The Great Goddess and Dionysus

Abstract

One of the main theses of this book is that the Bataillean-Foucauldian discourse may be interpreted as a transliteration of religious feeling—religious feeling of a special kind. As known, religion, from the Latin religare (to unite),² is the professed practice of communing with “the supernatural Other,” the nonhuman element that is perceived to be looming beyond the illusion of materiality. Thus, a religious understanding of life yields two realms of action: the sacred and the profane. The sacred is that sphere of life in which men consummate their “union with the gods,” and beyond the limits of this holy locus begins the realm of the profane, from the Latin pro fano (“out of the temple”). Thereby, men have established the sacredness of space (venue of prayer), of time (ritual festivities), of bodily conduct (demeanor and meditative care of the body), and of thought (the Word of the Books). For the religious man, everything outside the religious circle is nonsensical, contingent, unhallowed, meaningless, and, ultimately, “unreal.”³ For the religious man, the world, as he finds it, is a barren field that he must enclose, till, and ward under the watch of his divinity of election, because—and here the difficulties begin—there have since time immemorial appeared to be more than a few gods from which to choose; more than a few gods beckoning to the religious individual. Today, the conventional acceptation of “religion” is that of a unitary credo under the austere dispensation of a single, commanding, supernatural Lord: the traditional monotheistic confessions, in brief. Everything else, it follows, is profanity.

TEIRESIAS: There are two powers […] which are supreme. In human affairs: first Demeter—the same goddess is also Earth; give her which name you please—and she supplies mankind with solid food. After her came Dionysus, Semele’s son; the blessing he procured and gave men is counterpart to that of bread: the clear juice of the grape.

Euripides, The Bacchae ¹