Mystery
Certainty - Uncertainty
Solid - Liquid
Known - Unknown
Actuality - Potentiality
Closed - Open
Rest - Motion
Planned - Random
Control - Chaos
Simple - Complex
The weakness in radical critiques of sex and society is that they fail to recognize that sex needs ritual binding to control its daemonism and secondly that society’s repressions increase sexual pleasure.
There is nothing less erotic than a nudist colony. Desire is intensified by ritual limitations. Hence the mask, harness, and chains of sadomasochism.
[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.36
Related posts:
Femme Fatale
Sky - Earth
Father - Mother
Culture - Nature
Daemonic archetypes of woman, filling world mythology, represent the uncontrollable nearness of nature. Their tradition passes nearly unbroken from prehistoric idols through literature and art to modern movies.
The primary image is the femme fatale, the woman fatal to man. The more nature is beaten back in the west, the more the femme fatale reappears, as a return of the repressed. She is the spectre of the west’s bad conscience about nature. She is the moral ambiguity of nature, a malevolent moon that keeps breaking through our fog of hopeful sentiment.
The femme fatale is one of the most mesmerizing of sexual personae. She is not a fiction but an extrapolation of biologic realities in women that remain constant.
[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.13
I have been speaking of assaults of male on female. But some of The Faerie Queene’s boldest sexual aggressors are the licentious femmes fatales [...]
Their greatest power is in womblike closed spaces, in bedchambers, groves, and caves like the leafy grotto of Homer’s Calypso, where the male is captured, seduced, and infantilized. Spenser’s great word for such places is “bower,” both garden and burrow. Embowerment is one of The Faerie Queene’s primary processes, a psychological convolution of entrancement, turning the linearity of quest into the uroboros of solipsism.
Spenser’s femmes fatales tempt their male victims and paramours away from the pursuit of chivalric honor into “lewd sloth”—languid indolence and passivity [...] The rule of The Faerie Queene is: keep moving and stay out of the shade. The penalty is embowerment, sterile self-thwarting, a limbo of lush pleasures but stultifying passivity.
[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.187-9
Related posts:
Daemonic archetypes of woman, filling world mythology, represent the uncontrollable nearness of nature. Their tradition passes nearly unbroken from prehistoric idols through literature and art to modern movies.
The primary image is the femme fatale, the woman fatal to man. The more nature is beaten back in the west, the more the femme fatale reappears, as a return of the repressed. She is the spectre of the west’s bad conscience about nature. She is the moral ambiguity of nature, a malevolent moon that keeps breaking through our fog of hopeful sentiment.
The femme fatale is one of the most mesmerizing of sexual personae. She is not a fiction but an extrapolation of biologic realities in women that remain constant.
[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.13
I have been speaking of assaults of male on female. But some of The Faerie Queene’s boldest sexual aggressors are the licentious femmes fatales [...]
Their greatest power is in womblike closed spaces, in bedchambers, groves, and caves like the leafy grotto of Homer’s Calypso, where the male is captured, seduced, and infantilized. Spenser’s great word for such places is “bower,” both garden and burrow. Embowerment is one of The Faerie Queene’s primary processes, a psychological convolution of entrancement, turning the linearity of quest into the uroboros of solipsism.
Spenser’s femmes fatales tempt their male victims and paramours away from the pursuit of chivalric honor into “lewd sloth”—languid indolence and passivity [...] The rule of The Faerie Queene is: keep moving and stay out of the shade. The penalty is embowerment, sterile self-thwarting, a limbo of lush pleasures but stultifying passivity.
[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.187-9
Related posts:
Sky-cult / Earth-cult
Sky - Earth
Father - Mother
Culture - Nature
Apollo - Cybele
Mono - Poly
Light - Dark
Tragedy’s inhospitality to woman springs from nature’s inhospitality to man. The identification of woman with nature was universal in prehistory. In hunting or agrarian societies dependent upon nature, femaleness was honored as an immanent principle of fertility.
As culture progressed, crafts and commerce supplied a concentration of resources freeing men from the caprices of weather or the handicap of geography. With nature at one remove, femaleness receded in importance.
Both the Apollonian and Judeo-Christian traditions are transcendental. That is, they seek to surmount or transcend nature. Despite Greek culture’s contrary Dionysian element, which I will discuss, high classicism was an Apollonian achievement. Judaism, Christianity’s parent sect, is the most powerful of protests against nature. The Old Testament asserts that a father god made nature and that differentiation into objects and gender was after the fact of his maleness.
Judeo-Christianity, like Greek worship of the Olympian gods, is a sky-cult. It is an advanced stage in the history of religion, which everywhere began as earth-cult, veneration of fruitful nature.
The evolution from earth-cult to sky-cult shifts woman into the nether realm. Her mysterious procreative powers and the resemblance of her rounded breasts, belly, and hips to earth’s contours put her at the center of early symbolism. She was the model for the Great Mother figures who crowded the birth of religion worldwide.
[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.8-9
Men, bonding together, invented culture as a defense against female nature.
Sky-cult was the most sophisticated step in this process, for its switch of the creative locus from earth to sky is a shift from belly-magic to head-magic. And from this defensive head-magic has come the spectacular glory of male civilization, which has lifted woman with it. The very language and logic modern woman uses to assail patriarchal culture were the invention of men.
[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.9
The male has to will his sexual authority before the woman who is a shadow of his mother and of all women. Failure and humiliation constantly wait in the wings. No woman has to prove herself a woman in the grim way a man has to prove himself a man.
Man’s metaphors of concentration and projection are echoes of both body and mind. Without them, he would be helpless before woman’s power. Without them, woman would long ago have absorbed all of creation into herself. There would be no culture, no system, no pyramiding of one hierarchy upon another.
Earth-cult must lose to sky-cult, if mind is ever to break free from matter.
[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.16, 19-21
Women have borne the symbolic burden of man’s imperfections, his grounding in nature. Menstrual blood is the stain, the birthmark of original sin, the filth that transcendental religion must wash from man.
The Bible has come under fire for making woman the fall guy in man’s cosmic drama. But in casting a male conspirator, the serpent, as God’s enemy, Genesis hedges and does not take its misogyny far enough.
The Bible defensively swerves from God’s true opponent, chthonian nature. The serpent is not outside Eve but in her. She is the garden and the serpent. Anthony Storr says of witches, “At a very primitive level, all mothers are phallic.” The Devil is a woman. Modern emancipation movements, discarding stereotypes impeding woman’s social advance, refuse to acknowledge procreation’s daemonism.
Nature is serpentine, a bed of tangled vines, creepers and crawlers, probing dumb fingers of fetid organic life which Wordsworth taught us to call pretty.
I contend that the premenstrual woman incited to snappishness or rage is hearing signals from the reptilian brain. In her, man’s latent perversity is manifest. All hell breaks loose, the hell of chthonian nature that modern humanism denies and represses. In every premenstrual woman struggling to govern her temper, sky-cult wars again with earth-cult.
[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.11-12
Happy are those periods when marriage and religion are strong. System and order shelter us against sex and nature. Unfortunately, we live in a time when the chaos of sex has broken into the open.
Paganism recognized, honored, and feared nature’s daemonism, and it limited sexual expression by ritual formulae. Christianity was a development of Dionysian mystery religion which paradoxically tried to suppress nature in favor of a transcendental other world. The sole contact with nature that Christianity permitted its followers was sex sanctified by marriage. Chthonian nature, embodied in great goddess figures, was Christianity’s most formidable opponent.
Christianity works best when revered institutions like monasticism or universal marriage channel sexual energy in positive directions. Western civilization has profited enormously from the sublimation Christianity forced on sex. Christianity works least when sex is constantly stimulated from other directions, as it is now.
No transcendental religion can compete with the spectacular pagan nearness and concreteness of the carnal-red media. Our eyes and ears are drowned in a sensual torrent.
Male aggression and lust are the energizing factors in culture. They are men’s tools of survival in the pagan vastness of female nature.
[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.25-26
In psychology, philosophy, and art, classical Greek imagination sought, in Eduard Fraenkel’s words, “λóγος, ratio… the intelligible, determinate, mensurable, as opposed to the fantastic, vague, and shapeless.”
The Apollonian, I said, is the line drawn against nature. For Harrison, the Olympian gods are patriarchal betrayers of earth-cult and mother nature. The chthonian is her test of authenticity and spiritual value. But I say there is neither person, thought, thing, nor art in the brutal chthonian. It was, ironically, the west’s Apollonian line that produced the matchless Jane Harrison.
[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.73
In addition to his present preference, the Bantu has a list of priorities, in his conception of a higher standard of living, which contains many non-economic goals.
A fairly typical list of such priorities might run thus: food, sex dalliance, joking with one’s friends, a bicycle, music and dancing, a radio, leisure to go fishing. Any list such as this, with its high priority for non-economic and basically leisure activities, does not provide the constantly expanding material demands that are the motivating force in the West’s economic expansion.
Nor is the African’s strongly socialized personality, which shares all its successes and wants with others and constantly yearns for the social approval obtained by sharing income with kinfolk and friends, capable of supporting any economy of private selfishness and individual capital accumulation that became the basis for the industrial expansion of the West.
[…] Western methods might work if native peoples could acquire some of the more basic attitudes that have been the foundation of Western progress.
For example, the victory of the West in World War II was attributed to our capacity for rationalization and for scientific method. These in turn rest on the most basic features of the Western outlook and traditions, on the way in which our cognitive system categorizes the world, and the value system we apply to this structure of categories.
But our cognitive system is derived from our past heritage, such as our Hebrew ethical system, the Christian heritage (which strangely enough made us accept the reality and the value of the temporal world at the same time that it placed our final goal, achievable through behavior in the world of the flesh, in the eternal world of the spirit), and the lessons of Greek rationalism with its insistence on dealing with the world in a quite artificial system of two-valued logic based on the principle of identity and the law of contradiction.
Non-Western peoples who do not find in their own system of cognition any acceptance of the rules of identity or of contradiction do not see reality in terms of two-valued logic, and must make an almost impossible effort to adopt the West’s natural tendency to rationalize problems.
On this basis, they find it difficult either to rationalize their own emotional positions and thus to control or direct them, or to rationalize (which is to isolate and analyze) their problems and thus to seek solutions for them.
Africans, for example, unless they have been thoroughly Westernized, do not make the sharp distinctions we do between the living and the dead, between animate and non-animate objects, between deity and man, and many other distinctions which our long submission to Greek logic have made almost inevitable to us.
[Carroll Quigley]
Tragedy and Hope, ‘The New Era,’ p.752
Related posts:
Tragedy’s inhospitality to woman springs from nature’s inhospitality to man. The identification of woman with nature was universal in prehistory. In hunting or agrarian societies dependent upon nature, femaleness was honored as an immanent principle of fertility.
As culture progressed, crafts and commerce supplied a concentration of resources freeing men from the caprices of weather or the handicap of geography. With nature at one remove, femaleness receded in importance.
Both the Apollonian and Judeo-Christian traditions are transcendental. That is, they seek to surmount or transcend nature. Despite Greek culture’s contrary Dionysian element, which I will discuss, high classicism was an Apollonian achievement. Judaism, Christianity’s parent sect, is the most powerful of protests against nature. The Old Testament asserts that a father god made nature and that differentiation into objects and gender was after the fact of his maleness.
Judeo-Christianity, like Greek worship of the Olympian gods, is a sky-cult. It is an advanced stage in the history of religion, which everywhere began as earth-cult, veneration of fruitful nature.
The evolution from earth-cult to sky-cult shifts woman into the nether realm. Her mysterious procreative powers and the resemblance of her rounded breasts, belly, and hips to earth’s contours put her at the center of early symbolism. She was the model for the Great Mother figures who crowded the birth of religion worldwide.
[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.8-9
Men, bonding together, invented culture as a defense against female nature.
Sky-cult was the most sophisticated step in this process, for its switch of the creative locus from earth to sky is a shift from belly-magic to head-magic. And from this defensive head-magic has come the spectacular glory of male civilization, which has lifted woman with it. The very language and logic modern woman uses to assail patriarchal culture were the invention of men.
[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.9
The male has to will his sexual authority before the woman who is a shadow of his mother and of all women. Failure and humiliation constantly wait in the wings. No woman has to prove herself a woman in the grim way a man has to prove himself a man.
Man’s metaphors of concentration and projection are echoes of both body and mind. Without them, he would be helpless before woman’s power. Without them, woman would long ago have absorbed all of creation into herself. There would be no culture, no system, no pyramiding of one hierarchy upon another.
Earth-cult must lose to sky-cult, if mind is ever to break free from matter.
[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.16, 19-21
Women have borne the symbolic burden of man’s imperfections, his grounding in nature. Menstrual blood is the stain, the birthmark of original sin, the filth that transcendental religion must wash from man.
The Bible has come under fire for making woman the fall guy in man’s cosmic drama. But in casting a male conspirator, the serpent, as God’s enemy, Genesis hedges and does not take its misogyny far enough.
The Bible defensively swerves from God’s true opponent, chthonian nature. The serpent is not outside Eve but in her. She is the garden and the serpent. Anthony Storr says of witches, “At a very primitive level, all mothers are phallic.” The Devil is a woman. Modern emancipation movements, discarding stereotypes impeding woman’s social advance, refuse to acknowledge procreation’s daemonism.
Nature is serpentine, a bed of tangled vines, creepers and crawlers, probing dumb fingers of fetid organic life which Wordsworth taught us to call pretty.
I contend that the premenstrual woman incited to snappishness or rage is hearing signals from the reptilian brain. In her, man’s latent perversity is manifest. All hell breaks loose, the hell of chthonian nature that modern humanism denies and represses. In every premenstrual woman struggling to govern her temper, sky-cult wars again with earth-cult.
[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.11-12
Happy are those periods when marriage and religion are strong. System and order shelter us against sex and nature. Unfortunately, we live in a time when the chaos of sex has broken into the open.
Paganism recognized, honored, and feared nature’s daemonism, and it limited sexual expression by ritual formulae. Christianity was a development of Dionysian mystery religion which paradoxically tried to suppress nature in favor of a transcendental other world. The sole contact with nature that Christianity permitted its followers was sex sanctified by marriage. Chthonian nature, embodied in great goddess figures, was Christianity’s most formidable opponent.
Christianity works best when revered institutions like monasticism or universal marriage channel sexual energy in positive directions. Western civilization has profited enormously from the sublimation Christianity forced on sex. Christianity works least when sex is constantly stimulated from other directions, as it is now.
No transcendental religion can compete with the spectacular pagan nearness and concreteness of the carnal-red media. Our eyes and ears are drowned in a sensual torrent.
Male aggression and lust are the energizing factors in culture. They are men’s tools of survival in the pagan vastness of female nature.
[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.25-26
In psychology, philosophy, and art, classical Greek imagination sought, in Eduard Fraenkel’s words, “λóγος, ratio… the intelligible, determinate, mensurable, as opposed to the fantastic, vague, and shapeless.”
The Apollonian, I said, is the line drawn against nature. For Harrison, the Olympian gods are patriarchal betrayers of earth-cult and mother nature. The chthonian is her test of authenticity and spiritual value. But I say there is neither person, thought, thing, nor art in the brutal chthonian. It was, ironically, the west’s Apollonian line that produced the matchless Jane Harrison.
[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.73
In addition to his present preference, the Bantu has a list of priorities, in his conception of a higher standard of living, which contains many non-economic goals.
A fairly typical list of such priorities might run thus: food, sex dalliance, joking with one’s friends, a bicycle, music and dancing, a radio, leisure to go fishing. Any list such as this, with its high priority for non-economic and basically leisure activities, does not provide the constantly expanding material demands that are the motivating force in the West’s economic expansion.
Nor is the African’s strongly socialized personality, which shares all its successes and wants with others and constantly yearns for the social approval obtained by sharing income with kinfolk and friends, capable of supporting any economy of private selfishness and individual capital accumulation that became the basis for the industrial expansion of the West.
[…] Western methods might work if native peoples could acquire some of the more basic attitudes that have been the foundation of Western progress.
For example, the victory of the West in World War II was attributed to our capacity for rationalization and for scientific method. These in turn rest on the most basic features of the Western outlook and traditions, on the way in which our cognitive system categorizes the world, and the value system we apply to this structure of categories.
But our cognitive system is derived from our past heritage, such as our Hebrew ethical system, the Christian heritage (which strangely enough made us accept the reality and the value of the temporal world at the same time that it placed our final goal, achievable through behavior in the world of the flesh, in the eternal world of the spirit), and the lessons of Greek rationalism with its insistence on dealing with the world in a quite artificial system of two-valued logic based on the principle of identity and the law of contradiction.
Non-Western peoples who do not find in their own system of cognition any acceptance of the rules of identity or of contradiction do not see reality in terms of two-valued logic, and must make an almost impossible effort to adopt the West’s natural tendency to rationalize problems.
On this basis, they find it difficult either to rationalize their own emotional positions and thus to control or direct them, or to rationalize (which is to isolate and analyze) their problems and thus to seek solutions for them.
Africans, for example, unless they have been thoroughly Westernized, do not make the sharp distinctions we do between the living and the dead, between animate and non-animate objects, between deity and man, and many other distinctions which our long submission to Greek logic have made almost inevitable to us.
[Carroll Quigley]
Tragedy and Hope, ‘The New Era,’ p.752
Related posts:
The Three Logos
Apollo - Dionysus - Cybele
Separate - Amorphous - Connected
Inflation - - Deflation
Sky - - Earth
Day - Twilight - Night
Paranoia - Normality - Schizophrenia
Outer - - Inner
Order - Criticality - Chaos
Clear - Complex - Chaotic
The imaginaire is structured in early childhood and later on determines the fundamental points of personality formation. Although the imaginaire necessarily encompasses all three regimes, one of them is always dominant and represses the others, thereby erecting the structure of consciousness in accordance with its own geometry and topology.
The Diurne
The diurnal regime fully corresponds to what we call the Logos of Apollo. This is the solar, masculine, heroic, noetic universe.
The domination of the postural reflex (which pushes the child up into the upright, vertical stance) organizes consciousness in accordance with the diurnal regime. This regime is dominated by diaeretic operations, such as division, dismemberment, the establishment of clear limits, contemplation, vertical hierarchy, severe logical laws, and is characterized by the concentration of identity towards one end (i.e., the construction of a consolidated subject) in parallel to the dissection (down to miasma) of the subject of perception at the opposite end (e.g., analyzing an object, dismembering a sacrificial animal, etc.).
In the diurnal regime, the subject recognizes itself as a hero confronting time and death, with which it wages endless war. Vertical symmetries, images of flight (and fall), and masculine symbols such as the straight line, the sword, the scepter, the axis, arrows, light, the sun, and the sky are predominant in this mode.
Our thought is based on the development of this kind of imagination. We imagine things separately. We separate things and [in doing so] consolidate our subject. Everybody is against us but we [beat] everybody. In the field of mental illness, it corresponds to paranoia. Paranoia is absolutization of this diurne.
This is the creation of hierarchy, of verticality, with the most paranoid subject at the top of the society - the tsar, the king that destroys everything and consolidates himself. Paranoia is the illness of the kings because everybody is against them and everybody is planning to overthrow them […]
The Mystical Nocturne
This regime is marked by the absence of clarity, as consciousness enjoys the continuous and unlimited tissue of hardly distinguishable things. Sensations of digestion, saturation, napping, comfort, stillness, gliding, and slight immersion are dominant.
The prevailing elements are water, earth, and warmth. The relevant symbols are the cup, the Mother, twilight, reduced objects, centripetal symmetries, the infant, the blanket, the bed, and the womb.
This is the feminine, maternal regime. The mystical nocturne is based on radical feminization and is an antiphrasis. In this mode, dangerous and ominous phenomena (death, time, evil, threats, enemies, and misfortune, etc.) are given softer or contradictory names:
Death = dormition (literally falling asleep) or even birth (resurrection);
Time = progress, becoming, improving;
Threat = a game resolved in peace and bliss;
The enemy = a friend who is not dangerous, and to whose side one must necessarily cross as soon as possible (Stockholm syndrome)
Misfortune = happiness (a temporary challenge designed for something good), etc.
A person with a dominant mystical nocturne is prone to seek compromise, is distinguished by conformism and hyper-conformism, is peace-loving, easily adapts to any conditions, is feminine, is drawn towards serenity, and sets comfort, satiety, safety, and harmony above all else, believing that the best is guaranteed to come naturally.
It is not to separate something that is outside of us and to consolidate something that is inside of us, as in the case of the diurne, but […] to unite everything that is around us and to divide ourselves. This is a schizophrenic attitude, in the extreme case [because] the schizophrenic is separated inside. There are voices and different egos inside and there is the world around it that has reason, that is more powerful than the subject. So the world is united and strong and the subject is weak and problematic and ill.
Here we can unmistakably recognize the structures of the Black Logos, the noetic world of Cybele, the Great Mother, and the chthonic worlds of the womb.
The Dramatic Nocturne
The third regime of the imaginaire is also nocturnal, but is dramatic, dynamic, and active. It can be placed between the diurne and the mystical nocturne. It is built on a copulative dominant, on rhythm, movement, and dual symmetries. Its symbol is the bisexual being, the Androgyne, a pair of lovers, choreia, the circle, dance, rotation, repetition, the cycle, motion returning to its origin.
The dramatic nocturne does not struggle with time and death like the diurne, and does not cross over to the side of time and death as the mystical nocturne does. It closes time in a cycle and keeps death in a chain of births and deaths regularly replacing one another (reincarnation). In this regime, the subject is reflected in the object and vice versa, and this game of reflections is reproduced in an infinite sequence.
If the diurne is the masculine regime, the realm of the day, and if the mystical nocturne is the maternal realm of the night, then the dramatic nocturne correlates with twilight (dusk and dawn) and the male/female pair (sometimes united into one).
While the diurne rigidly divides one from another (diaeresis) and the mystical nocturne unites everything (synthesis), the dramatic nocturne unites the divided and divides the united – never entirely, but retaining differences in their merger and sameness in division.
Those who have a dominant dramatic nocturne exhibit developed artistic abilities, psychological flexibility, eroticism, lightness, mobility, the ability to maintain balance in motion and to perceive events in the external world as a never-ending, shifting alternation of dark and light moments (the ancient Romans’ dies fastus/dies nefastus).
Durand’s dramatic nocturne perfectly fits the description of the Dark Logos, the noetic universe of Dionysus, the god who fuses opposites in himself – suffering and dispassion, death and resurrection, male and female, high and low, and so on. Hence precisely why the “search for the Dark Logos” led us to Dionysus and the broad complex of his situation.
If the regime of diurne is paranoid and the regime of mystical nocturne is schizophrenic, what is the mental disease that corresponds to the dramatic nocturne? There is no mental disease: It is normality. In a normal situation we use this dramatical nocturne, the Dionysian approach to reality. Sometimes there is effeminization and sometimes there is radical separation and differentiation. So we are using both strategies at the same time.
The Three Worlds in Mythology
The realm of the Light Logos corresponds to Olympus, the heavenly world, and the king of the gods, the thunder-god Zeus, his wife, Hera of the air, the solar Apollo, the warrior Athena, the goddess of justice Dike, and other analogous figures.
This is the highest horizon of the celestial Olympian gods in the maximal purity in which the Greeks tried to imagine the gods free from chthonic or archaic elements. This series of gods can be called the diurnic series, for their primary realm of rule is the that of the day, wakefulness, the clear mind, the vertical symmetries of power, and purification.
The second realm of myth, corresponding to the mystical nocturne, is that of the chthonic deities associated with Gaia, the Great Mother. This includes the “Urania” of Rhea, the deputies of the titan Cronus and the mother of Zeus, all the generations of the Titans overthrown by the gods, as well as other creatures of the Earth, such as the Hundred-Handed Ones (Hecatoncheires), the giants, and other chthonic monsters.
The third kingdom, situated between Olympus and Hades (Tartarus), is the domain of the intermediate gods. The undisputed king of this mythical realm is Dionysus, who descends into Hades as Zagreus and rises to Olympus as the resurrected Iacchus of the Eleusinian mysteries and Orphic hymns. Here should also be included the psychopomp god Hermes, the goddess of harvest and fertility Demeter, as well as the countless series of lesser gods and daimons – the nymphs, satyrs, dryads, silens, etc.
[Aleksandr Dugin]
‘Introduction to Noomakhia: Logos of Dionysos [Lecture 5] - Alexander Dugin’ & The Three Logoi: An Introduction to the Triadic Methodology of NOOMAKHIA, Chap. 2
The Geometry of the Logoi
Logos of Apollo
[…] the Three Logoi represent three primordial positions of viewing the map of the Universe: from above (by Apollo and Olympus), from below (by Gaia, Cybele, and Tartarus), and from an intermediate position (that of Dionysus, Demeter, and humanity) […] the basic figure of the Universe will change depending on the arrangement of this or that “observatory point.”
The Logos of Apollo believes itself to be the center, the foundation, the top of the triangle or the peak of Mount Olympus (Parnassus). The view from here is a view looking down upon the base of the triangle. The descending vertical of the solar Logos sets at the opposite end of itself its opposition – the flat, horizontal Earth.
Logos of Dionysus
The intermediary world of Dionysus is structured differently. Its height rises up to the heavens and its depth reaches down to the center of hell. Dionysus’ center is in himself, while the above and below are the limits of his divine path – formed not by themselves, but over the course of the dramatic mysteries of his tragic, sacrificial death and victorious resurrection.
The Logos of Dionysus is dynamic; it embodies the abundance and tragedy of life. Dionysus’ universe differs radically from the Universe of Apollo, insofar as their different views yield different worlds.
The Logos of Dionysus is a phenomenon, a mutable structure of his epiphany. It is far from chaos, but it is not the fixed order of Apollo. It is a kind of playful combination of both, a sacred flickering of meanings and minds constantly threatening to plunge into madness – a madness which is healed by the impulse towards the higher Mind. It is not the fixed triangle of the mountain, but the pulsating, living heart that composes the paradigmatic canvas of thinking.
Logos of Cybele
The geometry of Cybele’s Universe is completely different. On the one hand, in her we can see the inverted image of the Universal Mountain turned upside down into a sort of cosmic funnel.
The symmetry between hell and heaven was vividly described by Dante. The Ancient Greeks believed that there is a black sky in Tartarus with its own (suffocating) air, its own (fiery) rivers and (foul) land.
Yet this symmetry should be not merely visual, but also ontological and noological. The world of the titans consists of the refusal of the order of the diurne. The horizontal thus acquires the dimension of a downwards vertical, a horizontal of the depths. Differences fuse while identities are split asunder. Light is black, and darkness blazes and burns. If in the world of Apollo there is only the eternal “now”, then Cybele’s world is reigned by time (Kronos – Chronos), where there is everything but the “now”, and instead only the “before” and “too late”, where the main moment is always missed. The torture of Tantalus, Sisyphus, and the Danaids reflects the essence of the temporality of hell: everything is repeated to no end.
The inverted triangle, as applied to the worlds of Cybele, is most akin to an inverse “Apollonian hypothesis” – and thus indeed Apollo understands this opposite to himself. Mother Earth thinks otherwise: she has no straight lines, no clear orientations. Attempts to separate one from the other cause her unbearable pain. Her thinking is muffled, gloomy, and inconsistent. She cannot break away from the mass which de-figures and repeatedly dissolves all forms, decomposes them into atoms and recreates them again at random. This is how monsters are born.
Therefore, the three views of the universe from these three positions represent three conflicting worlds, and it is this conflict of interpretations which constitutes the essence of the war of the minds.
[Aleksandr Dugin]
The Three Logoi: An Introduction to the Triadic Methodology of NOOMAKHIA, Chap. 2
[…] the Logos of Cybele, Logos of Dionysus, and Logos of Apollo are deep inside of any form of thought.
They are inside of thought and not in front of thought. They are the paradigms that are very difficult to grasp, to seize, and to understand because they are dealing behind our mind, defining its structure. We could not see [them] as images that are in front of us.
When we are speaking about the Logos, we are speaking about something that is deep behind our […] consciousness that defines the roots of our mentality.
[Aleksandr Dugin]
‘Introduction to Noomakhia: Logos of Dionysos [Lecture 5] - Alexander Dugin’
It is easily noticeable that the three synchronic worlds of this model can be taken to represent the calendric cycle: the upper half (the kingdom of Apollo) corresponds to summer, the lower world of Cybele to winter, and the intermediary worlds of Dionysus to autumn and spring.
The latter can be interpreted as the cardinal points of the drama of Dionysus, his sacrificial killing, dismemberment, resurrection, and awakening.
[Aleksandr Dugin]
The Three Logoi: An Introduction to the Triadic Methodology of NOOMAKHIA, Chap. 2
Related posts:
Apollo / Dionysus
The imaginaire is structured in early childhood and later on determines the fundamental points of personality formation. Although the imaginaire necessarily encompasses all three regimes, one of them is always dominant and represses the others, thereby erecting the structure of consciousness in accordance with its own geometry and topology.
The Diurne
The diurnal regime fully corresponds to what we call the Logos of Apollo. This is the solar, masculine, heroic, noetic universe.
The domination of the postural reflex (which pushes the child up into the upright, vertical stance) organizes consciousness in accordance with the diurnal regime. This regime is dominated by diaeretic operations, such as division, dismemberment, the establishment of clear limits, contemplation, vertical hierarchy, severe logical laws, and is characterized by the concentration of identity towards one end (i.e., the construction of a consolidated subject) in parallel to the dissection (down to miasma) of the subject of perception at the opposite end (e.g., analyzing an object, dismembering a sacrificial animal, etc.).
In the diurnal regime, the subject recognizes itself as a hero confronting time and death, with which it wages endless war. Vertical symmetries, images of flight (and fall), and masculine symbols such as the straight line, the sword, the scepter, the axis, arrows, light, the sun, and the sky are predominant in this mode.
Our thought is based on the development of this kind of imagination. We imagine things separately. We separate things and [in doing so] consolidate our subject. Everybody is against us but we [beat] everybody. In the field of mental illness, it corresponds to paranoia. Paranoia is absolutization of this diurne.
This is the creation of hierarchy, of verticality, with the most paranoid subject at the top of the society - the tsar, the king that destroys everything and consolidates himself. Paranoia is the illness of the kings because everybody is against them and everybody is planning to overthrow them […]
The Mystical Nocturne
This regime is marked by the absence of clarity, as consciousness enjoys the continuous and unlimited tissue of hardly distinguishable things. Sensations of digestion, saturation, napping, comfort, stillness, gliding, and slight immersion are dominant.
The prevailing elements are water, earth, and warmth. The relevant symbols are the cup, the Mother, twilight, reduced objects, centripetal symmetries, the infant, the blanket, the bed, and the womb.
This is the feminine, maternal regime. The mystical nocturne is based on radical feminization and is an antiphrasis. In this mode, dangerous and ominous phenomena (death, time, evil, threats, enemies, and misfortune, etc.) are given softer or contradictory names:
Death = dormition (literally falling asleep) or even birth (resurrection);
Time = progress, becoming, improving;
Threat = a game resolved in peace and bliss;
The enemy = a friend who is not dangerous, and to whose side one must necessarily cross as soon as possible (Stockholm syndrome)
Misfortune = happiness (a temporary challenge designed for something good), etc.
A person with a dominant mystical nocturne is prone to seek compromise, is distinguished by conformism and hyper-conformism, is peace-loving, easily adapts to any conditions, is feminine, is drawn towards serenity, and sets comfort, satiety, safety, and harmony above all else, believing that the best is guaranteed to come naturally.
It is not to separate something that is outside of us and to consolidate something that is inside of us, as in the case of the diurne, but […] to unite everything that is around us and to divide ourselves. This is a schizophrenic attitude, in the extreme case [because] the schizophrenic is separated inside. There are voices and different egos inside and there is the world around it that has reason, that is more powerful than the subject. So the world is united and strong and the subject is weak and problematic and ill.
Here we can unmistakably recognize the structures of the Black Logos, the noetic world of Cybele, the Great Mother, and the chthonic worlds of the womb.
The Dramatic Nocturne
The third regime of the imaginaire is also nocturnal, but is dramatic, dynamic, and active. It can be placed between the diurne and the mystical nocturne. It is built on a copulative dominant, on rhythm, movement, and dual symmetries. Its symbol is the bisexual being, the Androgyne, a pair of lovers, choreia, the circle, dance, rotation, repetition, the cycle, motion returning to its origin.
The dramatic nocturne does not struggle with time and death like the diurne, and does not cross over to the side of time and death as the mystical nocturne does. It closes time in a cycle and keeps death in a chain of births and deaths regularly replacing one another (reincarnation). In this regime, the subject is reflected in the object and vice versa, and this game of reflections is reproduced in an infinite sequence.
If the diurne is the masculine regime, the realm of the day, and if the mystical nocturne is the maternal realm of the night, then the dramatic nocturne correlates with twilight (dusk and dawn) and the male/female pair (sometimes united into one).
While the diurne rigidly divides one from another (diaeresis) and the mystical nocturne unites everything (synthesis), the dramatic nocturne unites the divided and divides the united – never entirely, but retaining differences in their merger and sameness in division.
Those who have a dominant dramatic nocturne exhibit developed artistic abilities, psychological flexibility, eroticism, lightness, mobility, the ability to maintain balance in motion and to perceive events in the external world as a never-ending, shifting alternation of dark and light moments (the ancient Romans’ dies fastus/dies nefastus).
Durand’s dramatic nocturne perfectly fits the description of the Dark Logos, the noetic universe of Dionysus, the god who fuses opposites in himself – suffering and dispassion, death and resurrection, male and female, high and low, and so on. Hence precisely why the “search for the Dark Logos” led us to Dionysus and the broad complex of his situation.
If the regime of diurne is paranoid and the regime of mystical nocturne is schizophrenic, what is the mental disease that corresponds to the dramatic nocturne? There is no mental disease: It is normality. In a normal situation we use this dramatical nocturne, the Dionysian approach to reality. Sometimes there is effeminization and sometimes there is radical separation and differentiation. So we are using both strategies at the same time.
The Three Worlds in Mythology
The realm of the Light Logos corresponds to Olympus, the heavenly world, and the king of the gods, the thunder-god Zeus, his wife, Hera of the air, the solar Apollo, the warrior Athena, the goddess of justice Dike, and other analogous figures.
This is the highest horizon of the celestial Olympian gods in the maximal purity in which the Greeks tried to imagine the gods free from chthonic or archaic elements. This series of gods can be called the diurnic series, for their primary realm of rule is the that of the day, wakefulness, the clear mind, the vertical symmetries of power, and purification.
The second realm of myth, corresponding to the mystical nocturne, is that of the chthonic deities associated with Gaia, the Great Mother. This includes the “Urania” of Rhea, the deputies of the titan Cronus and the mother of Zeus, all the generations of the Titans overthrown by the gods, as well as other creatures of the Earth, such as the Hundred-Handed Ones (Hecatoncheires), the giants, and other chthonic monsters.
The third kingdom, situated between Olympus and Hades (Tartarus), is the domain of the intermediate gods. The undisputed king of this mythical realm is Dionysus, who descends into Hades as Zagreus and rises to Olympus as the resurrected Iacchus of the Eleusinian mysteries and Orphic hymns. Here should also be included the psychopomp god Hermes, the goddess of harvest and fertility Demeter, as well as the countless series of lesser gods and daimons – the nymphs, satyrs, dryads, silens, etc.
[Aleksandr Dugin]
‘Introduction to Noomakhia: Logos of Dionysos [Lecture 5] - Alexander Dugin’ & The Three Logoi: An Introduction to the Triadic Methodology of NOOMAKHIA, Chap. 2
The Geometry of the Logoi
Logos of Apollo
[…] the Three Logoi represent three primordial positions of viewing the map of the Universe: from above (by Apollo and Olympus), from below (by Gaia, Cybele, and Tartarus), and from an intermediate position (that of Dionysus, Demeter, and humanity) […] the basic figure of the Universe will change depending on the arrangement of this or that “observatory point.”
The Logos of Apollo believes itself to be the center, the foundation, the top of the triangle or the peak of Mount Olympus (Parnassus). The view from here is a view looking down upon the base of the triangle. The descending vertical of the solar Logos sets at the opposite end of itself its opposition – the flat, horizontal Earth.
Logos of Dionysus
The intermediary world of Dionysus is structured differently. Its height rises up to the heavens and its depth reaches down to the center of hell. Dionysus’ center is in himself, while the above and below are the limits of his divine path – formed not by themselves, but over the course of the dramatic mysteries of his tragic, sacrificial death and victorious resurrection.
The Logos of Dionysus is dynamic; it embodies the abundance and tragedy of life. Dionysus’ universe differs radically from the Universe of Apollo, insofar as their different views yield different worlds.
The Logos of Dionysus is a phenomenon, a mutable structure of his epiphany. It is far from chaos, but it is not the fixed order of Apollo. It is a kind of playful combination of both, a sacred flickering of meanings and minds constantly threatening to plunge into madness – a madness which is healed by the impulse towards the higher Mind. It is not the fixed triangle of the mountain, but the pulsating, living heart that composes the paradigmatic canvas of thinking.
Logos of Cybele
The geometry of Cybele’s Universe is completely different. On the one hand, in her we can see the inverted image of the Universal Mountain turned upside down into a sort of cosmic funnel.
The symmetry between hell and heaven was vividly described by Dante. The Ancient Greeks believed that there is a black sky in Tartarus with its own (suffocating) air, its own (fiery) rivers and (foul) land.
Yet this symmetry should be not merely visual, but also ontological and noological. The world of the titans consists of the refusal of the order of the diurne. The horizontal thus acquires the dimension of a downwards vertical, a horizontal of the depths. Differences fuse while identities are split asunder. Light is black, and darkness blazes and burns. If in the world of Apollo there is only the eternal “now”, then Cybele’s world is reigned by time (Kronos – Chronos), where there is everything but the “now”, and instead only the “before” and “too late”, where the main moment is always missed. The torture of Tantalus, Sisyphus, and the Danaids reflects the essence of the temporality of hell: everything is repeated to no end.
The inverted triangle, as applied to the worlds of Cybele, is most akin to an inverse “Apollonian hypothesis” – and thus indeed Apollo understands this opposite to himself. Mother Earth thinks otherwise: she has no straight lines, no clear orientations. Attempts to separate one from the other cause her unbearable pain. Her thinking is muffled, gloomy, and inconsistent. She cannot break away from the mass which de-figures and repeatedly dissolves all forms, decomposes them into atoms and recreates them again at random. This is how monsters are born.
Therefore, the three views of the universe from these three positions represent three conflicting worlds, and it is this conflict of interpretations which constitutes the essence of the war of the minds.
[Aleksandr Dugin]
The Three Logoi: An Introduction to the Triadic Methodology of NOOMAKHIA, Chap. 2
[…] the Logos of Cybele, Logos of Dionysus, and Logos of Apollo are deep inside of any form of thought.
They are inside of thought and not in front of thought. They are the paradigms that are very difficult to grasp, to seize, and to understand because they are dealing behind our mind, defining its structure. We could not see [them] as images that are in front of us.
When we are speaking about the Logos, we are speaking about something that is deep behind our […] consciousness that defines the roots of our mentality.
[Aleksandr Dugin]
‘Introduction to Noomakhia: Logos of Dionysos [Lecture 5] - Alexander Dugin’
It is easily noticeable that the three synchronic worlds of this model can be taken to represent the calendric cycle: the upper half (the kingdom of Apollo) corresponds to summer, the lower world of Cybele to winter, and the intermediary worlds of Dionysus to autumn and spring.
The latter can be interpreted as the cardinal points of the drama of Dionysus, his sacrificial killing, dismemberment, resurrection, and awakening.
[Aleksandr Dugin]
The Three Logoi: An Introduction to the Triadic Methodology of NOOMAKHIA, Chap. 2
Related posts:
Apollo / Dionysus
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