Dionysus

Author: Walter F. Otto
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253208910
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 300

Book Description
"Who is Dionysus? The god of ecstasy and terror, of wildness and of the most blessed deliverance, and the mad god whose appearance sends mankind into madness. In this classic study of the myth and cult of Dionysus, Walter F. Otto recreates the theological world of ancient Greek religion. Otto's provocative starting point is to accept the immanent reality of the gods. To understand the cult of Dionysus, it is necessary to reimagine the original vision of the god. Otto challenges us to understand the power of this vision not as a bloodless abstraction but as a force animating belief, to see the myth and art of Dionysus as a passionate search to regain the power of the lost gof."--Back cover.

Dionysus in Exile

Author: Rafael López-Pedraza
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 120

Book Description
The internationally renowned Jungian analyst Lopez-Pedraza diagnoses the psychological illness at the core of modern society--the loss of embodied soulfulness in people's lives. In this study of the Greek god Dionysus, he offers insight for a cure. This book may be worth several years in psychotherapy, if one takes its message to heart. Dismemberment and cannibalism, Prometheus and Titanic nature, mystical experience, the communal aspect of Dionysiac worship, jazz, flamenco, and bullfighting are among the many twists and turns taken in this essay that wends its way through issues of the body and emotion to open hidden doors for psychotherapy and to cast new light on post-modern humanity.

Zarathustra’s Dionysian Modernism

Author: Robert Gooding-Williams
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804732956
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 444

Book Description
In arguing that Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a philosophical explanation of the possibility of modernism, the author shows that literary fiction can do the work of philosophy.

Dionysus in Literature

Author: Branimir M. Rieger
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
ISBN: 0299278735
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Book Description
In this anthology, outstanding authorities present their assessments of literary madness in a variety of topics and approaches. The entire collection of essays presents intriguing aspects of the Dionysian element in literature.

Dionysus and Rome

Author: Fiachra Mac Góráin
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110672235
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Book Description
While most work on Dionysus is based on Greek sources, this collection of essays examines the god’s Roman and Italian manifestations. Nine contributions address Bacchus’ appearance at the crossroads of Greek and Roman cultures, tracing continuities and differences between literary and archaeological sources for the god. The essays offer coverage of Dionysus in Roman art, Italian epigraphy; Latin poetry including epic, drama and elegy; and prose, including historiography, rhetorical and Christian discourse. The introduction offers an overview of the presence of Dionysus in Italy from the archaic to the imperial periods, identifying the main scholarly trends, with treatment of key Dionysian episodes in Roman history and literature. Individual chapters address the reception of Euripides’ Bacchae across Greek and Roman literature from Athens to Byzantium; Dionysus in Roman art of the archaic and Augustan periods; the god’s relationship with Fufluns and Liber in the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE; Dionysian associations; Bacchus in Cicero; Ovid’s Tristia 5.3; Bacchus in the writings of Christian Latin writers. The collection sheds light on a relatively understudied aspect of Dionysus, and will stimulate further research in this area.

Remembering Dionysus

Author: Susan Rowland
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317209621
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 202

Book Description
Dionysus, god of dismemberment and sponsor of the lost or abandoned feminine, originates both Jungian psychology and literature in Remembering Dionysus. Characterized by spontaneity, fluid boundaries, sexuality, embodiment, wild nature, ecstasy and chaos, Dionysus is invoked in the writing of C. G. Jung and James Hillman as the dual necessity to adopt and dismiss literature for their archetypal vision of the psyche or soul. Susan Rowland describes an emerging paradigm for the twenty-first century enacting the myth of a god torn apart to be re-membered, and remembered as reborn in a great renewal of life. Rowland demonstrates how persons, forms of knowing and even eras that dismiss Dionysus are torn apart, and explores how Jung was Dionysian in providing his most dismembered text, The Red Book. Remembering Dionysus pursues the rough god into the Sublime in the destruction of meaning in Jung and Jacques Lacan, to a re-membering of sublime feminine creativity that offers zoe, or rebirth participating in an archetype of instinctual life. This god demands to be honoured inside our knowing and being, just as he (re)joins us to wild nature. This revealing book will be invigorating reading for Jungian analysts, psychotherapists, arts therapists and counsellors, as well as academics and students of analytical psychology, depth psychology, Jungian and post-Jungian studies, literary studies and ecological humanities.

Redefining Dionysos

Author: Alberto Bernabé
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110301326
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 700

Book Description
This book contributes to the understanding of Dionysos, the Greek god of wine, dancing, theatre and ecstasy, by putting together 30 studies of classical scholars. They combine the analysis of specific instances of particular dimensions of the god in cult, myth, literature and iconography, with general visions of Dionysos in antiquity and modern times. Only from the combination of different perspectives can we grasp the complex personality of Dionysos, and the forms of his presence in different cults, literary genres, and artistic forms, from Mycenaean times to late antiquity. The ways in which Dionysos was experienced may vary in each author, each cult, and each genre in which this god is involved. Therefore, instead of offering a new all-encompassing theory that would immediately become partial, the book narrows the focus on specific aspects of the god. Redefinition does not mean finding (again) the essence of the god, but obtaining a more nuanced knowledge of the ways he was experienced and conceived in antiquity.

Masks of Dionysus

Author: Thomas H. Carpenter
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 372

Book Description
"Representing some of the most fruitful recent approaches to the phenomenon of Dionysus and well illustrated, this book will be essential reading for students and scholars of classical literature and ancient history, the history of ancient religion, art history, classical philology, and archaeology." -- Back cover

Dionysus

Author: Edward Hyams
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Viticulture
Languages : en
Pages : 392

Book Description
Publisher description -- This is the story of a sacred plant, Vitis vinifera, the grape-vine, from its pre-historic origins in western Asia to its spectacular expansion north, east, and west, and its final conquest of the world with the planting of vines in the southern hemisphere in the last century. The vine has been a symbol of both pagan and Christian deities from earliest times; indeed its history is so interwoven with the history of religion that god and vine are sometimes scarcely to be distinguished. The author describes how the vine has been cultivated, what sorts of wines have been drunk, how they were made and taxed, and how they have affected people's lives. It is the account of a single plant species through the eighty centuries of its association with man.

After Dionysus

Author: William Storm
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801434570
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Book Description
William Storm reinterprets the concept of the tragic as both a fundamental human condition and an aesthetic process in dramatic art. He proposes an original theoretical relation between a generative and consistent tragic ground and complex characterization patterns. For Storm, it is the dismemberment of character, not the death, that is the signature mark of tragic drama. Basing his theory in the sparagmos, the dismembering rite associated with Dionysus, Storm identifies a rending tendency that transcends the ancient Greek setting and can be recognized transhistorically. The dramatic character in any era who suffers the tragic fate must do so in the manner of the ancient god of theater: the depicted self is torn apart, figuratively if not literally, psychologically if not physically. Storm argues that a newly objectified concept of the tragic can prove more useful critically and diagnostically than the traditional and more subjective tragic "vision." Further, he develops a theory of the tragic field, a model for the connective and cumulative activity that brings about the distinctive Dionysian effect upon character. His theory is supported with case studies from Agamemnon and Iphigenia in Aulis, King Lear, and The Seagull. Storm's examination of the dramatic form of tragedy and the existential questions it raises is sensitive to both their universal relevance and their historical particularity.