Dionysus (Bolen)

Definition

Bolen’s Dionysus is a pattern in men’s psychology that Jean Shinoda Bolen named after the Greek god of wine, ecstasy and the theatre. In Gods in Everyman (1989) it closes the generation of the sons, and her chapter title gives it three roles: mystic, lover and wanderer. The man in whom Dionysus predominates, as she describes him, lives intensely and through the senses; he seeks ecstatic states, shows his feelings, is drawn to nature, music and the body, and is close to women, who are often drawn to look after him as he seeks to be mothered by them. Bolen’s god is androgynous and moves between worlds, and the pattern carries his extremes: a man pulled between opposites, wanting at once to merge and to be free. The difficulties she attaches are those of the extremes, from a restless hunger for ecstatic experience to the man who stays an eternal youth whatever his age.

Bolen places him apart from the other sons. The favoured Apollo and Hermes and the rejected Ares and Hephaestus are defined by Zeus’s approval or refusal; Dionysus, under her heading “An Ambivalently Viewed Son”, is in a category of his own, the only Olympian with a mortal mother, the son for whom Zeus was surrogate mother as well as father and who, she suggests, turned a distant father into a nurturing one. Men in power, she writes, treat Dionysus as a foreign influence to be kept out. Two exclusions apply. This is not Dionysus the god of Greek religion, whose myths enter only as Bolen’s material. And it is not the puer aeternus of Jung’s school, though she borrows the term. Bolen calls her gods archetypes; what she describes is a type of man, recorded here as hers: one of eight god patterns for men (1989), companions to the seven goddesses of Goddesses in Everywoman (1984).

History

The pattern first appears in chapter 10 of Gods in Everyman (Harper & Row, San Francisco, 1989; paperback 1990), the last chapter on the sons before the book’s close. Its epigraph comes from Walter F. Otto’s Dionysus: Myth and Cult (1933; English 1965), and its sources include Arthur and Libby Colman’s Love and Ecstasy (1975). The god also appears earlier in the book, in a section of the Hades chapter, “Hades and Dionysus” (p. 102), which takes from Otto the saying of Heraclitus that Hades and Dionysus are one. A twenty-fifth-anniversary edition (2014) changed the book’s subtitle; the figure has not been renamed.

The myths are public domain. Hesiod gives the mortal mother on which Bolen’s category rests:

And Semele, daughter of Cadmus was joined with him in love and bare him a splendid son, joyous Dionysus,—a mortal woman an immortal son. And now they both are gods. — Hesiod, Theogony (c. 700 BCE), ll. 940–942, trans. H. G. Evelyn-White (1914)

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

The Homeric hymn to Dionysus (7) has him appear as a young man on a headland, seized by pirates, who turns their ship into a vine-hung wonder and the sailors into dolphins. Euripides’ Bacchae (405 BCE) is the classic account of the ambivalence Bolen describes: the god returns to Thebes to vindicate his mother, its king Pentheus refuses him as a foreign corrupter, and the women of the city, Pentheus’s mother among them, tear the king apart on the mountain (prologue, ll. 1–63; messenger’s speech, ll. 1043–1152).

The debate

Bolen’s Dionysus touches the published puer aeternus at one point and parts from it at others. Jung used the phrase in 1912 for the young Dionysus and Iacchus of the Eleusinian mysteries, a mythological motif, and Marie-Louise von Franz’s lectures of 1959–60, published by Spring in 1970 and listed in Bolen’s bibliography, made it a clinical picture: the adult who stays provisional, bound to the mother and unable to commit. Bolen uses the term, attributing it to Jung, for the Dionysian man who stays an eternal youth regardless of his actual age (index, pp. 256–257), and for the Hermes man’s superficiality too. But her Dionysus is wider than the puer. It includes the mystic, the lover of women and the man at ease with feeling, which von Franz’s neurosis of the provisional life does not, and it is a temperament that can mature, not a possession to be cured. The roster’s other neighbours, the child and the trickster, are further off: Jung’s divine child is a symbol of beginnings and the self, and the trickster is his collective shadow.

The figure’s deeper lineage is Nietzsche’s. The Birth of Tragedy (1872) set the Dionysian, intoxication and the dissolution of the individual, against the Apollonian, and Bolen’s pairing of an orderly favoured son with an ecstatic ambivalent one carries that opposition into a typology of men. Robert Bly (1990) used the same pair inside the men’s movement, picturing Apollo standing on the dark, dangerous energy of Dionysus (p. 26). Shepherd Bliss, reviewing the book in 1989, thought Bolen most partial to Dionysus of all the gods and also found him the most problematic, recalling the maenads who killed Orpheus. Publishers Weekly (1989) took her description of John Belushi and Jim Morrison as “public Dionysus figures” who did not survive their midlife crises as a sample of instant readings of celebrities in a system “at least as simplistic as sun-sign astrology”. Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette (1992) objected to the typing itself: “no human being is an archetype, and neither is any God or Goddess” (notes to chapter 2, n. 17).

Empirical status

None. No study has tested Bolen’s Dionysus as a psychological construct, and no instrument based on her eight gods has published psychometrics. Research on sensation-seeking, on peak and mystical experience and on addiction describes neighbouring phenomena but makes no use of the figure.

Appearances

Bolen’s mythic instances are the god of the vine, the wanderer with his maenads and the son twice born from Zeus. Her contemporary instances, as reported by Publishers Weekly, were Belushi and Morrison. Apart from Bolen’s own instances, identifications with the type are readings, and the guide’s own exemplars, including the Bacchae, are marked as such.

Sources

• Bolen, J. S. (1989). Gods in Everyman: A New Psychology of Men’s Lives and Loves. Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0-06-250098-4. Chapters 2, 5 and 10, p. 102; index, pp. 187, 256–257; part, chapter and section titles checked by full-text search of the Internet Archive scan, https://archive.org/details/godsineverymanne0000bole
• Bolen, J. S. (2014). Gods in Everyman: Archetypes That Shape Men’s Lives (twenty-fifth-anniversary ed.). Harper Paperbacks. ISBN 978-0-06-232994-3.
• Bolen, J. S. (1984). Goddesses in Everywoman: A New Psychology of Women. Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0-06-250082-3.
• Hesiod, Theogony 940–942; Homeric Hymn 7, to Dionysus. In Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica (H. G. Evelyn-White, Trans., 1914). Project Gutenberg #348.
• Euripides (405 BCE). The Bacchae (G. Murray, Trans.). Project Gutenberg #35173. Ll. 1–63, 1043–1152.
• Otto, W. F. (1965). Dionysus: Myth and Cult (R. B. Palmer, Trans.; German 1933). Indiana University Press. ISBN 978-0-253-20891-0.
• Colman, A., & Colman, L. (1975). Love and Ecstasy. Seabury Press. ISBN 978-0-8164-9250-3. As listed in Bolen’s sources for chapter 10.
• Jung, C. G. (1912/1916). Psychology of the Unconscious (B. M. Hinkle, Trans.). Part II, chapters 1 and 7. Project Gutenberg #65903.
• von Franz, M.-L. (1970). The Problem of the Puer Aeternus (3rd ed. 2000). Inner City Books. ISBN 978-0-919123-88-5.
• Nietzsche, F. (1872). The Birth of Tragedy (W. A. Haussmann, Trans., 1909). Project Gutenberg #51356.
• Bly, R. (1990). Iron John: A Book About Men. Addison-Wesley. ISBN 978-0-201-51720-0. P. 26.
• Bliss, S. (1989). [Review of Gods in Everyman]. Yoga Journal, May/June 1989, pp. 72–76. https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_vOsDAAAAMBAJ
• [Unsigned review of Gods in Everyman]. (1989, 27 February). Publishers Weekly. https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780062500984
• Moore, R., & Gillette, D. (1992). The Warrior Within: Accessing the Knight in the Male Psyche. William Morrow. ISBN 978-0-688-09592-5. Notes to chapter 2, n. 17 (pp. 245–246 by the index).