Wednesday, September 16, 2015

Once again we must balance Apollo and Dionysus


It seems that the new (but perhaps older) northern god Apollo brought patriarchy to the old southern Furies of matriarchy in Ancient Greece, and this can perhaps be seen developing in the tragic dramas. Dionysus seems to have been part of that old matriarchal theology.

A more ordered rational Apollo superseded the more instinctive, emotional Dionysus---or call it a transformation, retaining the old in the new, which is the old dynamic of conservatism, rather than a radical or militant revolution.

Then Christianity came to the West and reformed (really blocked) Dionysian instincts, replacing the more instinctive “eye for an eye” of Judaism with the blocking of the desires of the flesh so as to experience the bliss of the mindful God or Father Within (not unlike Buddhism).

A new natural balancing was therefore required, because both the later Greeks (Socrates) and Christianity went too far in blocking the instincts of the old Dionysian Furies. But then Friedrich Nietzsche, in his final thinking, went too far and virtually killed Apollo in affirming Dionysus, rather than conservatively synthesizing or transforming emotional Dionysus into ordered Apollo.

So once again we must balance Apollo and Dionysus by transforming the Furies of Nietzsche and Dionysus into the ordered Apollonian evolution of material life to supermaterial Godhood. Ordered evolution replaces the old conservative term "ordered liberty" in a deeper conservatism.  

This sacred evolution is the task of theological materialism and the Twofold Path, which can work with modern science. The Involutionary Inward Path to the God Within is transformed---and not rejected---in the Evolutionary Outward Path of material evolution to real supermaterial Godhood.

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