It is an incontestable tradition that Greek tragedy in its oldest form had as its subject only the suffering of Dionysus and that for a long time later the individually present stage heroes were simply Dionysus. But with the same certainty we can assert that right up to the time of Euripides Dionysus never ceased being the tragic hero, that all the famous figures of the Greek theatre, like Prometheus, Oedipus, and so on, are only masks of that primordial hero, Dionysus.3 The fact that behind all these masks stands a divinity, that is the single fundamental reason for the frequently admired characteristic “ideality” of those well-known figures.
Someone, I don’t know who, made the claim that all individuals, as individuals, are comic and thus untragic, and from that we might gather that the Greeks in general could not tolerate individuals on the tragic stage.4 In fact, they seem to have felt this way: that Platonic distinction between and evaluation of the “idea” in contrast to the “idol,” to copies, in general lies deeply grounded in the nature of the Greeks.1 But for us to make use of Plato’s terminology, we would have to talk of the tragic figures of the Greek stage in something like the following terms: the one truly real Dionysus appears in a multiplicity of shapes, in the mask of a struggling hero and, as it were, bound up in the net of the individual will. So now the god made manifest talks and acts in such a way that he looks like an erring, striving, suffering individual: the fact that he generally appears with this epic definition and clarity is the effect of Apollo, the interpreter of dreams, who indicates to the chorus its Dionysian state by that metaphorical appearance.
In reality, however, that hero is the suffering Dionysus of the mysteries, that god who experiences the suffering of the individual in himself, the god about whom the amazing myths tell how he, as a child, was dismembered by the Titans and now in this condition is venerated as Zagreus.2 Through this is revealed the idea that this dismemberment, the essentially Dionysian suffering, is like a transformation into air, water, earth, and fire, that we also have to look upon the condition of individuation as the source and basis for all suffering, as something in itself reprehensible. From the smile of this Dionysus arose the Olympian gods, from his tears arose mankind. In that existence as dismembered god Dionysus has the dual nature of a cruelly savage daemon and a lenient, gentle master.
The initiates in the Eleusinian mysteries hoped for a rebirth of Dionysus, which we now can understand as a premonition of the end of individuation: the initiates’ thundering song of jubilation cried out to this approaching third Dionysus. And only with this hope was there a ray of joy on the face of the fragmented world, torn apart into individuals, as myth reveals in the picture of Demeter sunk in eternal sorrow, who rejoices again for the first time when someone says to her that she might be able once again to give birth to Dionysus. In these established views we already have assembled all the components of a profound and pessimistic world view, together with the mysterious doctrine of tragedy: the basic acknowledgement of the unity of all existing things, the observation that individuation is the ultimate foundation of all evil, art the joyful hope, that the spell of individuation is there for us to break, as a premonition of a re-established unity. —
It has been pointed out earlier that the Homeric epic is the poetry of Olympian culture, with which it sang its own song of victory over the terrors of the fight against the Titans. Now, under the overwhelming influence of tragic poetry, the Homeric myths were newly reborn and show in this metamorphosis that since then the Olympian culture has also been overcome by an even deeper world view. The defiant Titan Prometheus reported to his Olympian torturer that for the first time his rule has threatened by the highest danger, unless he quickly joined forces with him. In Aeschylus we acknowledge the union of the frightened Zeus, worried about his end, with the Titan. Thus the earlier age of the Titans is belatedly brought back from Tartarus into the light once more.3 The philosophy of wild and naked nature looks with the open countenance of truth at the myths of the Homeric world dancing past it: before the flashing eyes of this goddess, those myths grow pale and tremble — until the mighty fist of the Dionysian artist forces them into the service of the new divinity. The Dionysian truth takes over the entire realm of myth as the symbol of its knowledge and speaks of this knowledge, partly in the public culture of tragedy and partly in the secret celebrations of dramatic mystery celebrations, but always in the disguise of the old myths. What power was it which liberated Prometheus from his vultures and transformed the myth into a vehicle of Dionysian wisdom? It was the Herculean power of music, which attained its highest manifestation in tragedy and knew how to interpret myth with a new significance in the most profound manner, something we have already described before as the most powerful capacity of music.
For it is the lot of every myth gradually to creep into the crevice of an assumed historical reality and to become analyzed as a unique fact in answer to the historical demands of some later time or other. The Greek were already fully on their way to re-labelling cleverly and arbitrarily the completely mythical dreams of their youth as a historical, pragmatic, and youthful history. For this is the way religions tend to die out, namely, when the mythical pre-conditions of a religion, under the strict, rational eyes of an orthodox dogmatism become systematized as a closed totality of historical events and people begin anxiously defending the credibility of their myths but resisting every naturally continuing life and further growth of those same myths and when the feeling for the myth dies out and in its place the claim to put religion on a historical footing steps forward.
The newly born genius of Dionysian music now seized these dying myths, and in its hands myth blossomed again, with colours which it had never shown before, with a scent which stirred up a longing premonition of a metaphysical world. After this last flourishing, myth collapsed, its leaves grew pale, and soon the mocking Lucians of antiquity grabbed up the flowers, scattered around by all winds, colourless and withered.1 Through tragedy myth attains its most profound content, its most expressive form. It lifts itself up again, like a wounded hero, and all the remaining strength and the wise tranquilly of a dying man burn in its eyes with its final powerful light.
What did you want, you rascal Euripides, when you sought to force this dying man once more into your cheerful service? He died under your powerful hands. And now you used a counterfeit, masked myth, which knew only how to dress itself up with the old splendour, like Hercules’ monkey. And as myth died with you, so with you died the genius of music as well. Although you liked to plunder with greedy hands all the gardens of music, even so you achieved only a counterfeit, masked music. And because you abandoned Dionysus, you were then abandoned also by Apollo. Even though you hunted out all the passions from their beds and charmed them into your circle, even though you sharpened and filed a really sophisticated dialectic for the speeches of your heroes — nevertheless your heroes have only counterfeit, masked passions and speak only a counterfeit, masked dialogue.
Footnotes:
1Plato: (428-348 BC), the most important philosopher in classical Greece, who distinguished between a real word of ideal forms and the phenomenal world of sense experience, with the latter being an inferior imitation of the former.
2According to some Greek myths Zeus and the goddess Demeter were the parents of Zagreus, a child who was torn to pieces by the Titans but who was later born again, either reassembled by Demeter or born to the mortal Semele. Zagreus was identified with the god Dionysus, child of Zeus and Semele.
3When Zeus overcame the Titans, who were immortal, he imprisoned them in Tartarus, a region deep within the earth.
1Lucians : Lucian of Samosata (125 AD-180 AD), a popular satirist in Roman Syria who wrote in Greek and, among other things, made fun of traditional stories.
