28

The Cycles of Decadence

and the Heroic Cycle

In relation to the period preceding the Flood, the biblical myth mentions a race of “heroes of old, the men of renown” (Gen. 6:4), born of the union between the sons of heaven and the daughters of men. This union is an example of the miscegenation that caused the primordial spirituality to give way to the spirituality of the age of the Mother. The offspring of this union was the race of the Giants (Nephilim in Hebrew), whom the Book of Enoch refers to as “the people from the Far West.” The biblical myth relates that the earth became filled with violence and wickedness, thus drawing upon itself the catastrophe of the Flood.

The myth of a fantastic “androgynous” race of powerful beings that the gods themselves feared constitutes another example of nonhuman races; in order to neutralize these beings, the gods broke them into two halves, into “male” and “female.”^[1] The symbolism of the “inimical pair,” found in several traditions, sometimes refers to a similar division that destroys the power feared by the gods; this motif is susceptible to a historical and even a metaphysical interpretation. The primordial powerful and divine race of androgynous beings may be related with the period in which the Nephilim were “men of renown”; it is the race of the Golden Age. After this race, a new division occurred; the “One” generated the “Two,” the couple, or the dyad. The first of the two elements is the Woman (Atlantis), the second is Man. This Man was no longer pure spirit and he eventually rebelled against the lunar symbolism by either affirming himself or by pursuing violent conquests and by attempting to usurp certain spiritual powers.

This is the myth of the Titans. They are the Giants. This is the Bronze Age. In Plato’s Critias violence and injustice, yearning for power, and covetousness are the qualities ascribed to the degenerated inhabitants of Atlantis.^[2] In another Hellenic myth it is said that “men living in primordial times [to which Deucalion, who survived the Flood, belonged] were filled with arrogance and pride; they were guilty of many crimes; they broke oaths and were merciless.”

An essential feature of myth and symbol is that both are apt to convey multiple meanings, which must be separated in a clear-cut fashion and assigned methodically to different categories by means of adequate interpretations. This is also the case of the “inimical pair” and of the Titans.

On the basis of the duality Man-Woman (in the sense of a materialized virility and of a merely priestly spirituality), which is the premise of the new types of civilization derived by involution from the primordial civilization, it is possible to define the following types.

The first type of civilization is the Titanic one, in a negative sense, and refers to the spirit of a materialistic and violent race that no longer recognized the authority of the spiritual principle corresponding to the priestly symbol or to the spiritually feminine “brother” (e.g., Cain vs. Abel); this race affirmed itself and attempted to take possession, by surprise and through an inferior type of employment, of a body of knowledge that granted control over certain invisible powers inherent to things and people. Therefore, this represented an upheaval and a counterfeit of what could have been the privilege of the previous “glorious men,” namely, of the virile spirituality connected to the function of order and of domination “from above.” It was Prometheus who usurped the heavenly fire in favor of the human races, and yet he did not know how to carry it; thus the fire became his source of torment and damnation^[3] until he was freed by another hero, Heracles, who was worthier and also one reconciled with the Olympian principle (i.e., with Zeus) and its ally in the struggle against the Giants. The second race was “far worse than the other,” both naturally (ρυὴν) and mentally (νόημα). According to Hesiod, as early as the end of the first age, it refused to pay respect to the gods and thus opened itself up to the influence of telluric forces (according to Hesiod, at the end of its cycle it became the race of subterranean demons, the νποχθόνιοι); it eventually produced a mortal generation characterized by pertinacity, physical strength, and an uncontrolled pleasure in violence, war, and power (this corresponds to Hesiod’s Bronze Age, to the Persians’ Iron Age, and to the biblical giants, or Nephilim).^[4] According to yet another Hellenic tradition, Zeus is believed to have caused the Flood in order to extinguish the “fire” element that threatened to destroy the entire earth, as Phaëton, the son of the Sun, lost control of the quadriga that the frenzied horses had carried up into the sky. “Age of battle-axes, age of swords, age of wolves, until the world is ruined. Brothers will fight and kill each other”: this is the prophecy contained in the Edda.^[5] Men living in this age have hearts “as hard as iron.” But no matter how scary these men may appear, they will fall victim to the black death and disappear into the “moldering domain [εὐρωένια] of cold Hades.”^[6] While the biblical myth claims that the Flood put an end to this civilization, we may assume that the Atlantic cycle ended with a similar stock and that a similar civilization was eventually swept away by the oceanic catastrophe—and maybe because of the previously mentioned abuse of certain secret powers (Titanic black magic).

Generally speaking, according to the Northern tradition, the “Age of the Battle-Axes” opened the way to the unleashing of the elemental powers, that eventually swept away the divine race of the Aesir—in this context this race may be made to correspond with the race of the residual groups of the golden race and to the breaking down of the barriers of the “fortress at the center of the world,” which express figuratively the creative limits established by the primordial “polar” spirituality. The emergence of women and of a no-longer virile spirituality heralded the “twilight of the Aesir” and the end of the golden cycle.^[7] During this time, the dark strength that the Aesir themselves had nourished, after keeping it chained for a while—symbolized by the wolf Fenrir, or better, by two wolves—“grows tremendously.”^[8] This corresponds to the usurpation of the Titans, which was immediately followed by the revolt and the emergence of all the elemental powers, the Southern infernal fire, and the beings of the earth (hrinthursen) that used to be kept outside the walls of Asgard. The bond is broken. After the “Age of the Battle-Axe” (the Bronze Age) one of the two wolves “will swallow the sun. Then the other wolf will catch the Moon”:^[9] in other words, this is the end not only of the solar spirituality, but of the Demetrian, lunar spirituality as well. Odin, the king of the Aesir, falls, and Vidar himself, who succeeded in killing the wolf Fenrir, falls victim to its poison; in other words his own divine nature as an Aesir is corrupted by the lethal principle that is passed on to him by this wild creature. Fate or the twilight (rok) of the gods takes place with the collapse of the Bifrost bridge that connects heaven and earth;^[10] this represents the earth abandoned to itself, lacking all connections with the divine element, following the rebellion of the Titans. This is the “Dark Age,” or “Iron Age” that comes after the Bronze Age.

A more concrete reference is given by the concurrent witnesses of the oral and written traditions of several peoples that mention a frequent opposition between the representatives of the spiritual and the temporal (i.e., regal or warrior) powers, regardless of the special forms assumed by either one in adapting to different historical circumstances. This phenomenon was just another aspect of the process leading to the third age. The usurpation of the priestly caste was followed by the revolt of the warrior class and by its struggle against the priestly class for the achievement of supreme authority; this was the prelude to an even lower stage than that reached by a Demetrian and priestly society; this was the social equivalent of the Bronze Age and of the Titanic, Luciferian, or Promethean motif.

While the Titanic upheaval represented the degenerated (in a materialistic, violent, and almost individualistic sense) attempt to reinstate “virility,” it nevertheless corresponded to an analogous deviation from the sacred female law that characterized the “Amazonian” phenomenon. From a symbolic point of view the Amazons and the generic type of armed goddesses can be understood, following Bachofen, as an abnormally empowered gynaecocracy, or as an attempt to react and to reinstate the ancient authority of the “feminine” or lunar principle against the male revolt and usurpation; this attempt, though, was carried out on the same plane as the violent masculine affirmation and in so doing it lost that spiritual element that alone established the primacy and the dignity of the Demetrian principle. Whether or not Amazonism enjoyed a historical and social reality, it is found throughout myths with constant traits, thus rendering it susceptible of characterizing analogically a certain type of civilization.

Thus, it is possible to prescind from the real appearance of women warriors in history or prehistory and understand Amazonism as the symbol of the reaction of a “lunar” or priestly spirituality (the feminine dimension of the spirit) that was unable to oppose the material or even temporal power (the masculine dimension of the spirit, which no longer acknowledged its laws, as for instance in the myth of the Titans) in any way other than in a material and temporal fashion, that is, by adopting the way of being of its opposite (the virile figure and strength of the “Amazon”). Thus, it is possible to refer to what I previously said concerning the alteration of the normal relationship between royalty and priesthood. In the abovementioned generalization there is Amazonism wherever there are priests who do not yearn to be kings, but rather to dominate kings.

There is a very revealing legend according to which the Amazons, who attempted in vain to conquer the symbolical “White Island” (the leuke island, which has an equivalent in several traditions), did not flee at the sight of a Titan-like figure, but rather at the sight of a hero: Achilles. They were also fought by other heroes such as Theseus, who can be considered the founder of the virile state of Athens, and by Bellerophon. The Amazons, who had usurped the Hyperborean battle-axe, came to the rescue of Venus’s city, Troy, against the Achaeans; they were eventually exterminated by another hero, Heracles, the rescuer of Prometheus. Heracles grabbed from their queen the symbolic belt of Ares-Mars and the axe (λαβρύς) that was the symbol of the supreme power of the Lydian dynasty of the Heraclideans.^[11] The meaning of Amazonism versus “Olympian” heroism will be discussed further on.

A second type of civilization must also be considered. The pair always come first. There is, however, a crisis, and the feminine primacy is upheld through a new principle, the Aphrodistic principle. The mother is replaced by the hetaera, the son by the lover, and the solitary virgin by the divine couple that, as I have suggested, in various mythologies often characterizes a compromise between two opposite cults. But the woman in this context (unlike in the Olympian synthesis) is not Hera, who was subordinated to Zeus although always scheming behind his back; we do not even have, as in the Far Eastern synthesis, the yang principle that retains its active and heavenly character vis-à-vis the yin principle, which is its feminine and earthly complement.

Instead, the chthonic and infernal nature penetrates the virile principle and lowers it to a phallic level. The woman now dominates man as he becomes enslaved to the senses and a mere instrument of procreation. Vis-à-vis the Aphrodistic goddess, the divine male is subjected to the magic of the feminine principle and is reduced to the likes of an earthly demon or a god of the fecundating waters—in other words, to an insufficient and dark power. From this theme derive, analogically and according to different adaptations, types of civilization that may be called Aphrodistic. This could be yet another meaning of the theory of eros that Plato associated with the myth of the androgynous beings whose power was shattered when they became “two,” male and female. Sexual love arises between mortal beings from the deep-seated desire of the fallen male who realizes his inner insufficiency and who seeks, in the fulgurating ecstasis of orgasm, to reascend to the wholeness of the primordial “androgynous” state. In this sense, the erotic experience conceals a variation in the theme of the rebellion of the Titans with the only difference being that, due to its own nature, it takes place under the aegis of the feminine principle. It is easy to remark that a principle of ethical decadence and corruption must necessarily be connected with a civilization oriented in this sense, as it is apparent in the various festivals that up to relatively recent times were inspired by Aphroditism. If Mouru, the third creation of Ahura Mazda, which most likely corresponds to Atlantis, is seen as the Demetrian civilization, then the notion that the god of darkness set up various sins^[12] as some kind of countercreation may refer to the following period of Aphrodistic degeneration in that civilization that is parallel to the Titanic upheaval itself; this is true especially if we consider the frequent associations between Aphrodistic goddesses and violent and brutally warlike divine figures.

It is well known that Plato established a hierarchy of the forms of eros, rising from the sensual and the profane up to the peaks of the sacred^[13] and culminating in the eros through which “the mortal seeks to live forever and to become immortal.”^[14] In Dionysism, eros becomes “sacred frenzy,” mystic orgiasm: it is the highest possibility inherent in this direction and it is aimed at undoing the bonds of matter and at producing a transfiguration through frenzy, excess, and ecstasis.^[15] But if the symbol of Dionysus, who fights against the Amazons himself, reveals the highest ideal of this spiritual world, nevertheless it remains something inferior compared to what the third possibility of the new era will be: the heroic reintegration that alone is really detached from both the feminine and the telluric principle.^[16] In fact, Dionysus was also represented as a demon of the infernal regions (“Hades is the same as Dionysus” said Heraclitus^[17]), and was often associated with the principle of the waters (Poseidon) or with the underground fire (Hephaestus). Often he is found together with feminine figures of mothers, virgins, or goddesses of nature turned into lovers: Demeter and Core, Ariadne and Aridela, Semelis and Libera. The masculinity of the Corybantes, who often dressed as women, like the priests in the Phrygian cult of the Mother, was very ambiguous. The ecstatic and pantheistic orientation, associated with the sexual element, predominates in the Mystery or in the “sacred orgy”; frenzied contacts with the occult forces of the earth and maenadic and pandemic liberations occur in a domain that is simultaneously that of unrestrained sex, night, and death. If in Rome the Bacchanalia were originally celebrated by women and if in the Dionysian Mysteries women could play the role of priestesses and initiators; and if historically all the memories of Dionysian epidemics are essentially to be attributed to the feminine element—in all this we have a clear indication of the survival during this cycle too, of the theme of the woman’s preeminence, not only in the coarsely Aphrodistic stage (in which she dominates through the bond that eros in its carnal form imposes upon phallic man), but also as the woman inducing an ecstasis that may also signify dissolution, destruction of the form, and therefore, attainment of the spirit, but only on condition of the renunciation of its possession in a virile form.

The third and last type of civilization to be considered is the civilization of the heroes. Hesiod mentions that following the Bronze Age and prior to the Iron Age, Zeus created a better lineage out of those races whose destiny was “to descend ingloriously to Hades.” Hesiod called this lineage the race of “heroes” to whom it is given the possibility of attaining immortality and partaking, despite all, in a state similar to that of the primordial age.^[18] In this type of civilization we find evidence of the attempt to restore the tradition of the origins on the basis of the warrior principle and of membership in the warrior caste. Indeed not all the “heroes” become immortal by escaping Hades; this is the fate of only some of them. And if we examine the body of Hellenic myths and the myths of other traditions, upon recognizing the affinity—hidden behind various symbols—of the deeds of the Titans with those of the heroes, we will realize that the hero and the Titans, after all, belong to the same stock; they are the daring ones who undertook the same transcendent adventure, which can either fail or succeed. The heroes who become immortal are those whose adventure succeeds; in other words, they correspond to those who are really capable of overcoming, thanks to an inner impulse toward transcendence, the deviation proper to the Titanic attempt to restore the primordial spiritual virility and the supremacy over the woman, that is, over the lunar spirit, both Aphrodistic and Amazonian; conversely, the other heroes, those who are not capable of realizing such a possibility conferred upon them by the Olympian principle, or Zeus—the same possibility to which Jesus referred when he said (Matt. 11:2): “The kingdom of heaven has been subject to violence and the violent are taking it by storm”^[19]—descend to the same level as the race of the Titans and of the Giants, who were cursed with various punishments and afflictions as a result of their boldness and their corruption (of which they were guilty) in the “ways of the flesh on earth.” As far as these relationships between the way of the Titans and that of the heroes is concerned, there is an interesting myth according to which once Prometheus was freed, he taught Heracles the way to reach the Garden of the Hesperides, where he would find the fruit that renders one immortal. Such a fruit, once obtained by Heracles, is taken back by Athena, who represents in this context the Olympian intellect, and put back “so that it may not be partaken of by anybody”;^[20] this probably means that the attainment of that fruit should be reserved for the stock to which it belongs and that it should not be desecrated by putting it at the disposal of the human race, as Prometheus intended to do.

Even in the heroic cycle we sometimes find the theme of the dyad, that is, of the pair, and of the Woman, but with a different meaning from that of the cases I discussed in the first part concerning the saga of the Rex Nemorensis, the “women” who appoint divine kings, the “women” of the chivalrous cycle, and so on. Concerning this different aspect, in which the same symbolism will appear to function differently, here it will suffice to say that the woman who embodies a vivifying principle (such as Eve, the “Living Woman,” Hebe, and what derives from the relation of the divine women with the Tree of Life, etc.); or a principle of transcendent or enlightening wisdom (such as Athena, born from the mind of the Olympian Zeus, Heracles’ guide; or the virgin Sophia, or the Lady Intelligence of the medieval “Love’s Lieges,” etc.); or a power (such as the Hindu śaktis, the goddess of the Morrigu’s battles who offers her love to solar heroes of the Celtic Ulster Cycle, etc.)—is the object of conquest, and does not take from the hero his virile character, but allows him to integrate it on a higher plane. A relevant motif in the cycles of the heroic type is that of the opposition to any gynaecocratic claim and to any Amazonian attempt to usurp power. This motif, together with the previous one, which is equally essential for a definition of the notion of “hero” and refers to an alliance with the Olympian principle and a struggle against the Titanic principle, had a very clear expression in the Hellenic cycle, especially in the figure of the Doric Heracles.

We have already seen that Heracles, like Theseus, Bellerophon, and Achilles, fights against the Amazons and eventually exterminates them. Though the Lydian Heracles falls for Omphale, the Doric Heracles proves to be a true µισόγυνος an enemy of women. Since his birth, Hera, the earth goddess, is hostile to him; while still in his cradle he choked two snakes she had sent to kill him. Heracles has constantly to battle Hera without winning, but succeeds instead in wounding her and in taking her only daughter Hebe, the “perennial youth.” If we consider other figures of this cycle in both East and West, we will always find these fundamental themes. Thus Apollo, whose birth had been prevented many times by Hera (it is significant that she was helped in this by Ares, the violent god of war), who had sent the serpent Python to kill him, eventually has to fight against Tatius, Hera’s son, who can count on his mother’s protection. In the ensuing struggle she is wounded by the Hyperborean hero, just like in the epic tale Aphrodite is wounded by Ajax. As uncertain as the final outcome may be of the saga of Gilgamesh, the Chaldean hero who set out to find the plant of immortality, the bottom line is that his story is the account of the struggle he waged against the goddess Ishtar, an Aphrodistic type of the Mother of Life. He turned her love down, reminding her of the fate of her former lovers; he finally slew the demonic animal that the goddess unleashed against him. In one of his actions that is considered “heroic and virile,” Indra, who is the heavenly prototype of the hero, strikes the Amazonian and heavenly woman Uṣas with his thunderbolt while being at the same time the Lord of Śakti, whose name also means “power.” And if Parsifal’s departure caused his mother, who opposed his heroic vocation as a “heavenly knight,”^[21] to die of grief; and if the Persian hero Rostam, according to the Shanami, must thwart the plot of the dragon that approached him in the disguise of a seductive woman before freeing a blind king who, thanks to Rostam, gains his sight back and is revealed to be the one who attempted to ascend to heaven with the help of “eagles”—in all this we find the same theme over and over again.

Generally speaking, the seductive snares of a woman who tries to distract from a symbolic feat a hero who is conceived of as a slayer of Titans, monstrous beings, or rebellious warriors, or as a conqueror abiding by a higher law, is such a recurrent and popular theme as not to require individual examples. The element in these legends and sagas that must be firmly upheld, however, is that the woman’s snares can be reduced to the plane of the flesh in the lowest sense of the word. If it is true that woman brings death and that man overcomes her through the spirit by passing from the phallic to the spiritual plane of virility, it must be added that the plot devised by the woman, or by the goddess, expresses in esoteric terms the snare represented by a form of spirituality that emasculates and tends to paralyze or to thwart any impulse toward the supernatural.

Lordship over the origins; not to be the original force but to possess it; the quality of the αὐτοϕυής [to be a light unto oneself] and of the αὐτοτέλεστος [to have oneself as an end], which in Hellas was often associated with the heroic ideal—these qualities have sometimes been represented through the symbolism of parricide or of incest; parricide in the sense of an emancipation, and of becoming one’s own guiding principle; incest in an analogous sense, conveying the idea of possessing the prime generating matter.

Thus, as a reflection of the same spirit in the world of the gods, we find, for instance, the type of Zeus who killed his own father and possessed his mother Rhea, when in order to run away from him, she took the form of a snake. Indra himself, just like Apollo, who had killed the snake Python, slew the primordial serpent Ahi; he too was believed to have killed his heavenly father Dyaus. Even in the symbolism of the Hermetic Ars Regia we find the theme of the “philosophical incest.”^[22]

With regard to the two accounts of the solar symbolism previously employed to point out the differentiation of traditions, we may generally assume that the heroic myth is related to the sun, which is associated with a principle of change, not with change as such—as in the destiny of caducity and perennial redissolution into Mother Earth typical of the year-god—but in a way that tends to become free from this principle in order to become transfigured and reintegrated into an Olympian immutability and into a Uranian immortal nature.

The heroic civilizations. that arose prior to the Iron Age (an age deprived of every real spiritual principle) and around the time of the Bronze Age, and that overcame both the Demetrian-Aphrodistic spirituality and the Titanic hubris thus bringing about the end of the Amazonian upheavals, represent partial resurrections of the Northern Light as well as instances of restoration of the golden Arctic cycle. It is very significant that among the feats that bestowed Olympian immortality upon Heracles we find the adventure of the Garden of the Hesperides. According to some traditions, in order to reach that garden Heracles went through the symbolic northern center “which neither ship nor marching feet may find,”^[23] namely, the land of the Hyperboreans. Then Heracles, the “handsome victor” (χαλλἱνικος), was believed to have carried away from this land the green olive leaf with which victors are crowned.^[24]

In summary, I have reached a morphological determination of six basic types of civilization and tradition that came after the primordial one (the Golden Age). These are: Demetrism, representing the pure Southern Light (the Silver Age, Atlantic cycle, societies ruled by a priestly caste); Aphroditism as a degenerated version of Demetrism; and finally Amazonism, which was a deviated attempt at lunar restoration. On the other hand, we find Titanism (in a different, almost Luciferian context), which was a degeneration of the Northern Light (the Bronze Age, age of warriors and giants); Dionysism, as a deviated and emasculated masculine spirituality generating passive and promiscuous forms of ecstasis;^[25] and finally, Heroism, as the restoration of the Olympian-solar spirituality and the overcoming of both the Mother and Titan figures. These are the fundamental structures to which, generally speaking, we can analytically reduce any mixed form of civilization arising in historical times during the cycle of the Dark Age or Age of Iron.

Footnotes

1. Plato. Symposium, 189c2–d6. Concerning the theme of the “pair,” we may recall that according to Plato the primordial woman Kleito generated three couples in the mythical Atlantis; this corresponds to the Mexican tradition describing the cycle of the Waters, Atonatiu, in which the serpent woman Ciuatcoatl generated a large number of twins. The Mexican cycle ended with a deluge that corresponds in the smallest details (survival of the seeds of all living things, the sending forth of a vulture that does not return and of a hummingbird that returns with a green branch in its beak) to the biblical account.

2. “To the perceptive eye the depth of their degeneration was clear enough, but to those whose judgment of true happiness is defective, they seemed, in their pursuit of unbridled ambition and power, to be at the height of their fame and fortune.” Plato, Critias.

3. The punishment met by Prometheus contains symbolic elements that reveal its esoteric meaning: an “eagle” ate his liver. The eagle or the sparrow hawk, birds of prey sacred to Zeus and to Apollo (in Egypt to Horus, among the Nordic people to Odin-Wotan, in India to Agni and Indra), were among the symbols of the regal “glory,” in other words, of the divine fire that Prometheus stole. The liver was considered the seat of a feisty spirit and of the “irascible soul.” The shift of the divine force onto the plane of merely human and impure qualities that are not adequate to it was what consumed Prometheus and was his punishment as well. I have already mentioned the double aspect in the symbolism of the Titan Atlas in which the idea of a “polar” function and of a punishment are seen as interchangeable.

4. Hesiod,. Works and Days, 129–42; 143–55.

5. Gylfaginning, 5.

6. Hesiod, Works and Days, 154.

7. Gylfaginning, 5 I.

8. Ibid., 34. From the mention that the two wolves were generated by a giantess (Gylfaginning, 12) we can see the inner connection between the various “stages of decadence.”

9. Concerning the “wolf” and the “Age of the Wolf,” here portrayed as synonymous with the Bronze Age and with the “Dark Age,” we must keep in mind that this symbolism also has an opposite meaning: the wolf was associated with Apollo and with the light (ly- kos, lyke), not only among the Hellenes, but also among the Celts. The positive meaning of the wolf appears in the Roman cycle, in which the wolf and the eagle appeared as the symbols of the “eternal city.” In the exegesis of Emperor Julian (Hymn to King Helios, 154b) the wolf was associated with the solar principle in its regal aspect. The double meaning of the symbol of the wolf is but an example of the degeneration of an older cult, the symbols of which take on a negative meaning in the following age. The wolf—in the Nordic tradition—that was related to the primordial, warrior element takes on a negative meaning when this element loses control and becomes unleashed.

10. This bridge, which recalls the “pontifical” symbol mentioned in chapter 1, collapses when Muspell’s sons “go and ride it”; the lord of Muspell is Surtr, who comes from the south to battle the Aesir. Thus, we have yet another mention of a southern location from which destructive forces will descend upon the world.

11. In the Germanic sagas the same theme appeared in the conflict between the original figure of Brunhild, queen of the island, and Siegfried, who defeated her.

12. Such as unbelief, pride, sodomy, burial of the dead, witchcraft, and cremation. Vendidad, 1.12.

13. Plato, Symposium, 14–15; 26–29; Phaedrus, 244–45; 251–57b.

14. Symposium, 26.

15. For an in-depth analysis of this positive possibility of human sexuality, see my Eros and the Mysteries of Love.

16. Bachofen identified three stages in the cult of Dionysus that represent this god respectively as a chthonic being, a lunar nature, and a luminous god associated with Apollo, although with an Apollo conceived as the sun subject to change and passions. In this latter aspect Dionysus may fall into the group of heroes who vanquished the Amazons. More than in the Thracian-Hellenic myth, however, the highest possibility of the Dionysian principle was upheld in the Indo-Aryan myth of the soma, a heavenly and lunar principle that induces a divine intoxication (mada) and that is related with the regal animal, the eagle, and with a struggle against female demons.

17. Heraclitus, frag. B15 Diehl.

18. Hesiod, Works and Days, 156–73.

19. During his quest for the gift of everlasting life, the Chaldean hero Gilgamesh uses violence and threatens to knock down the door of the garden filled with “divine trees.” A feminine figure, Sabitu, had closed this door to him.

20. Apollodorus, Bibl., 2.122.

21. In the saga of the Grail, the sacred “heroic” type corresponds to the one who can sit in the empty place in the assembly of the knights without being struck by lightning.

22. See J. Evola, The Hermetic Tradition, chap. 19.

23. Pindar, The Pythian Odes, 10.2.

24. Pindar, The Olympian Odes, 3.

25. It is important to distinguish the valid elements that Dionysism may contain in the context of the so-called Way of the Left Hand (in relation to a special initiatory use of sex), from the meaning that Dionysism has in the context of a morphology of civilizations.