Many of us are going through the painful, difficult processes of awakening to who and what we are, not the personas we put on to fit into society and play our various roles, but our authentic selves.
Those who choose to be conscious and live life instead of sleep-walking through it are also learning to recognise and respect mythic, archetypal forces that work in and through us. We learn by allowing our feelings to flow instead of hiding or repressing them. We learn by being genuine, by respecting our own sovereignty as well as the sovereignty of others. We learn by attending to our dreams that tell us what we do not know about ourselves, and treating them as important messages from our unconscious, and sometimes, we learn the hard way that when those archetypal forces are ignored, like offended gods they can turn against us.
What gods have we offended? Mainly, I think, the wild gods, the forces of bodily instinct, our primal nature. Though we consider ourselves civilised, we are heirs to animal nature and thousands of generations who continue to affect us, and too often, fail to honour and give expression to those ancient influences. We fail to consciously and respectfully acknowledge our animal nature, to express our animal instincts or behave as part of nature. Instead, we can be self-indulgent, hedonistic, grasping, utterly selfish, and mightily destructive of nature and life, making a thousand excuses for this gross immaturity, calling it freedom, self-expression, genetic selfishness, liberation or progress.
Nature has an order in accordance with which all other creatures except man exist and live. There is a natural dignity and grace in wild things that we humans have lost, and must find again before it is too late. Homo sapiens sapiens might once have lived in harmony with Nature within and without, but we have fallen low, and lost the natural grace that is the birthright of all living things.
By not honouring Dionysus, god of physicality, not consciously, intentionally giving life-affirming expression to our anger, our sexuality, authentic feelings, the soul’s urgings to transcendence, we are less than the animals in our unconsciousness. When we neglect Dionysus, we may be driven to wild excesses, to madness, to meaningless selfish sex, to rages and insane violence. We become destroyers, murderers of ourselves, others, and our society.
Caravaggio's Bachus / Dionysus a wilder Dionysus on a cheetah
We offend Pan as well, the great god of Nature to whom Socrates prayed. Though the Great God Pan was declared dead, he was simply being put aside by the later Greeks who had turned away from a nature-centred attitude towards greater worship of power, cities, man-made laws, exclusivity and conventionality. Pan still is, shaking his divine head at the savagery and utter selfishness of our attitude to nature, including our own true nature… The major religions got it wrong. Nature is not there for us. We are here to serve her, our Mother, without whom no one of us would live.
Pan and Psyche, Edward Burne-Jones by Jacob Jordaens
We can still bring these gods back into our lives, not necessarily as gods but as forces. We can do it by tending respectfully to our bodies, our instincts, our intuitions and dreams, by living more harmoniously with all living things and nature. We can honour the great Earth Mother in any of her forms, as Gaia, as Hathor or Isis or as Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty. Certainly, there is a great need in western culture for the energy of the feminine with its dark, lunar, emotional, generative-destructive, earthy, nature-oriented, receptive, introverted qualities.
We can embrace the wild god Eros, the primal god of connectedness, the life force of generation, growth, expression, and also of transcendence. Eros is god of the life force, of libido, love, of genuine relationship between individuals, us and our society, us and nature. … Give this god our respect, allow him to work in and through us, and we are in tune with the great thrust of life and love in the world.
Isn't love also destructive, painful, full of anguish? Yes, when we mistake love for possession, ownership, satisfying one's needs, expectation, as we mostly do. It is very difficult to love without all those preconceptions, but, like all things that hinder, inhibit and deceive us, they must eventually be released so that we can love another person simply for who he or she is. It is, after all, a fundamental truth in this life that in order to grow and evolve, we must experience many deaths .... the old - old habits, old ways of thinking, old expectations, our old needy selves - must be destroyed to make way for the new. No one ever said that Eros is easy.
Allowing the gods into my life has meant allowing them to work in me, not for me but in me.
As I've written in other posts, Eros is hugely significant for me right now, and I have been learning to work with, and slowly integrate his great energy. After a lifetime of denying his influence, I have allowed myself to be swept up in that fierce, loving, sometimes dark energy, and try to express it - through art, writing, learning tango, talking about it with a trusted few.
To honour Dionysus, I have begun drinking wine (first time in my life) and make a small libation each time. I dance despite a bad hip. More important, I allow my emotions and sexual urges to rise and fall and course through me without shame or guilt, allowing myself to sometimes be not-respectable, not correct, socially unacceptable, but always genuine.
I honour Pan when I sit in nature, accept a little wildness in my garden, touch another living thing with deep appreciation of its uniqueness and innate beauty. I speak to him sometimes.
I have no altar to these gods, but however I can, I allow them to live in me, to express through me, a tiny cell in the immense body of the universe.
