Hence, transgression acquires a sacred dimension only when it is
subordinated to a suprahuman aim, either explicitly or through its
inscription in a symbolic context which, by paradoxically juxtaposing and
especially infusing them with the values of the interdictory sacred, charges
even the crudest profanities with a transcendent significance. As the social
organization becomes more differentiated, the process of re-inscription may
well be translated into mythico-ritual ‘sectarian’ confrontations between
renunciatory ascetic orders and frankly transgressive religious currents, or
between the hierarchized gods and perspectives of pure sacerdotal and impure
even ‘marginal’ castes. By reserving, as ordained by Prometheus in the
Hesiodic founding-myth, the aromatized fumes of the burnt bones for the gods
and the cooked animal for human consumption, on the one hand, and by
inscribing, within the sacrificial procedure itself, the culinary
progression from a ‘savage’ roasting of the victim's unsalted vital organs
consumed on the spot to the "civilized" boiling of its seasoned flesh fit
for delayed consumption on the other hand, the Greek citizen sought to
maintain his political life at a reasoned mid-distance mediating between the
beastly and the divine. By inverting this culinary sequence, the central
Orphic initiatic myth of the ritual murder of the child-Dionysus by the
Titans, cast in the image of primordial mankind, who first boil his members
before roasting them, reveals and condemns the animal-sacrifice that
sustains the Greek city-state to be no more than a reversion to primitive
cannibalism, shunned with horror by the pure vegetarian spirituality of the
Orphics who rejected this institutionalized violence. Yet, not only did
Dionysus, whose pure purified pole was adored by the Orphics themselves as
the benign incarnation of the paradisiacal Golden Age, receive
blood-sacrifices and even raw-flesh [432>] from the polis, but his
transgressive essence took possession of his frenzied devotees to sanctify
even their omophagy and anthropophagy. By presenting itself as that critical
point where the interdictory masculine spirituality of Orphic asceticism
reaches its zenith only to plunge into the abysmal depths of Dionysian
transgression, the savage dismemberment of the sun-worshipping apollonian
Orpheus at the impure female hands of the furious Bacchae, could just as
well be read, in the light of the profound complicity between the Delphic
Apollo and the victimized Dionysus, as the tacit sacralization of the
unmitigated crime of cannibalism that nourishes the roots of Greek humanity.
[See M. Detienne, "Dionysos orphique et le bouilli rôti," in Dionysos mis à
mort (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), pp.163-217; also W. Burkert, Homo Necans: The
Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth (Berkeley: Univ.
of California Press, 1983), pp.89 n.29, 105, 119, 122-5, 177-8. Cf. J.C.
Heesterman's key-note paper on "The Vedic origin of Vegetarianism,"
delivered to the 15th South-Asia Conference (see n.1) along with his
contribution there to the Transgressive Sacrality seminar on "The Notion of
Anthropophagy in Vedic Ritual" centered on the consumption of the Dionysian
dîkshita reduced (nowadays) to a he-goat.]

http://www.svabhinava.org/dikshita/PurityPower/index.php


Sunthar

[Rest of this thread at Sunthar V. (08 Mar 2009)

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Abhinavagupta/message/4887]


-----Original Message-----
From: Delia
Sent: Saturday, March 07, 2009 2:36 PM
To: dionysos-l@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [dionysos-l] Nietzsche's Dionysos

MoodyLawless wrote:

> What do members think of Nietzsche's depiction
> of Dionysos, particularly in his 'The Birth of
> Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music'?

>

Here's a term paper I wrote on Nietzsche and
Dionysos, a few years back:

http://home.earthlink.net/~delia5/pagan/dio/masked-god.htm

If it had not been a term paper, with all the
constraints that implies, it would have been
quite different. Some day I hope to delve into
all this again and write it up in a very different way.

>

And: Great to see some life on this list; thanks!

~ Delia