Dionysus, Apollo, and Asklepios

Abstract

ABSTRACTIt is one form of experience to study Greek myths and Greek gods through books, articles, journals, and film; it is another to be visited by any of them and, in this case, the god Dionysus, through disease. The article focuses less on sources of the god and more on the experience of his presence in illness and in surgeries that respond to his presence. During the author’s illness and slow recovery in April 2017 and continuing into the present day, he realized what the early Greeks had written about Dionysus as one who intrudes into one’s life, dismembers one’s normal ways of being, and then offers re-membrance once he is acknowledged and responded to. While Dionysus both dismembers and heals, so too the god Apollo and his son Asklepios are both healers and purifiers. Jung’s own thoughts on Dionysus and Apollo are presented here; for him these two gods serve as polarities and as complements to the psyche’s full range of experiences surrounding wounding, infection, affliction, and healing. The author believes there is a cost to the visitation by these gods that may alter one’s life and identity permanently. Such is the power of divinities that the Greeks have given us as a legacy of their own sense of the soul in sickness and in health.