| |
|
For many women physical passion and chemical abuse seen inextricably intertwined. As children we are taught that our sexuality is somehow bad or wrong. Some of us were sexually abused. In adolescence we often discover that drinking and /or drugging is the magic potion that releases our inhibitions so we are able to more easily act on our desires or to allow ourselves to feel them in the first place. Other women take solace in food or extreme dependency on other people. Eventually what seemed like such a miraculous aphrodisiac may become a substitute for love, crowding out the possibility of healthy love relationships – with partners, with ourselves, with the world around us and with the Sacred. Like Ariadne of Greek myth, we become wed to the god of ecstasy. Ariadne, the lover of Dionysus was originally not merely the partner of the god of wine and revelry, but a goddess in her own right. Her name means “very holy,” and in ancient Crete she was worshipped by women as the goddess of the underworld and germination. She was the Earth Mother. When the Greeks conquered Crete, they suppressed worship of Ariadne by demoting her from goddess to mortal woman and incorporating her into their own mythology. According to the Greek revised version of the tale, Ariadne had been a very beautiful and very human princess of Crete, betrayed by her lover Theseus. They met when Theseus, a mortal from Athens, volunteered to kill the Minotaur, a half-bull/half-human monster which lived in a labyrinth beneath the city. No man had survived such an attempt before. From the first time she saw him, Ariadne was attracted to Theseus and decided to assist him if he would take her to Athens and marry her. When he agreed, she gave him a ball of twine and told him to tie the end to the door at the entrance of the maze, unwinding the string as he worked his way toward the center. To find his way back to safety, all he would have to do was to follow the string and reverse his steps. Aided by Ariadne’s cleverness, he killed the Minotaur and took her on his ship sailing toward Athens. On the journey, the lovers made port in Naxos and debarked. As soon as Ariadne fell asleep on shore, Theseus, who had no more use for her cleverness, abandoned her and sailed off on his own. When Ariadne awakened and found herself deserted, she grieved – until Dionysus appeared. He was a savior/destroyer god who wandered the world with his female attendants and panthers. Dionysus was the god who had brought the Greeks agriculture, art and drama as well as wine. He represented the dual nature of intoxication, and his mystery was the mystery of mad despair and of ecstasy. When Dionysis found Ariadne on Naxon, he fell in love with her and married her. In some stories, he gave her a crown and when she died, he tossed that crown up to the heavens where it shines today. According to other versions of the legend, he took Ariadne, herself, with him to the heavens were she became immortalized – transformed into a goddess through his efforts. Given the Greeks’ goal to suppress the religion of the goddess worshippers and the dual nature of Dionysus’ character, it isn’t surprising that other, more popular variations of the story take a more sinister turn. These say that Dionysus and Ariadne were lovers in Crete until Theseus kidnapped her. In the version recounted in The Odyssey, when Theseus later abandoned Ariadne on the island, Dionysys ordered her killed. In another version she hanged herself, and in yet another account she became pregnant and died the instant before she was able to give birth to the child fathered by Dionyss before her abduction. The god of wine who had the power to immortalize Ariadne also had the power to destroy her or to compel her to destroy herself. In classical art, the wine god was often portrayed surrounded by women called Maenads. In his worship in Greece, he was served by priestesses. When a woman was initiated into the mysteries of Dionysus, she entered into a sacred marriage with the god, identifying completely with Ariadne. These women had no formal temples; instead, they worshipped their god in the wilderness. There they celebrated Dionysus with drunkenness, orgies and nakedness, with music and movement, sexuality and intoxication. Their rituals could be incredibly dark when ecstasy turned to raging, brutal frenzy. Sometimes these priestesses of Dionysus became “possessed” with him and became wild women, tearing apart sacrificial victims. It was rumored that they even ate their victim’s flesh in a bloody feast. Ariadne, the mortal woman, and the Maenads who took on her identity, wanted union with a god. People today who become dependent on alcohol or drigs often do so in a misguided attempt to slake their thirst for the Divine, according to Matthew Fox, founder of the Institute for Creation Spirituality, and many chemical dependency experts. Male-dominated culture has worked for thousands of years to strip women of our awareness of the hold, of the Goddess inside of us, to suppress our sexuality and to divorce our spirituality from our bodies, We are taught to be ashamed of ourselves and our ecstatic feelings. Western religious tradition excludes women from full participation and sometimes damns us solely because of our sex. In order to truly connect with the Divine, we are told we must deny our physical selves. Because of this, women may be especially vulnerable to seeking chemical means, food or “love addiction” to alter consciousness. By sleeping with Dionysus we initially feel as though we were transported to the heavens and made goddesses. We feel holy again, whole. When we become Maenads through our intoxication, we are at last able to catch a glimpse of our own primal wildness, our Goddess energy. We feel uninhibited, ecstatic; we are able to sing and to dance, to laugh and to weep without wondering what other people are thinking. We are able to remove the stiff and ill-fitting clothing society has forced us to wear in the form of people-pleasing personas. And then the ritual marriage turns dark. Our drinking, drugging, eating or compulsive relationships unleash incredible amounts of destructive anger. We rage; we become frenzied. Our fury from past pain mounts and, with it, our capacity for violence. If we remain the wine god’s lover, our fate will be the same as Ariadne’s in the two most misogynist versions of her tale. We will either turn the rage inward, destroying ourselves through madness, suicide or illness, or we will be killed by Dionysus’ hit man in the form of an under-the-influence-accident or at the hands of an abusive lover. Our recovery process must involve divorcing Dionysus and reconnecting with the Sacred, which lives in each one of us. When we return Ariadne to her original position as Earth Goddess rather than victim and recognize that she lives in each one of us, we no longer feel compelled to seek out Dionysus in the form of chemicals, food or relationships to experience ecstatic connection. We begin to embrace and express our primal feminine energy. We have the choice of how and when to express it and can decide to do that in constructive and creative ways. We become lovers not only of sexual partners, but of ourselves, the world and the Divine. Our past experience with addiction becomes the catalyst for the germination of our wholeness. |