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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bob Lao-Tse who wrote (39407)	6/6/1999 6:41:00 PM
From: jbe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Back to Dionysus and J.C. again... Well,Bob, I don't think the parallels artists & thinkers saw, at the time we are talking about, had much to do with "love" or "voluntary sacrifice." A fertility god is ripped apart by Maenads or strung up & roasted because it's that time of year, when his blood, tears, and flesh are needed to fertilize the land. If humans were used as stand-ins for the god, as they often were, then the participants in the "ritual" might be lucky enough to get a hunk of real flesh to bury in their private fields. Pretty unsentimental approach. Most mystery cults did end up spiritualizing these "savior" gods, but the point was that their origins were in ancient, and rather barbarous and bloody, fertility rites. Some people reacted to the research on this subject by concluding that Christianity was "no better" than the pagan cults it superseded, and whose rituals it allegedly "copied." So all that stuff about Osiris/Dionysus/Bacchus/etc. was used to debunk Christianity. Others reacted quite differently: their imaginations were stimulated by the parallels between Christianity and the ancient fertility religions, and they set about trying to develop imaginative syntheses of the two. Christ/spirit+Dionysus/flesh=Janus God with Two Faces. And so forth. Then, there is the enormous role played by Nietzsche with his critique of "slave" Christianity and his exposition of the Dionysiac principle. and his reference to himself, when he finally went stark raving mad, as "The Crucified Dionysus".... And...... YOu will have to forgive me, Bob. I spent years of dissertation-writing steeping myself in the intellectual atmosphere of this period, and it is hard for me to convey the essence of it in a few paragraphs. And damned if I want to write the dissertation all over again! No, no! Anything but that! :-)