The European Legacy, 2015
Vol. 20, No. 4, 349–359, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10848770.2015.1019217
On the Centrality of Dionysus in Nietzsche’s
Philosophy
KIERAN STEWART
ABSTRACT Despite the widespread influence of Nietzsche’s iconoclastic works on twentieth-century intel-
lectual and literary culture, there has been a surprising lack of academic focus on the parallels between his
philosophical trajectory and the anthropological literature on the mysterious god Dionysus. The striking cor-
relations between ancient Dionysian worship with Nietzsche’s oeuvre revalorise the celebration of ecstasy.
In Twilight of the Idols, he states that the Dionysian is “beyond pity and terror, to realize in oneself
the eternal joy of becoming.” By elucidating some of the mysteries surrounding this enigmatic god, this arti-
cle aims to re-establish the central importance of Dionysus in Nietzsche’s work, and to suggest that if we
are to understand Nietzsche at all, we must first undertake an anthropological reading of Dionysus.
INTRODUCTION
In his late work Twilight of the Idols (1889), Nietzsche affirms that he is the last disciple
of the Greek god Dionysus. This is no metaphor, for he states: “I, the last disciple of
the philosopher Dionysus—I, the teacher of the eternal recurrence.”1 Considering this
sweeping categorical self-designation it is surprising that there has been relatively little
academic research on the conceptual links between the modern anthropological litera-
ture on the Greek god Dionysus and Nietzsche’s work. The main tenets of Dionysian
worship, its mystery cults and the “madness” they incite suggest that “Dionysian
ecstasy” is precisely the goal of Nietzsche’s thought, periodically shifting from enstasis
to ecstasis.
In his early work The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nietzsche conceived of the
Dionysian as the objective ground of Being itself, in opposition to the Hellenic deity
of semblance, Apollo. For Nietzsche, Dionysus is the primordial god of ‘dark libidinal
heat’ while Apollo the god of solar brilliance.2 In other words, for Nietzsche, Apollo
represents the illusory, yet necessary, veil of rational civilisation, whereas Dionysus
symbolises the wholly irrational, wild impulses of human nature. In Nietzsche’s middle
and late periods, however, Dionysus is transformed into the essence of human nature
as the “Will to Power,” entirely subsuming Apollo and expressing Nietzsche’s supreme
affirmation of life. Dionysus is the perfect example of what religious scholars Jane Ellen
Harrison and Joseph Campbell term the “dying god,” a cyclical god who dies and is
Department of Humanities and Communication Arts, University of Western Sydney, James Ruse Drive, Parramatta,
New South Wales, 2137 Australia. Email: kieran.stewart@hotmail.com.
© 2015 International Society for the Study of European Ideas
350 KIERAN STEWART
reborn again, in either a symbolic or literal sense. The cyclical nature of Dionysus is in
many ways congruous with Nietzsche’s concept of “eternal return,” which he
develops from The Gay Science (1882) onwards. This concept, as I will argue, is the
horrifying idea of an interminable existence. For the Greeks, however, Dionysus
symbolized a state of ecstasy. I will discuss Nietzsche’s concept of Dionysus in the
framework of the anthropological theories of Dionysian worship and mythology.
Nietzsche was fascinated, even obsessed, with the Greek god Dionysus as pure ecstasis,
this god as all-encompassing in his oeuvre. Secondly, it is clear that the Dionysian rites
enact or demonstrate the psychological, mythological, and cultural processes of a sym-
bolic, cyclical death and rebirth—the process of becoming and renewal. The idea of
becoming—as opposed to a static being—is a key element in Nietzsche’s philosophy. I
am not concerned whether the Greeks actually ‘believed’ in Dionysus. Rather, my
aim is to explore how the ecstatic states of Dionysian madness and mysteries illuminate
Nietzsche’s work. I argue that for Nietzsche Dionysian ecstasy was a means of
approaching the sacred and of triumphing over humanity’s two greatest fears, the fear
of the unknown and the fear of death.
I will establish the historical and religious context by drawing on Jane Ellen
Harrison’s seminal studies on Dionysus as the archetypal outsider in Prolegomena to the
Study of Greek Religion and A Companion the Greek Religion. I will then characterize
Dionysian ecstasy by discussing Gordon Wasson and Albert Hoffmann’s The Road to
Eleusis, and draw on Walter F. Otto’s Dionysus: Myth and Cult to dwell on what has
often been overlooked—the central importance of Dionysus in ancient Greece. Based
on these studies I will turn to the role of Dionysus in Nietzsche’s philosophy (and life),
from The Birth of Tragedy up to Ecce Homo, and develop my argument on Dionysus
and Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. My aim is
thus to explore the relationship or parallels between the anthropological Dionysus and
Nietzsche’s philosophy of becoming.
SEEKING DIONYSUS THROUGH RITUAL: THE MASKED GOD
Dionysus represents the archetypal figure of the outsider. His figure and historical sta-
tus has been difficult to trace after the decline of Greco-Roman polytheistic traditions.
His place as a deity appears to stand beyond or outside the boundaries of cultural
norms, which are ruptured and disintegrate by his presence. He represents the raw,
marginal, vitalistic essence of life and death itself—a pure primordial statelessness whose
mysterium tremendum (supreme joy and horror in unison, whether religious or not) is so
overwhelming that the god must reveal himself in the Apollonian form of a mask. He
is a Black Sun representing the absence of the solar deity Apollo. Most importantly, as
classical scholar Jane Ellen Harrison states, “intoxication is of the essence of the god
Dionysus.”3 The question is why Dionysus has been so difficult to comprehend and at
the same time so important to the Greeks and later to the Romans.
However ardently anthropologists have striven to determine the original function
of Dionysus, and often designate him as a mere vegetation or fertility god, they seem
to overlook the fact that some of the “noblest minds” in Occidental history have
inscribed his “eternal symbol” into the core of their most profound thoughts.4
Kieran Stewart 351
Harrison, for example, in opposing originary-utilitarian theories (i.e., Dionysus as a
god of fertility), argues that the advent of Dionysus in Greek religion was a natural
way of balancing or keeping in check the Apollonian one-sidedness of the Olympian
gods. Yet she admits that because “Dionysus is a difficult god to understand,” “the
mystic” is the only way of uncovering his “true mystery.”5 Similarly, according to
Daniel Ogden “Dionysus is so difficult to pin down because he is ever on the move
and always in a perennial state of arrival and epiphany.”6 Although an approximate
date is never specified, Ogden makes the claim that Dionysus appears late on the scene
of the Greek pantheon, with most scholars suggesting that he arrived from Thrace,
Ethiopia, or even Asia Minor, sweeping across Greek towns and villages, and inflicting
madness on any who encountered him. Harrison refers to Dionysus as the “immigrant
god,” arriving as a much-needed but long-forgotten “spiritual impulse.”7 Nevertheless,
for both Harrison and Ogden, Dionysus symbolizes the immanent transition between
life and death. In Ogden’s words “Dionysus is concerned with the soul’s last journey
to the world of the dead because, as a god of transitions, he bridges life and death.”8
How can this foreign god, whose arrival is said to be late, have such gravitas for the
Greeks? One way of answering this question is to examine the initiation rituals held in
his honor.
Several cults emerged from the myth of Dionysus. Leaving aside the festivals of
Dionysia, which developed much later in Greek history (c. 487 BCE), and were asso-
ciated with the evolution of theatre, violence, and drunken revelry, I will focus on the
earlier rites and secret rituals that emphasized Dionysus as the god of madness and
ecstasy as explicated by Harrison, Ogden, Hoffmann, Wasson, and Ruck. The evi-
dence suggests that the Dionysian Mysteries were originally held to invoke the
“underworld” of chthonic madness, and later on, the transcendental, which promised
initiates certain benefits in the afterlife. Ogden tells us that the “Bacchic worshipers
performed Dionysiac teletai [initiations] in preparation for death.”9 The initiate would
invoke the god with the aid of intoxicants (music, dance, wine, and entheogens) in
order to experience and celebrate the eternal cycle of life and death in the form of
ecstatic trance. These ecstatic rituals disrupted normal consciousness so as to revitalise
both the individual and communal psyche. As Harrison explains, “at Delphi there
were rites closely analogous to those of Osiris and concerned with the tearing to
pieces, the death and burial of the god Dionysos, and his resurrection and re-birth as a
child.” The Dionysian rites thus reflect the psychological need to return to a pure, pri-
mordial state. It is clear that these rites, although obscure to modern eyes, were of
great benefit to the initiates for whom the trance was a way of unleashing their “true”
nature by uniting with their original, primal essence: “With Dionysos, god of trees
and plants as well as human life, there came a ‘return to nature,’ a breaking of bonds
and limitations and crystallizations, a desire for the life rather of the emotions than of
the reason, a recrudescence it may be of animal passions.”10 Dionysus, according to
Ogden, was not only “responsible for the trance” but also “responsible for its
release.”11 Nietzsche tells us that the initiate’s experience of release by the eternal
becoming of Dionysian epiphany leads him “beyond pity and terror, to realize of one-
self the eternal joy of becoming.”12 The initiate is reborn from the “blindness” of his
previous existence, bound by pity and terror, and ultimately becomes the mediator of
what Nietzsche calls the will of Dionysus.
352 KIERAN STEWART
These early Dionysian rituals are closely related to the mysteries held in honour
of Persephone, Dionysus’ mother, according to the popular myth. Once a year,
selected initiates were to travel the road to Eleusis to take part in the most important
mystery rite in the Greek calendar. According to Albert Hoffmann and Gordon
Wasson the Eleusinian mysteries unleashed the “celebration of the god Dionysus.”
Eleusis was the supreme experience in an initiate’s life. It was both physical and
mystical: trembling, vertigo, cold sweat, and then a sight that made all previous
seeing seem like blindness, a sense of awe and wonder at a brilliance that caused a
profound silence since what had just been seen and felt could never be
communicated: words are unequal to the task.13
The authors suggest that these secretive mysteries revolved around the use of a myste-
rious psychedelic substance (either psilocybin mushrooms or ergot of rye) to which
the ancient Greeks referred as Kykeon. Harrison explains that “in the polytheistic socie-
ties of Greece and Rome it was common for individuals to belong to more than one
mystery cult. Initiates of the Eleusinian mysteries, for example, might also belong to
mystery cults of Dionysus or Isis, or both.”14 Since the Eleusinian mystery was the
most important ritual in ancient Greece the Dionysian ecstasy appears to be directly
related to it. And what the initiates experienced in it, according to Wasson and
Hofmann, was the Dionysian ecstasy itself—the consummation of life and death as a
unity.
DIONYSIAN ECSTASY: UNVEILING THE MASK
As we have seen, it is clear from a reading of Harrison and Ogden that the cults of
Dionysus were “always cults of intoxication.”15 Yet classical philologist Walter F.
Otto, perhaps the greatest authority on Dionysus, gives a far more transparent account
of the god with an emphasis on ecstasy: “The most distinguished poets and thinkers
sensed in this diversity a reality of inexpressible depth. But modern scholars are still
completely baffled by it.”16 Indeed, scholars do remain baffled by the diversity of
events, seasons, and rituals the god symbolizes. Yet, what then is the function and sig-
nificance of Dionysus as the representative of death and ecstatic rebirth, as ecstasy
itself?
“Dionysian ecstasy” itself is not a catalyst for the reversal of cultural opposites,
such as the fool becoming wise, the king a beggar, and the temporary change of sexual
orientation (much like the Bacchanalia, or Dionysia). Rather, it is a catalyst for the over-
throw of all binary cultural distinctions that can be associated with waking life, and the
complete loss of the ability to execute value-judgments of any kind. Dionysian ecstasy
is the temporary opening up of all possible values, an opening up of what philosopher
Brian Massumi terms “hyperconnectivity.” Thus to be out of one’s mind means to
escape from the self. The cognitive forms of phenomena give way and the illusory
basis of everyday praxis evaporates, and in its wake lies the tremendous opening and
rupture of the Dionysiac. In Dionysian ecstasy one experiences both life and death as
one. Otto concisely articulates the notion of Dionysus as the god of ecstasy itself:
Kieran Stewart 353
He is the mad ecstasy which hovers over every conception and birth and whose
wildness is always ready to move onto destruction and death. He is life which, when
it overflows, grows mad and in its profoundest passion is intimately associated with
death. This unfathomable world of Dionysus is called mad with good reason.17
Dionysus represented, for the Greeks, the most profound paradox of life that points
to something always just beyond the reach of everyday consciousness. The ecstasy
Dionysus excites thus transcends both everyday linguistic registers and popular eschato-
logical religions—he cannot be experienced while one is in a rational state of mind.
The ecstatic state is something that can never be expressed in any language other than
the language of poetry or myth: “Dionysus was the god of the most blessed ecstasy
and the most enraptured love. But he was also the persecuted god, and all whom he
loved, and all who attended him, had to share his tragic fate.” His tragic fate was to be
torn to pieces and reborn as a child innumerable times: an eternal cycle of death and
rebirth. He was the god who was simultaneously closest to the proximity of death, and
the emergence of life, wherever he appeared. According to Otto he was “an intoxi-
cated god, a mad god!” “a god who demands our deepest thought.”18 Dionysus
revealed to the Greeks an ecstasy of such profundity that two thousand years after the
decline of Greco-Roman culture we see Hegel (Hegel’s dialectic between Dionysus
and Christ), Hölderlin (the poem Brod und Wein), and Nietzsche expressing their most
penetrating thoughts under the name of Dionysus. Dionysus represents a primordial
duality that manifests itself as horror and ecstasy, infinite destruction and liveliness.
Upon his appearance the illusory masks are removed, the initiate becoming one with
the primordial, undifferentiated oneness of being, a state that in the words of poet
Hakim Bey is “chaotic, random and perpetually intoxicated.” What Dionysian ecstasy
revealed was “neither a god nor a maggot,” but one whose “idiotic desires encom-
passed every possible choreography.”19 For Otto “at the height of Dionysian ecstasy
all these paradoxes suddenly unmask themselves and reveal their names to be Life and
Death.”20 To awaken to the impermanence of life thus means to re-cognize death,
which Otto describes as the mysterium tremendum. Thus the worship of Dionysus tells
us something about the reverence of the ancient world for ecstasis, for the unmediated
recognition of birth and death as an eternal cycle, and as a chance for personal,
communal, and mythical renewal.
NIETZSCHE’S DIONYSUS: FROM DIONYSIAN/APOLLONIAN DUALITY TO
DIONYSIAN DITHYRAMBS
To trace the fundamental importance of Dionysus for Nietzsche requires us to exam-
ine his first work, The Birth of Tragedy, widely denounced by his contemporaries, in
which he explores the origins of Greek tragedy and its relevance to the culture of his
age. Nietzsche first used Dionysus in his aesthetic theory in opposition to Apollo: The
Apollonian stood for the brilliant beams of rationality, reason, and architectonic perfec-
tion of the ancient Greek world, which could not function without the Dionysian, the
dark androgynous, violent impulses of music, tragedy, ecstasy, boundary dissolution,
and irrationality. Dionysus represented the underlying chaos and suffering of all exis-
tence. These two contradictory artistic impulses were maintained in a fragile balance,
according to Nietzsche, which enabled the creation of the dramatic, and more
354 KIERAN STEWART
importantly, the tragic arts of ancient Greece. Yet their coexistence came to an end
with the rise of post-Socratic philosophy and especially of ethics. The overarching
theme of The Birth of Tragedy is that the tragic hero attempts to make Apollonian sense
in an unjust and chaotic Dionysian world. Although the tragic hero dies unjustly (e.g.,
in the tragedies of Sophocles), the attainment of Dionysian ecstasy, usually through
music, dance, and intoxication, allows us to regain “a primordial unity with our nat-
ure” that “breaks down the barriers between man and man,” beyond Apollonian cog-
nition.21 But, after The Birth of Tragedy, Dionysus gradually moves to the centre of
Nietzsche’s thought. In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche confesses that his aim in writing The
Birth of Tragedy was to explore how the Greeks eradicated certain forms of psychic
negativity: “the book contains the first attempt at showing how the Greeks succeeded
in disposing of pessimism.”22 And so, by the time he wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra
(1883–35) he believed he had attained a Dionysian awakening, an ecstatic rebirth.
Dionysus now encompasses all things through the “eternal recurrence of the same,”
and Nietzsche becomes his last disciple. The Apollonian is subsumed and amalgamated
into the Dionysian, for, he says, the noblest goal is to eliminate all opposites. In
Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche elaborates on the Dionysian state of ecstasy:
Affirmation of life even it its strangest and sternest problems, the will to life rejoicing
in its own inexhaustibility through the sacrifice of its highest types—that is what I
call the Dionysian. ... Not so as to get rid of pity and terror, not so as to purify one-
self of a dangerous emotion through its vehement discharge—it was thus Aristotle
understood it —but, beyond pity and terror, to realize in oneself the eternal joy of
becoming—that joy which also encompasses joy in destruction. ... And with that I
again return to that place from which I set out—The Birth of Tragedy was my first
revaluation of all values: with that I again plant myself in the soil out of which I
draw all that I will and can—I, the last disciple of the philosopher Dionysus—I, the
teacher of the eternal recurrence.23
The Heraclitean joy in eternal becoming through the eternal recurrence of the same
would become, as Nietzsche saw it, his original contribution to humanity. Dionysian
rapture, “beyond pity and terror,” suggests that the only way to celebrate existence is
to realize oneself as (a) becoming. Thus the boundary-dissolving qualities of Dionysian
ecstasy in Nietzsche’s oeuvre (also referred to as Zarathustra, the eternal recurrence)
became an obsession and, as some have argued, paved the way for his decline into
madness. The last words written by an arguably sane Nietzsche in Ecce Homo are:
“Have I been understood?—Dionysus vs. the crucified.”24 For Nietzsche Dionysus
was clearly the highest affirmation of life, not only in his philosophy but also in his
own life. Every one of his major works after The Birth of Tragedy further develops and
refines what he means by Dionysus, god of ecstasy, symbol of the rapturous transfor-
mation from death of the self and destruction of the body, as found in the original
myths, to ecstatic rebirth.
A SHARED STATE OF ECSTASY
Nietzsche’s work is dominated by the rejection of moral prejudice and timidity in
favour of a philosophy that will “arrive at the unknown,” arousing “excess and
Kieran Stewart 355
ecstasy.”25 Consequently, one of his fundamental concerns was that religion and
morality had stifled the Dionysian experience of ecstasy, cultivating instead a timid
philosophy of closure and desire to withdraw from life. As he writes in Beyond Good
and Evil, “all psychology has in the past remained anchored to moral prejudices and
timidities: it has not ventured into the depths.” To reach these depths, Marsden claims,
“we have to recognize a Dionysian phenomenon that ever again anew reveals to us
the playful construction and destruction of the individual world as the outflow of a
primordial pleasure.”26 In order to reach this “primordial pleasure” we must follow
the teachings of Zarathustra. In his seminal work Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche
asserts that only in the depths of solitude can human beings confront their fears, timid-
ities and moral prejudices: “many should be dissuaded from solitude” for it is not a
position for the “timid, ashamed, awkward.” For Nietzsche-Dionysus, it is the over-
coming of the fear of solitude that leads to the ecstatic affirmation of an “eternal
becoming”: “for fear—is the exception with us. Courage, however, and the adventure
and joy in the unknown, the unattempted—courage seems to me the whole pre-history
of man.”27 This overcoming opens up of new paths to recreate the world and the self
anew. Thus by releasing us from the chains of our current mythology, ecstasy us into
the de-individuated realm of uncertainty and egoless becoming:
Set outside ourselves, we swim in an enigmatic, fiery element, no longer knowing
ourselves nor recognizing the most familiar of things; we no longer possess any stan-
dard of measurement, everything law-like and rigid begins to shift, everything
gleams in new colours, speaks to us in new signs and characters.28
These words truly capture the thought of a philosopher who is a “specialist in
ecstasy.”29 The incessant beating of the drum, the melodies that carry the visionary
into the realms of the unconscious, reveal a world that is eternally becoming, where
“everything gleams in new colours, speaks to us in new signs and characters.” Zarathu-
stra beckons: “put your will and your values upon the river of becoming. … Now the
river bears your boat along.”30 Both the mythical Dionysus and Nietzsche reject our
conventional, established truths by undermining the terra firma on which they stand,
and by promoting in their stead the authentic moments that disrupt the “logic of the
same.”31 For these two figures, nothing less is required than the annihilation of the
subject and his absorption into the monstrous forces of nature. Von Stuckrad’s inter-
pretation of this transformation also sums up Nietzsche’s philosophy of nature: “the
function of the ego that transgresses its boundaries and enters the absolute and the
monstrous, ultimately becoming the Self, and finally his philosophy of nature provided
subsequent generations with a key for interpreting the metaphysical dimensions of
reality, music, and shamanism.”32 Whether through music or entheogens, Dionysian
“becoming” demands the total revaluation of cultural values through ecstasis, which
brings us to Nietzsche’s concept of the eternal return.
BEYOND MAN AND TIME
The pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus understood nature to be in a state of perpetual
becoming, or “‘all flowing” (Gk. όλες οι ροές). He proposed that the ceaseless war
356 KIERAN STEWART
of opposites striving for unity is the only standard in a reality where everything is in
flux and nothing is permanent.33 In other words, the only fixed “law” of nature was
the law of perpetual change. In similar fashion, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra argues for
accepting the necessary and inevitable impermanence of being. In his brilliant and
bizarre autobiography Ecce Homo, Nietzsche describes “The Eternal Recurrence of the
Same” as “the highest formula of a life affirmation that can ever be attained.”34 To
embrace this concept is to affirm all that appears and disappears in the world. Marsden
argues that Nietzsche’s concept of Eternal Return “maps a philosophical trajectory
which circumvents cognitive judgements of being and perhaps circumvents being as
such.”35 Nietzsche confirms this in Ecce Homo by encouraging “the yea-saying to the
impermanence and annihilation of things, which is the decisive feature of a Dionysian
philosophy; the postulation of becoming, together with the radical rejection even of
the concept being.”36 According to Karl Löwith Nietzsche’s concept of the Eternal
Return and Zarathustra are one and the same thing. Nietzsche poses a question: are
we to take this knowledge as a horrifying burden? Or are we to integrate it as a pre-
condition to transform ourselves? Eternal recurrence represents, for him, the inverse of
the Hindic and Buddhistic conceptions of eternal recurrence. Instead of seeking libera-
tion from the endless wheel of life and death, Nietzsche urges us, according to Löwith,
to embrace this universal law: “Nietzsche-Zarathustra becomes the teacher of the eter-
nal recurrence, he, too, is reborn, because of a reversal, to be sure. But he is born not
to a new and different life in Christ, but to the always same life of the world, which as
an eternal cycle comes back to itself in its becoming.”37 In Ecce Homo Nietzsche writes
that Zarathustra and the eternal return are catalysts for rebirth. Thus he moves beyond
the illusion of being and through the eternal recurrence toward an affirmation of Dio-
nysian becoming: “with the idea of the eternal recurrence, Nietzsche is in fact beyond
man and time, ecstatically removed from himself.”38 The primary theme in Thus Spoke
Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s opus magnus and self-proclaimed masterpiece, is the overcom-
ing of the ailments caused by stagnant myths, through the affirmation of the eternal
recurrence and Dionysian ecstasy. The “tragic artist of the Dionysian type” and the
eternal return thus act as one in Nietzsche’s philosophy for confronting and overcom-
ing nihilism. This for Nietzsche is the ultimate Dionysian ecstasy, which brings
“redemption from perfect nihilism.”39 We are asked to repeatedly confront the burden
of eternal recurrence and to come through triumphantly each time. Zarathustra must
fight against all the odds in deepest solitude, for only in solitude, on the edge of mad-
ness, can one “awaken”: “and once you are awake, you shall remain awake eter-
nally.”40 Once Zarathustra completes his metamorphosis into a child, by affirming the
eternal recurrence of the same, he discovers that all things that are held dear by
humans are of their own creation. Emerging from his solitude and desperation, he
affirms all that comes into, and goes out of, existence, with an emphatic “Yes”:
Did you ever say Yes to one joy? O my friends, then you said Yes to all woe as
well. All things are interlinked and entwined together, all things are in love; if ever
you wanted one time twice, if ever you said: “You please me, happiness, flashing
instant, moment” you wanted everything back! Everything anew, everything eter-
nal, everything interlinked, entwined, in love, O thus did you love the world.41
Kieran Stewart 357
The cultural physician par excellence, Nietzsche affirms the transience of existence rather
than hiding behind rigid systems of religious thought. The mysterium tremendum is his
recognition of the role Dionysian ecstasy plays in the reconfiguration and reconstruc-
tion of the individual and thus of culture.
DIONYSUS: MAD, DYING, REBORN
Madness, ecstasy, intoxication, music, dance, the symbolism of rebirth, hallucination,
descent, ascent, transformation—these are all inherent in Nietzsche’s philosophy.
Although his interpretation of Dionysus has been widely recognized, little attention
has been paid to Dionysus’ ecstatic qualities. For Nietzsche and the Greeks, Dionysus
represents the highest affirmation of primordial life and transcendent existence, and
Nietzsche regularly discusses the nature of Dionysian ecstasy, which dissolves all earthly
boundaries, disrupts social order, and as a consequence, regenerates the community.
Some of the qualities of this mysterious god are undeniable, yet some lack direct
evidence, for his origins appear to lie in a proto-religious, pre-Socratic mythology.
The primary role of Dionysus was to reveal the authentic being hidden under the
rational, civilized Apollonian mask. When Nietzsche’s Dionysus is studied side by side
with the anthropological literature on Dionysus, we see a continuity between his phi-
losophy and the ancient rituals associated with encounters with the divine. I have
argued that Dionysus is the symbol of the mysterium tremendum. For Nietzsche, too,
Dionysus is the god of ecstasy, of renewal itself, at once the horrific and joyful celebra-
tion of becoming. Thus, for Nietzsche, the transfiguration of existence, of rebirth,
comes about through dying to the world, by being absorbed into the infinite flux of
nature until all ties with the world dissolve, and then rising from the ashes of madness
and death:
We have to recognize a Dionysian phenomenon that ever again anew reveals to us
the playful construction and destruction of the individual world as the outflow of a
primordial pleasure; in a similar manner, the worldbuilding force is compared by
Heraclitus the dark to a child at play who places stones here and there, builds sand-
castles and smashes them again.42
Here, the eternal recurrence reveals its horror and magnitude in the form of a Diony-
sian revelation. For rebirth to occur, the icon, word, or god, must be born, and ulti-
mately destroyed, sacrificed, again and again, so that everything may gleam in “new
colours.” For the process of renewal can only come from the joyous, childlike affirma-
tion of the creation and destruction of all things through the de-individuating ecstatic
state. The visionary awakening of the initiate arises from the encounter with what the
Greeks and Nietzsche call the Dionysian, at the utmost limits of civilization or social
order, inducing a hyperawareness of existence that is far removed from the Apollonian
semblance of culture. Dionysus manifests the untamable, underlying horror and joy of
knowing that all things are impermanent, that all things are forever becoming. When
Nietzsche recognized the infinite ebb and flow as the only law of the universe he also
realized that he had reached the limit of sanity. On reaching that limit, yet before his
descent into madness, he experienced the final awakening: losing the culturally
358 KIERAN STEWART
charged mythos of the static “self,” he experienced the amoral, ecstatic state of eternal
creation and destruction. This ecstatic state and awareness, in the end, was the only
way Nietzsche-Dionysus could face the unknown without the many masks of sanity.
NOTES
An earlier version of parts of this article appeared online as “Nietzschean Shamanism” at
www.academia.edu.
1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols: Or How One Philosophizes with a Hammer, trans. R.
J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1990), 88.
2. Jill Marsden, After Nietzsche: Notes towards a Philosophy of Ecstasy (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2002), 34–35.
3. Jane Ellen Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1908), 425.
4. Walter F. Otto, Dionysus: Myth and Cult (Dallas, TX: Indiana University Press, 1986), 7–8.
5. Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, 364.
6. Daniel Ogden, ed., A Companion to Greek Religion (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 341.
7. Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, 364.
8. Ogden, A Companion to Greek Religion, 339.
9. Ogden, A Companion to Greek Religion, 340.
10. Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, 84.
11. Ogden, A Companion to Greek Religion, 42.
12. Nietzsche, Twighlight of the Idols, 56.
13. Robert Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, and Carl A. P. Ruck, The Road to Eleusis:
Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries, 1st ed. (New York: North Atlantic Books, 1978), 19.
14. Wasson, Hofmann, and Ruck, The Road to Eleusis, 19.
15. Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, 412.
16. Ogden, A Companion to Greek Religion, 49.
17. Otto, Dionysus: Myth and Cult, 141.
18. Otto, Dionysus: Myth and Cult, 50.
19. Hakim Bey, The Temporary Autonomous Zone (New York: Autonomedia, 1991), 40.
20. Otto, Dionysus: Myth and Cult, 50.
21. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. D. Smith (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2000), 91.
22. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 68.
23. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 88.
24. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is, trans. R. J. Hollingdale
(London: Penguin, 1992), sec. 4, aphorism 9.
25. Nick Land, “Shamanic Nietzsche,” in Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987–2007, ed.
Robin Mckay and Ray Brassier (Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic, 2011), 223.
26. Marsden, After Nietzsche, 45.
27. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin,
2003), 312.
28. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Untimely Meditations, trans. Anthony M. Ludovici and Adrian
Collins (Digireads.com Publishing, 2009), pt.4, sec. 8.
29. Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries: The Encounter between Contemporary Faiths and
Archaic Realities (London: Collins, 1968), 71.
30. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 137.
31. Marsden, After Nietzsche, 13.
32. Kocku Von Stuckrad, “Utopian Landscapes and Ecstatic Journeys: Friedrich Nietzsche,
Hermann Hesse, and Mircea Eliade on the Terror of Modernity,” Numen 57 (2010): 87.
33. Heraclitus, The Cosmic Fragments: A Critical Study, trans. Geoffrey Stephen Kirk (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
34. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 31.
35. Marsden, After Nietzsche, xii.
Kieran Stewart 359
36. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 72–73.
37. Karl Löwith, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, trans. J. Harvey
Lomax (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978), 122.
38. Löwith, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, 62.
39. Löwith, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, 63.
40. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 102.
41. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 10.
42. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 24.
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