Another Chapter on Dionysus: Identity, Modern Digital Technology, and the Specter of Death Drive

Abstract

Based on literary, historical, anthropological, and psychological data scholars have formed a post-modern concept of Dionysus that expresses him as a timeless and exceptional god originating from ancient Greece. Dionysus’ unique personality is antithetical even unto itself and has therefore been difficult to rationalize beyond assumptions concerning the god’s historical lineage. Mythographer and psychoanalyst Rafael Lopez-Pedraza declared that to write about Dionysus was an uncertain undertaking due to the god’s discrepant imagery that dwells in “irrationality” (Dionysus in Exile 1). The compensation, Lopez-Pedraza believes is in the idea that it “is precisely from this irrationality that Dionysus serves as a metaphorical vehicle for exploring shadowy areas of human nature” (Dionysus in Exile 1).

This essay takes into consideration Pedraza’s assertions regarding both the adumbral and redeeming aspects of Dionysus as a metaphorical psychological figure whose attributes inspire among others, a fusion of the perpetuation of creativity, the sophistications of self-destruction, and the light of epiphany merged with the opacity of madness. This project identifies unamplified or unrecognized specifics of the ancient deity through literature, myth, and psychology. It approaches the subject through research in the fields of archetypal and depth psychological theories, mythological studies, literature, philosophy, and through documented and observable contemporary American social phenomena.

The dissertation addresses both ancient and contemporary literature about Dionysus and explores its association with narratives concerning paradox, transition, vulnerability, shame, and human psychological tendencies. Dionysus’s traditional relationship and affiliations with death are also re-positioned so that what becomes evident is a clear relationship between metaphorical interpretations of the god and previously unrecognized psychological complexes involving both self-preserving and self-destructive behavior. The study also utilizes the culmination of myth, literature, anthropology, and psychology about Dionysus to establish the figure as a primary force in the creation of and interaction with modern digital-mechanized technology in America.