This book is a Dionysian tale, part fact, part fiction. To do honor to a strange and mad god, any book about him must be strange and mad too. It was the only interesting thing he ever did. Even Jesus Christ had the good sense to turn water into wine. Wine is the most ancient cure for the illness of normality, for altering normal, tedious, trivial, boring, conservative states of consciousness. Humanity will never turn its back on wine, on the magic vine. While, all around us, the old religions fail and become ever more decrepit, anachronistic, and downright embarrassing, Dionysus remains eternally fresh and relevant. Where would humanity be without Dionysus’s wine, without its ability to transform our feeble state of consciousness into something glorious and elevated? Therefore, Dionysus, the mad God who brings madness, is humanity’s greatest boon. Yet Plato said that our greatest blessings come to us through the gift of madness. Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make victims of Dionysus, the trickster god, the maker and conjurer of madness. Above all, do not fail to acknowledge his divinity. He can beguile you, inspire you, grip you with mania … destroy you. It concerns a state of rapture that stupefies the body while freeing the soul to contemplate divine things.ĭionysus can appear anywhere at any time, and always as a stranger. Dionysus delivers strange epiphanies that estrange people from themselves, that take them out of themselves. Everyone needs the god Dionysus, the perpetual stranger, the embodiment of strangeness, the strange god who brings strangeness wherever he goes. The more normal you are, the greater your need. They are electrifying.Įveryone needs a bit of strange. They have an aura no normal person could ever possess. They speak in new, thrilling and utterly unusual ways. When they say they have communed with the gods, their very otherness, their manifest loss and lack of normality, is the proof of their claim. When they return – if they return – they are different from everyone else. So, humanity has to be mostly normal, but with a few abnormal individuals who ascend the highest mountains, or descend into the deepest caves, or walk into the wilderness, or enter the labyrinth, or dive to the bottom of the ocean, or travel to the unknown land, or venture across the uncharted sea, or go to new places in the mind and have thoughts no one else has ever imagined. If everyone were radically unique, completely unlike everyone else, everything would be chaos. It would be unable to adapt to changing circumstances. Humanity would not survive if everyone were normal. The enemy of the sacred is the banal, the bland, the conventional, the ordinary, the familiar, the normal. Only then are they qualified to say sacred things, extraordinary things, the things that none of your neighbors could ever tell you. When they return, they are at a higher level. It is a separated, guarded space, unlike anything in the ordinary world. How do you gain access to the sacred? The sacred is never found in the ordinary, familiar, normal world. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored, in any form or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical without the express written permission of the author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review. Regatta De Mort: The Mad God Regatta De Mort: The Mad GodĪll rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof in any form.
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