On Dionysus:
Bob, I am not quite sure you got the point. The Christ/Dionysus parallel was popular at the turn of the century for two reasons:
1) All that exciting research being done on the similarities between Christianity and the various Hellenic mystery religions, featuring a dying & resurrected god. Those gods, in turn, were spiritualized versions of the old fertility gods/kings, actually or symbolically killed every year to ensure good crops. Did you ever read Frazer's study, The Golden Bough? Very powerful influence on literature, most notably on Eliot's The Waste Land.
2) Dionysus as the "other face" of Christ. Not the same as (1). Here, the emphasis is on expanding the idea of Christ, understood too often (as my guy Merezhkovsky would have said) as affirming only one side of the duality: spirit vs. flesh, light vs. dark, good vs. evil, yin vs. yang, etc., etc. But when Dionysus is seen as the "other face", you realize that the seeming antitheses have been transcended, and synthesized in a higher mystical whole; that what you see is a "coincidentia oppositorum", duality becoming unity, etc., etc., blah, blah, blah...(I can talk the talk, even though I don't walk the walk...)
I read Demian years ago, and I hardly remember it. But since the themes of Hesse's novels seem to be basically pretty much the same, I would guess that Abraxas plays the role of the "Christ-Dionysus"figure in the novel, the figure that reconciles all these bothersome opposites. As I said, the theme is a big one in late 19th-early 20th century lit; Kazantsakis probably pursued it longer than anyone else.
Joan |
