Offering: December 3, 2021

Joy, harmony & the arrival of new Gods

Image description: Six Tarot cards by Pamela Colman Smith from the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot. Left to right and top to bottom, they are Ten of Pentacles, Ace of Wands, The World, The Fool, The Emperor, Three of Cups.

To listen to me read this offering aloud, click here.

The practice of making these offerings depends on a certain synergy, the accordance of rhythms. I read, I live my life and I trust that some degree of synchronicity will happen and that with it, a tapestry can be woven. 

My understanding of synchronicity comes partly from working with cards over the years, but also Carl Jung, who’s view of synchronicity was essentially that it’s what happens when interior and exterior experience syncs up. For instance, I’m thinking of you, and then you call. 

I make the choice to understand synchronicity as sacred because it’s always felt like the revelation of an otherwise invisible ecology. I’ll be going about my business and then suddenly aware of the possibility that there may be ten million intricate webs laced between the inner and outer, an organism and its environment. You can call synchronicity coincidence, if you prefer. (Ten of Pentacles)

I’ve been reading about gnosticism again, a core component of Hermeticism and—as I understand it—a direct experience of knowledge, rather than an intellectual way, when something is known because facts and logic told you so (Lachman, 2011). I can’t say with any level of authority that what I experience when I read and see connections and make offerings with them is actually sacred. (Ace of Wands)

But I can say, totally subjectively, there’s a felt dimension to it, a sense of being part of something big and invisible. And it isn’t the fact that related ideas continue to find me exactly in the right timing that keeps me seeking. It’s the feeling I get when it happens. It’s honestly, pure joy.

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This week I wasn’t sure what I’d write. I read one third of The Bacchae, a Greek tragedy by Euripides about the God Dionysus.

I read the introduction to a Hakomi Method manual that’s been collecting dust since I bought it after a walk with a somatic therapist friend in California who first told me about the Hakomi concept of nourishment barriers.

I read half the letter on The World card in Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism, and continued The Quest for Hermes Trismegistus, on the origins and impacts of Hermetic philosophy. 

I use a panoramic lens when I read so that I can see beyond particulars and feel currents which form the threads that I can then plait together. These days it’s rare that whatever emerges comes from a pre-set ideation—I want to write about rest, for example. It comes through an earnest desire to be told secrets and their ultimate revelation through a practice of reading and listening. 

It’s not without intention, though. I want to make technicolor blankets of the many wisdoms of the world. I look for fibers that are sturdy, vibrant, and with at least one toe in the mysteries. That last trait is necessary because, in James Hillman’s words, “I want to shed light on obscure issues, but not the kind of light that brings an end to searching” (Hillman, 1977).

There is no other reason to do this but joy. Joy in an old sense of the word, as “the accordance of rhythms,” which is how the Anonymous author of Meditations on the Tarot defined it. It is joy who lives in the moments when patterns appear, when the first stitches catch and a shape starts to form, then a tapestry. What’s emerged through my process this week is just this, it is joy, The accordance of rhythms.

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My decision to start reading The Bacchae was rooted mostly in the fact that I had a big bill to pay and couldn’t do it just yet.

It’s a Greek tragedy about Dionysus, as I mentioned, who is most popularly known—according to a quick Google search—as God of wine, madness, ecstasy, festivity and fertility. I know Dionysus more through his Roman counterpart Bacchus from my days in New Orleans, where I’d always attend the Krewe of Bacchus Mardi Gras parade, and a beloved Bywater wine bar called Bacchanal. 

The Bacchae is interesting to me because it’s a Fool story. It opens with a chorus of women who sing part of Dionysus’ complex origin story: He’s conceived by a God, Zeus, and a mortal, Semelê who dies when she sees Zeus for the first time in his full splendor.

She’s still pregnant with young Dionysus when she dies, so Zeus cuts open his own thigh and places the fetus inside to finish growing. The baby is born with horns and a crown of serpents. 

Gnostic Catholic bishops David and Lynn Scriven say that Dionysus grew up to be an incredible winemaker, but Zeus’ jealous wife Hera (who was behind the death of Dionysus’ mother) “struck him with madness and caused him to aimlessly wander the earth.”

From the Scrivens’ telling of Dionysian mythology, there seem to be many examples of the God’s inalienable freedom. Whenever he or his followers would be tied up or shackled, the knots and chains would magically unravel or open, tethers falling to the ground. 

Dionysus is eventually cured of his madness by his grandmother Rhea, who “initiated him into her mysteries.” But he was not cured of his wandering impulse, and so off he went to spread the word. (Scriven & Scriven, 1995).

This calls to mind something I shared a few weeks ago on The Fool, that they “relate to reality as the nomad relates to place; in full participation— tasting local berries, making medicines with the plants, bathing in the cool waters—and because the landscape of reality is always changing, The Fool keeps an eye toward the emergent. When it comes time to leave, they know it, and they go.”

In The Bacchae, Dionysus returns to Thebes after having traveled the world. He’s amassed a cult following of ecstatic, tattooed, dancing, drumming women donning fawn-skins, and men draped in ivy carrying wands. Even Teiresias, the mythic blind-vision-seer of Thebes has converted to worshiping the new God Dionysus.

This makes the King Pentheus irrationally angry. In the November offering I also wrote that “The Fool is best understood in relation to what they are not; the dominant structure and how they clash with the status quo. As Daniel Deardorff has written of the liminal, it isn’t nice, it doesn’t fit, it shouldn’t be allowed, and it doesn’t belong” (2008).

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I’m calling The Bacchae a Fool story for a few reasons. One is that the link between madness and divinity feels important. Another is because it's the playing out of a very specific, archetypal drama: Things are a particular way, here in Thebes. That is, until some wild traveling winemaker comes through, triggering ecstasy and dancing and the performance of unruly, secret rites. 

In fact, the winemaker says he's a God, and now hoards of otherwise rank-and-file citizens are going off to the forest to do Lord-knows-what in his honor. What we do know is that the women are leaving the hearths untended, and that once enchanted with the new God they can think of no one else. Naturally, the existing King hates this, fights it, sends his guards to capture the new God and vows to kill him. 

The new God Dionysus smiles as the guards cuff him and haul him away. His cheeks stay rosy, he doesn’t flinch. Once in the King’s court, he responds to the jeering King’s questions with riddles. For me as a witness here, I really start to feel bad for the King. The people’s newfound joy feels like a threat to him. I’ve been there and I know that feeling. This is only the beginning of the story. But let’s break here. 

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I wrote a few weeks ago about how in Gestalt therapy there’s a premise that we “creatively adjust” to our environments through the development of behavioral patterns, and that those adjustments crystallize into habits. Hardened habits fade into the unconscious, and shift to machination, buzzing almost imperceptibly in the background. So soft you’d really have to listen to hear it.

But then in comes a new God—a change to you, or to the environment, usually a combination of both. This change brings potential for joy, ecstasy, laughter. One that offers dancing in the woods, prayers that sound different from the ones you said before. But then there is suffering, because beauty’s on offer but is impossible to access because you're stuck in an old way. 

You’re stuck because the old way is ubiquitous now, tough to see. Those with some form of vision will begin to notice that there’s tension; the landscape has changed but you haven’t. Like the trees were bare before, and there’s fruit now. Your mouth is watering but you’re forgotten your hands. There’s no joy because the micro rhythms of self are in discord with the macro rhythms of place.

Therapeutic work—and I don’t just mean psychotherapy—could be seen as harmonizing work, as the updating of one’s interior in order to more adequately gel with and respond to the dynamics of the present.

A supervisor in graduate school once told me that the first rule of introducing change into a family system is to expect pushback. To have run-ins with a King who’s not happy about the new guy in town. There may and likely will be fear and fury. The new fruits are only on offer for those willing to enter the forest, but whoever’s sitting on the throne in the existing town square liked the old song and dance just fine. (The Emperor)

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The new god Dionysus brings instant and encompassing joy to those who follow him. His chorus of women sing “For his kingdom, it is there, in the dancing and the prayer, in the music and the laughter, in the vanishing of care…then pain is dead and hate forgiven.” (Three of Cups)

The joy of Dionysus and his followers appears as madness to a King who is set in an old way and doesn’t understand. He retorts, “What is this, a dream? Insults of this unknown, mad man wanderer? Blasphemies begging for the gallows?”

As a wanderer, Dionysus embodies the psychic border-crossings that new learning demands. A walker between worlds is always bringing foreign concepts from abroad, upending the rules. Those versed in stories will tell you that we need go-betweens like a cardinal needs wings.

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In the Anonymous author of Meditations on the Tarot’s twenty-second letter on The World, the author writes that “Joy is the harmony of rhythms, whilst suffering is their disharmony.” 

They continue:

“The pleasure that one experiences in winter when one is seated close to a fire is only the restoration of an accord between the body’s rhythm and the rhythm of the air—that which we call “temperature.” The joy that friendship gives is the harmony between the psychic and mental rhythms of two or more people…Joy is therefore the state of harmony of inner rhythm with outer rhythm, of rhythm below with that from above, and lastly of the rhythm of created being with divine rhythm” (2002).

What I love about the word rhythm is that when you know it’s involved you’ve got an invitation to listen and to feel. Listening and feeling is exactly what we’re not doing when we’re in the role of Emperor—preserver of the status quo—frozen in an old way and therefore a moment in time.

I, for example, learned once long ago, never to trust that love would be steady. Having stayed with that expectation overlong I suffered decades of whiplash. Choosing rhythms that were impossibly out of accordance with the rhythm of my heart’s core need to be loved. 

With time I learned to create my own external rhythms through the use of behaviors that expressed self-care, even when I didn’t feel tender toward myself. I did this with routine—regular sleeping and meal times, daily yoga practice, meditation, anything protecting the circadian rhythm was especially helpful. 

Years later when I tune in to my body I hear love’s thrum enter from the outside, too, and that’s harmony. I have stable love in my life. Having good love isn’t this simple of course. But sometimes the best we can do is aim to make private moments that will resonate with those we one day hope to have with others.

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Many versions of The World cards, including Pamela Colman Smith’s, depict a dancer inside a laurel wreath, with a man, eagle, bull and lion in the four corners. 

Dance is, of course an expression of the accordance of rhythms. Something inside syncs up with what’s outside—the track, the drum, another dancer—and no word but joy can describe that feeling. 

In this interpretation, The World seems to stand for an ultimate task: of listening for the rhythm of the right here and now, and not those of old. And to stay doing this, over and over and over again for eternity.

This way, new and more complex polyrhythms can develop and our lives are layered with richness and complexity. Maybe if we’re lucky our perception begins to anticipate difference and otherness, and with time grows more accommodating to the plural, unexpected, and ambiguous nature of life. 

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Sources

Anonymous. (2002). Meditations on the tarot: A journey into Christian hermeticism. TarcherPerigee.

Deardorff, D. (2008). The other within: The genius of deformity in myth, culture and psyche. North Atlantic.

Euripides. The bacchae. (1915). Longmans, Green and Co. (Free PDF here!)

Hillman, J. (1977). Re-visioning psychology. Harper & Row.

Lachman, G. (2011). The quest for Hermes Trismegistus: From ancient Egypt to the modern world. Floris. 

Scriver, D & Scriven, L. (1995). “Dionysus.” Mystery of mystery: A primer of Thelemic ecclesiastical gnosticism. Berkeley. Accessed via: https://hermetic.com/sabazius/dionysus