I have been thinking about the kylix. This is a type of shallow vase that was used for drinking wine in ancient Greece. What is interesting about the kylix is that some of them had eyes painted on their undersides, so that when the drinker tipped back the vessel, which was wide enough to cover at least a part of his face, he would give the impression that he was wearing a mask.
The god Dionysus was a god of manifestation and transgression, in that the boundaries between himself (insofar as a god can be said to have a self) and his followers was easily blurred. In other words, to act Dionysian is to embody Dionysus. There are lots of ways to act Dionysian, most notably here drinking, participating in theater, or participating in any kind of mob mentality. So, one way to embody Dionysus is to enter some kind of altered state, or take on a new personality. However, this also implies that Dionysus himself is a kind of amalgamation of altered states, with no fixed central personality from which these manifestations radiate, at least none that humans can see.
This last point becomes less remarkable, though, once we realize that this kind of multiplicity is a characteristic of every god. In fact, this could be said to be the defining quality of godhood. People can only exist in one place, and are tied to one body and one fate, but gods can manifest in many places and with many different ‘personalities’, each as fleshed out as the other. There are local iterations of gods that may have nothing to do with each other, not to mention wider cults. For example, there is the Artemis who presides over giving birth, there is an Artemis who is present on the battlefield, and there is a local Artemis who is venerated for her role in founding an isolated rural town, but these are not necessarily the same Artemis. So, gods are characterized by the fact that they have multiple context-dependent iterations which are continually reified by the communities that worship them. Cult legitimates godhood, as we see in the case of deified humans (hero cults), and one deity can have multiple cults and therefore multiple finely articulated facets.
To return to Dionysus, he is not remarkable because he expresses the multiplicity that I describe above, but because he allows his followers to participate in multiplicity and transformation. Under the aegis of Dionysus, humans, like gods, can take on any number of different faces. However, there are thresholds that mark the passage into a Dionysian state – the theater was heavily ritualized, as was the drinking ceremony. The relationship between daily life and the Dionysian was not at all seamless, and often the intrusion of Dionysus into the quotidian was depicted as incredibly destructive. To my mind, the tension here is that the embodiment of Dionysus offers humans a moment of godhood (in a very limited way), but remains transgressive and therefore dangerous.
This is interesting to me because I think that the internet offers this multiplicity of personality but makes it mundane. In this sense, being on the internet, alongside drinking and acting in a play, is an embodiment of the god Dionysus, or would be seen as such by an ancient worshiper of that god. However, it differs from its ancient analogues because it is in no way marked. The threshold between the ‘real me’ and the various people on the internet that I am does not exist, because I just pick up my phone when I’m bored and, by nature of being on my phone, slip into one of those personalities. The self as constructed by the internet is godlike – its various components are divided from each other and develop, through the feedback of various separate internet communities, without interacting with each other – but it is also mundane, because the internet permeates and becomes our lives.
Of course, I don’t believe that the personality of any given individual is all that coherent. I’m different depending on whom I’m talking to. But all of these different real life personas are united by that stubborn, abject thing which is my body. The collection of internet personalities has another thing in common with the gods – it’s not tied to any single image. Zeus can appear as a shower of gold or a swan or whatever. This is something that no person, in real life, can do, but it’s almost ridiculous at this point to point out that I can represent myself as whatever I want on the internet.
Which brings me, finally, to my point, which is the irreducible problem of the real body, which persists in existing, tied to one location, and which cannot map onto the internet at all. Another component to the Dionysus figure is that there are lots of different myths about him (and his followers, who are of course expressions of him) being physically torn apart. What’s interesting about the internet is that it necessitates a sort of mental rending, a fragmentation of the personality on one level and a division between the personality and the body on the other, in short, a total alienation of various parts of the psyche from itself. This point has been made by others, I know, but I really do want to connect it to the Dionysus figure, mostly because I’m just fascinated by the similarities between the worshiper of the god, whichever form he may take, and anyone who uses more than one form of social media. I don’t really have much to say beyond this, except that, after this moment of severe self-alienation, those touched by the god in myth would often achieve a kind of perverse wisdom. Most people frame the kind of self that the internet creates as bad, but I don’t think we can walk away from it, so I would ask – what wisdom does this destructive and transformative multiplicity give us? How does it create an image of man (or ego) that is different from what we are used to? Can this be good at all, or are we doomed?