to be elements of a Proto-Indo-European creation myth preserved either explicitly or as much altered resonances in the traditions of the Celts, Germans, Slavs, Iranians, and Indo-Aryans. These traditions all indicate a proto-myth whereby the universe is created from a primeval giant – […] [e.g.] a “man” such as the Vedic Purusa – who is sacrificed and dismembered, the various parts of his anatomy serving to provide a different element of nature. The usual associations are that his flesh becomes the earth, his hair grass, his bone yields stone, his blood water, his eyes the sun, his mind the moon, his brain the clouds, his breath the wind, and his head becomes the heavens. This body not only fills out the material world but the dismemberment also provides the social tiers with the head associated with the First (ruling) Function, the arms being equivalent with the warrior function, and the lower torso, with its sexual organs, the fertility function.(***)
The dismemberment of one of the twins (the twin symbolising Nature) is reminiscent of that of Dionysos, whereas the fact that the other twin (the twin symbolising Culture) gathers in him what is otherwise extended in nature echoes, in turn, Apollo’s gathering and unifying character.
Strangely, re-positioning ourselves so as to be able to tune again – in the midst of the Anthropocene – with such a lucid binary consciousness, takes us back to our lost indigeneity, with one of our hands held by Heidegger, the other one held by Lévi-Strauss.
(*) See further Martin Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track (edited and translated by Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes; Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 1-56..
(**) See Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Story of Lynx (translated by Catherine Tihanyi; Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
(***) J. P. Mallory and D. Q. Adams, The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 435.
Dionysos and Apollo by Olha Liubokhynets for polymorph