Sinister Missionaries!

Someone posted the following to our neighborhood message board last night:

Missionaries Knocking at Door

Tonight at 8:54pm, I heard a knock at my door. When asked who was at the door a man answered, ‘We are missionaries.’ Who ever heard of missionaries coming to your door at 8:54pm after dark? After refusing to open the door, I immediately went upstairs and looked out of my window and saw two people with very short hair dressed in long pants and long sleeve shirts with backpacks on (I assume they were both men). Can anyone shed some light on this?

Fair enough, right? I know who they were, obviously, but this lady doesn’t. I know that their curfew is 9pm, and that, while knocking on doors at 8:54 is an impolite exercise of bad judgment, it happens sometimes (I did it myself a time or two, but usually when it was still light outside in July in Germany). The lady’s concern and question are reasonable–strangers are knocking on her door and she wants to figure out who they are and why.

But the first response on the message board was this:

[T]his is extremely suspicious. I think you were wise to do what you did. Solicitors are allowed by County law only to approach homes before sunset or 5 PM, whichever is earlier. Moreover, church groups who engage in door to door proselytizing typically make the rounds in the morning hours, and I have never known any group of this kind to approach homes this late in the evening. In addition, I would be extremely suspicious of anyone identifying themselves as a missionary going door to door in this area, as missionaries typically work in underprivileged areas and underdeveloped countries. I suggest you call the police to report this so they are aware and can investigate.

Sigh. I’ll admit, I had a laugh. And then I did my best to set the record straight, clear up peoples’ concerns, and ask them to please not pester the police about it. But I don’t think I did any good: sadly, my neighbors seem intent on being scared even when there’s a perfectly good explanation for why they shouldn’t be.

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The Lavender Dionysus Office

I had a dream a couple of nights ago, a complicated, long dream that was very dependent on this series of adjacent locations in the dream-landscape. Among these locations was a set of purple and lavender office buildings, the nondescript two story office-suite kind you find in the suburbs that is invariably three-quarters full of doctors, insurance salesmen, and after-school tutors, and is one-quarter full of empty space. But unlike the ones you find in real life, this one was purple, and although I remember no sign, I understood that somehow these offices belonged to the god Dionysus, or at the very least to some organization or corporation that represented him.

I do not remember clearly what I did while I was at this office, but I remember sitting in a reception area and possibly filling out some paperwork. I might have flipped through a coffee-table book in the waiting area. I interacted with a moderately friendly receptionist: businesslike but not unpleasant.

Somehow in the middle of this fairly mundane corporate bullshit, the presence of the god was unmistakable. Either his presence permeated the completely contradictory surroundings, or I have a major lacuna in my sense of the narrative: it is possible that something extremely significant happened, some direct contact with the god, and I remember the approaching sense of divinity and power leading up to the event and the power receding afterwards, but the event itself is like a lost period of time, something like what UFO abductees often report.

In the dream I think I knew what was going on, but now in the waking world, the details of what role Dionysus was playing, what benefit I got out of our meeting, and exactly what I was doing there is all kind of obscure and abstract. Something and nothing at the same time, and I’m not entirely sure how it related to the other elements of the dream landscape (a thick wilderness, a military installation that reminded me of Sand Hill at Fort Benning where I did basic training and infantry school, a police academy, a series of rural roads, a witches’ sabbat, the offices of a nameless law firm, and a cyborg super-soldier created by the Department of Transportation to defend roads under construction and he had this sweet gun that shot blue pulses of massively destructive kinetic energy), but at the conclusion of my business in the purple office building of Dionysus, I was told very clearly (by a representative or the receptionist maybe) that the office would henceforth be forever closed to me. I was never to return.

I’m not sure what this means. Am I no longer to worship Dionysus? Was his role in m life only as a gateway god, to lead me to more and fuller experiences with his Hellenic co-deities, but not to stay with me for the long run? Was it a message that formal worship of Dionysus is for some reason not appropriate for me? The dream was completely suffused with the trappings of formality: government, offices, law, military, law enforcement. And then I walked out of the office into the night and witnessed the witches’ sabbat I mentioned earlier. Is the message that I am to leave Dionysus alone now, or is it somehow specifically connected to the formality of the setting? As I have mentioned in a few previous posts, I have been a little worried for awhile that I have neglected Dionysus in my zeal to worship Aphrodite and the other gods and goddesses, and also because I can’t really figure out a way to worship him or even directly interact with him that makes sense to me. His presence in my life has been powerful, but it has never felt right to transform it into anything resembling the regular, formal worship of the other gods?

In myth, Dionysus was worshipped separately in Bacchic rites, out in the wilderness away from the demos and the religious/cultural/political structures that Greek religion otherwise revolved around. Is this dream somehow significant to that distinction? I’m just not sure. Shit, maybe it was just a weird dream.

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