When I think of direction in religion and my ongoing conundrum, some of my difficulties fit the Apollonian/Dionysian dichotomy really well. Simply put, in terms of Apollonian religious experience, Christianity is the most appealing and compelling to me. Christianity (and for me I mean mostly Episcopalian/Anglican Protestantism) is beautiful: I love the liturgy, the hymns, I love the churches. I like the idea of a professional, trained clergy, and am comfortable with a degree of hierarchical authority, especially when it is given legitimacy by the weight of tradition, and when it is unable or unwilling to exercise its authority in a heavy-handed or abusive way. I like an authoritative clergy, not an authoritarian one. I like the freedom of thought that is (often) preserved in Episcopalianism. I like Christian theology and history. I like churches and cathedrals, and the entire aesthetic of Christianity.
But on the Dionysian side, nothing happens. Jesus does not intoxicate me. I am not in love with Jesus. I don’t feel a connection to Jesus, a relationship with Him. Nothing, nada, not at all. I have no problem with Jesus conceptually–I think he’s pretty great, and the idea of a personal, mystical relationship with the incarnate God of the Universe is amazing to me. But I can’t figure out how to make it happen at all.
I’m sure someone is going to say that that side of religion is not important or crucial, but they’re wrong, at least when it comes to me. I’m not just going to embrace a religion because it sounds good and looks good on paper. I need something more. I hunger for the divine, and the Apollonian, while really important, simply does not sate that hunger. So I am just not okay with a spiritual direction where I don’t make some kind of contact with god.
I actually started to wonder if maybe the mystical/Dionysian side of religion either didn’t exist, or just wasn’t going to happen for me. I was waiting for it, and trying to put myself in situations where it could happen: I didn’t want to close myself off to the possibility of some kind of Road to Emmaus moment, but at the same time I was wary about lowering the bar on mystical experience too far. If Mormonism taught me only one thing about religion, it is how easy it is to manufacture your own spiritual experiences if you want them bad enough and are willing to deceive yourself.
So, perhaps you can imagine my surprise and the eager excitement I felt when a Dionysian experience really did happen to me. Perhaps you can also understand the special irony in the fact that I felt this Dionysian connection not with Jesus or Yahweh at all, but of all deities, …with Dionysus. More on that in a future post, though. Suffice it to say that at this point, my barrier to Christianity is not just that I am not getting the mystical access to Jesus that I want and need, but that I am actually getting it somewhere else.
Sailing to Byzantium 
The god that interests me the most at the moment is Shiva. There’s something about his mythos that draws me in. Other gods don’t really hold my attention. I don’t know that I would call it a mystical connection, but it is what it is.
Wow. Congratulations.
Not sure if that’s supposed to be sarcastic or not.
It’s absolutely not sarcasm. I’m the ADF member who posted on
https://byzantium.wordpress.com/2008/01/04/reconstructionism/
and….another post that I can’t find anymore.
I don’t think we chose how the divine manifests for us. I’ve had similar difficulties with Christianity. It’s been hard for me to connect with Jesus on an experiential level. The deity I’ve ended up connecting the most with is Saraswati who is the Hindu goddess of knowledge and wisdom.
However, I’ve come to realize how much archetypal spiritual truths cut across cultures and religions. In many ways, Saraswati personifies similar meaning as the Gnostic-Christian Sophia. You might be interested in the evidence that lends weight to Dionysus being one of the formative models for Jesus.
Your experience (or lack thereof) probably isn’t uncommon. I doubt most Christians have or expect to have an overwhelming emotional experience of Jesus. The Gnostics were the Christians that believed that religion without experience was no religion at all, but they were declared heretical and so we now have an overly formalized Christianity.
Pretty much early Christianity is lost because no one any longer knows what the experience of early Christians was like, but we can guess it might’ve been similar to the Hellenistic Mystery religions. I haven’t studied it much but from what I understand Dionysus worship had some historical similarities to Christianity. It started off as a folk religion and then later became more formalized as Orphism. It is Orphism that shows many similarities to Christianity.
Thank you for your comment, Benjamin. I am most definitely aware of the Jesus-Dionysus parallels, and plan on writing a post about that similarity and its possible ramifications for my particular spiritual experiences in the near future.
I agree with the unpredictability of mystical experience. Like I’ve said before, one of the most unfortunate things about Mormonism is that it makes promises on behalf of God about the availability of mystical experience, and as a result winds up lowering the bar so far that virtually any positive sensation that confirms Mormonism gets counted as genuine divine revelation.
As far as spiritual experience’s place in Christianity, I am sure that a lot of Christians would tell me that mystic experience of God is not a part of the Christian conversion process at all. And that’s fine and dandy, but it’s just not going to work for me. As I have been saying all along, I hunger for genuine spirituality, and the litmus test for me and religion is and always has been that it must be catalyzed by some kind of mystical experience. Is that just a vestige of my Mormon upbringing? Undoubtedly. But that doesn’t change the fact that it is central to my understanding of personal religion, and not something I am particularly interested in rooting out of my psyche.
Yeah, I was wondering if you were aware of the Dionysus-Jesus connection. It does seem that knowledge of these kinds of connections is increasing in society. So, how do you personally sense this connection?
I do find it strange how many Christians don’t seem to value mystical experience or even understand what it is. I’m only vaguely familiar with Mormonism, but I didn’t know they emphasized spiritual experience. I was raised in Unity church which does promote an openness to spiritual experience, but doesn’t see it as proof of one’s religiosity.
I’m like you in that I also “hunger for genuine spirituality. The problem for me is that most of my spiritual experiences can’t be described and limited to a single religion’s theology. I tend to see mysticism in terms of perennian philosophy. It seems to me that mystics have more in common with eachother than most people in their respective religions.
Even though my most intense spiritual experiences have been with particular Deities, I can identify with your situation in that they have not necessarily lent themselves to a particular theology, or more importantly for me, a particular set of spiritual practices.
But I think you are right when you say that mystics of every stripe have a lot more in common with each other than their less mystically inclined religious compatriots. I think that there’s a lot of evidence to back up the assertion that most of the world’s history of mystical experience has been really similar.
Wonderful article. I’m continually fascinated with the Apollonian-Dionysian dichotomy. Or any archetypes, really. And I think there’s much to be gained by comparing mythologies and religions, from the Greeks and Romans, Mayan and Hindi, and of course the Abrahamic faiths. I always enjoy reading other people’s perspectives on the topic.