Paper: Listening in the Bardo: Hearing Beyond Sound

Copyright 2004 Kris Seraphine

Listening in the Bardo: Hearing Beyond Sound

One of the most exciting and mysterious experiences I encountered as a percussion student in my early 20’s was seeing the renowned solo percussionist Evelyn Glennie. About 25 of us in the percussion department at California State University, Northridge went to see a rehearsal of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Our teacher wanted us to experience a true talent in symphonic percussion performance. We sat down eager with anticipation to observe what could be new inspiration for all of us.

Evelyn Glennie played with more sensitivity and dynamism than any other percussionist enrolled in the program at the time I attended. The way her arms moved over the drums was as fluid and light as mercury, and as powerful as thunder. She was a Sarasvati of percussion and a pure expression of musical genius, grace and power. To the amazement of the whole group, not including the teacher who was already aware of her “infirmity,” we found out Evelyn was deaf. How was she able to play so perfectly, so sublimely, without being able to hear herself or the orchestra? She could feel the vibrations from the drums, to be sure, and follow the music and the direction of the conductor, but still it remains an enigma how she was able to draw out perfect sounds from the timpani.

Evelyn is in a class with another musician-composer, Ludwig van Beethoven, who was struck with deafness at the height of his career in Vienna. In his later years, Beethoven composed music “in his head” and painstakingly revised each piece of music until he was satisfied with the result. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is also said to have heard music internally, as if he were tuned into a channel that directly linked him to the harmony of the spheres. All of Mozart’s musical manuscripts are original copies that show no sign of revisions of any kind. His copious body of works, which include operas, symphonies, chamber and religious music, is mythic as well. All three of the examples just given are completely different, yet each shares a common denominator: the ability to hear music beyond the physical phenomenon of sound.

Ethnomusicologist Guy Beck relates this kind of internal (or imaginal) hearing to non-linguistic sound, which is characterized as “sounds of objects employed in worship, interior sounds heard in meditation, and especially musical sounds in both categories” (Beck 6). Linguistic sound, according to Beck, corresponds to language sounds that occur in the mantras and chants used during meditation, as well as in the reading of the Tibetan Book of the Dead at the time of death. In mythomusicological and psychological terms, both non-linguistic and linguistic sounds function as psychopomps, guiding the psyche into deeper levels of the unconscious during meditation and transporting the soul through the bardo when life has left the body.

The word bardo translates as “gap,” and as “a sort of landmark which stands between two things” (Freemantle 10); the bardo is both a gap of emptiness and a place within a gap, it is the image representing the experience of luminous consciousness. Musical intervals and rhythmic patterns in music, for example, are created and measured by the amount of “gap” or space between individual notes––they are microcosmic expressions of meditative, dreamlike states of being. The macrocosm in which the phenomena of music and sound exist would be similar to a universal womb. The womblike, vacuous space in which music and sound travels to the ear and to the soul is called dharmadhatu, “the idea of the all-encompassing matrix in which all phenomena arise and cease” (Freemantle 107). In his commentary about the Bardo Thotrol, Chogyam Trungpa describes the visions experienced in the dharmata bardo:
...the brilliant colours and sounds that come along with the visions, are not made out of any kind of substance which needs maintenance from the point of view of the perceiver, but they just happen, as expression of silence and expression of emptiness. (Freemantle 12)

The link of mystical music to chthonic deities, myth and ritual in Tibetan Buddhism is audible in the chanting of Buddhist monks and visible in the sacred text, The Tibetan Book of the Dead. The musical technique used by the Buddhist Tibetan monks of Gyume Tantric Monastery and Gyuto Tantric University in Lhasa to create the low, resonant, growling sound is called the “one voice chord.” How these monks created this chanting style has been attributed to internal hearing in a dream:

One night in 1433 AD, the Tibetan Lama Je Tzong Sherab Senge awoke from a startling dream. He had heard a voice in the dream unlike any voice he knew. It was a low voice, unbelievably deep, sounding more like the growl of a wild bull than anything human. (Hightower 2000)


According to the legend, the lama was instructed by the dream to create a new tantric chanting style that would “embody both the masculine and the feminine aspects of the divine energy” (Hightower 2000). Alexander Berzin connects the genesis of the one voice chord with another lama, Tsongkhapa, a guru of Je Tzong Sherab Senge.

Tsongkhapa had two styles of chanting at different times in his life, based on visions he had, in which protectors chanted to him in these ways. The two are called the mountain-cracking voice ( ri-bo rags-pa’i skad ) and the waterfall-crashing voice ( chu-der sgrogs-pa’i skad ). Both styles are with an extremely base voice, with the former being a flat monotone and the later undulating and producing overtones. (Berzin 2003)


Musicologists and musicians have studied the technique employed by the chanting monks and have found it astoundingly difficult to reproduce the sound themselves. One musician in particular, Jonathon Goldman, tried to teach himself the one voice chord after spending many hours in the studio recording the monks of both the Gyuto and Gyume Tantric Universities. He had been unable to recreate the sound until he had been listening to a recording in his meditation studio and fell asleep. Upon awakening he tried vocalizing the one voice chord again and it seemed to effortlessly drift out of his throat.
The voice appears to be a gift I received by being with the monks. In Tibetan Buddhism, it is said to be the result of making an offering to the Buddha on a conch shell in a past life. I do not know. In my own dreams, I recall a meeting with the monks in which I was given the voice. During this dreamtime experience, I was told never to misuse the voice for ego or attention. It is perhaps an extraordinary example of 'Harmonic Transmission', a musical power that is transferred directly to a student due to being in the vibratory presence of an expert. (Hightower 2000)


The monks chant the low bass note that is two octaves below middle C, which in effect vibrates at a frequency that resonates harmonics above it to create multiple notes coming from one voice––and for the most part the human ear isn’t sensitive enough to hear all of the resulting harmonics. The harmonics are implied, but not explicitly heard, transmitting the mystical and archetypal images and energies to and from the psyche. The “deep voice chant” (an alternate name for the “one voice chord”) transmits sacred tantric knowledge from the guru to the student, and more importantly, from the student and guru to the world as a way to expand enlightenment to all beings living in all realms.

According to tantric philosophy, and The Tibetan Book of the Dead, there are six bardos: the bardo of life, the bardo of dying, the bardo of dharmata, the bardo of becoming, the bardo of dream, and the bardo of meditation (class lecture notes). Life itself is a bardo state and while we are alive we also experience the bardos of dream and meditation; the one voice chord chanting technique seems to have come to the lamas while in the dream bardo. In order to prepare for entry into the bardo of death, the monks chant and meditate on the prayers and mandalas from The Tibetan Book of the Dead during the bardo of life––as if each of these bardo states are different psychological and imaginal spaces in the tantric web of existence. However, during the bardo of life, meditation on death and non-being is believed to be of the highest importance. In the Mahaparinirvana Sutra, the Buddha says,

Of all footprints
That of the elephant is supreme;
Of all mindfulness meditations
That on death is supreme.


The state of mind that occurs in musicians while performing and composing is analogous to the bardo of meditation. For a musician to play from their soul, they must step away from technique, transcending the rules they are taught and allow for the music to play itself through their instrument. Only through being an open channel of mindfulness can a musician express the most sublime music to guide the souls and psyches of their audience––transporting them, the Tibetan monks, into the higher spheres of enlightenment.

In the life story of Gautama Buddha, Old Path White Clouds, written by Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh, the Buddha meets a group of well-to-do young men who are hell bent on finding a young dancing girl that has stolen their jewels. The Buddha teaches them the concept of mindfulness, turning their need to find and harm the girl towards inner peace and finding themselves. He explains to the young men that they can only find their true selves by being present in the moment, acutely aware of all the colors and sounds around them. The Buddha transmits the lesson of mindfulness through a flute playing demonstration:

The sound was as delicate as a thin strand of smoke curling gently from the roof of a simple dwelling...Slowly the thin strand expanded across space like a gathering of clouds which in turn transformed into a thousand-petalled lotus, each petal a different shimmering color. (Hanh 164)


Even though the Buddha hasn’t physically practiced the flute for many years, the power of the music comes through his playing because he can “look deeply into the heart” (Hanh 121) of everything and see how all things are interconnected.

Playing the flute does not depend solely on practicing the flute. I now play better than in the past because I have found my true self. You cannot reach lofty heights in art if you do not first discover the unsurpassable beauty in your own heart. (Hanh 165)


The three young men, and in fact all of nature surrounding them, are guided toward higher consciousness through the music of the Buddha and his practice of mindfulness meditation.

Arthur Schopenhauer, credited with introducing Indian thought into German philosophy (Schirmacher ix) in the mid-1800’s, also wrote about the power of music in his essay “On The Metaphysics of Music.” He understood music to be the only art form that directly represented the human will in all of its aspects: its suffering, joy, ambivalence, striving. From a tantric point of view, the will isn’t in isolation, it is a part of a mandala that contains the entire universe. The mind must be highly conditioned through meditation and contemplation to truly discern the numinous revelation behind the phenomena of music, and of life.

As the sun needs an eye in order to shine, and music an ear in order to sound, so the worth of every masterpiece in art and science is conditioned by the mind related and equal to it to which it speaks. Only such a mind possesses the incantation to arouse the spirits imprisoned in such a work and make them show themselves. (Hollingdale 225)


Music is revelatory of what lies hidden in the soul of the world and in the soul of each individual being. All other arts were ranked according to a Platonic hierarchy as far as how each art form was a copy, or repetition of something in nature, in the world. Schopenhauer says that music,
is by no means like the other arts, namely a copy of the Ideas, but a copy of the will itself, the objectivity of which are the Ideas. For this reason the effect of music is so very much more powerful and penetrating than is that of the other arts, for these others speak only of the shadow, but music of the essence. (Alperson 157)


From a Jungian perspective, Schopenhauer’s concept of music as mimetic of the will is closely related to the psyche’s process of individuation. In a letter to Pastor Walter Bernet in June of 1955, Jung writes:

The whole course of individuation is dialectical, and the so called “end” is the confrontation with the “emptiness” of the centre. Here the limit of possible experience is reached: the ego dissolves as the reference point of cognition. (Edinger 129)


In The Tibetan Book of the Dead, hearing is one of many vehicles in which the soul is moved through the bardo; during each state that the psyche encounters in the journey, the ego’s projections are dissolved one by one (in a strangely logical sequence) until the “end,” the Great Perfection, is reached. The person who has died is listening to the voice of their guru read the text for seven or more days, despite the fact they no longer possess the physical apparatus they once used for hearing. The sound of liberation in the bardo is the non-linguistic, imaginal version of the “one voice chord” transforming into the insight of linguistic sound:

when the sound of dharmata roars like a thousand thunders,
may it be transformed into the sound of mahayana teachings. (Freemantle 103)


The experiences illustrated in The Tibetan Book of the Dead are universal and at the same time, each person also has unique projections to work through in their lifetime and in the bardo of death. The unconscious contents are both collective and individual, frightening and peaceful. As ego identification dissolves with the death of the body, the mind is free to expand into empty, luminous space. Once the Great Perfection is attained, the mind liberated from projections, and the will liberated from striving, the only sound heard is earth shaking silence.



Works Cited
Alperson, Philip. “Schopenhauer and Musical Revelation.” Journal of Aesthetics & Art Criticism. Dec 81, Vol. 40. Issue 2. 155-167.


Beck, Guy L. Sonic Theology: Hinduism and Sacred Sound. Columbia: U of SC Press,
1993.


Berzin, Alexander. “A Brief History of Gyumay and Gyuto, Lower and Upper Tantric
Colleges.” The Berzin Archives. September 2003. 14 April 2004.



Edinger, Edward F. Eds. Dianne D. Cordic and Charles Yates. The New God-Image:
A Study of Jung’s Key Letters Concerning the Evolution of the Western God-
Image. Wilmette: Chiron Publications, 1996.


Freemantle, Francesca and Chogyam Trungpa. The Tibetan Book of the Dead: The
Great Liberation through Hearing in the Bardo. Boston: Shambhala, 1987.


Hanh, Thich Nhat. Old Path White Clouds: Walking in the Footsteps of the Buddha. Berkeley: Parallax Press, 1991.


Hightower, Thomas. “The One Voice Chord.” November 2000.10 April 2004.
.


Hollingdale, R.J. Arthur Schopenhauer: Essays and Aphorisms. London: Penguin
Group, 1970.


Schirmacher, Wolfgang. Arthur Schopenhauer: Philosophical Writings. New York: Continuum, 1994

Reflexivity: Soulfulness in Methodology

The word “reflexivity” derives from the Medieval Latin reflexivus and from the Latin reflexus (Merriam-Webster Online). The Etymology Dictionary Online gives the definition of reflexus as “a bending back” (Online Etymology Dictionary). The meanings of reflexivity are: something “directed or turned back on itself”; “marked by or capable of reflection”; and “of, related to, characterized by, or being a relation that exists between an entity and itself” (Merriam-Webster Online). Within the meanings of the word “reflexivity,” there are associations with reflections, mirrors, and the play between the unconscious and conscious, the Ego and the Self.

I remember, once upon a time, when I was on the cheerleading team in eighth grade and I had to learn how to do a backbend. Everyday I would lean back as far as I could and put my arms up over my head, but I just did not feel safe to let go, even when I had piles of pillows underneath me to catch my fall.

Then the idea hit me: I could learn to do a backbend off of the diving board into the pool without being hurt. Water was always forgiving because not only did it reflect the surface images, but it also let me see through it to the bottom of things. So, I took a deep breath, bent backwards with my arms over my head and jumped off the board into the cool water. It was my first try and the unbelievable part was that I did a perfect back dive.

Reflecting on my first back dive experience has led me to think about how reflexivity in relation to ethnographic fieldwork and encountering the Other, is both a mirror and a window. The Other can be a mirror of our passions, our frustrations and our biases. In Clifford Geertz’s essay, “‘From the Native's Point of View’: On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding,” he describes an entry from Branislov Malinowski’s journal written while working in the field. Geertz reports that, to many an ethnographer’s dismay, Malinowski “had rude things to say about the natives he was living with, and rude words to say it in. He spent a great deal of time wishing he were elsewhere” (Geertz 50).

Within this example, I sense that Malinowski may have been experiencing anxiety from the mirroring process of integrating the Other. During the mirroring/reflection process the scholar must withdraw their presumptions and projections from the Other, weakening the egocentric position as a result. This “bending back” is certainly uncomfortable at first and will usually incite anger and negative emotions. It is also certain that because of the reflexive nature of scholarship, the Other being studied will most likely have negative feelings towards the researcher. The reflexive relationship transforms the perceptions that both the scholar and the Other hold of one another and their cultures. As Geertz puts it, there is no magical recipe to step into a native’s skin, and even if you tried they would not be too happy about it. Instead Geertz suggests to perceive “with” or “by means of” or “through” (Geertz 52): “The trick is to figure out what the devil they think they are up to” (Geertz 52 ). It is even more important, however, to have a clear idea of what the devil we think we are up to before diving into studying the Other.

In the last session, we discussed Margery Wolf’s work from the feminist perspective and now I wish to direct our attention to her remarks about reflexivity. Wolf says, “experience is messy” (Wolf 355) precisely because all cultures are extremely complex, as well as the individuals studying them.

When human behavior is the data, a tolerance for ambiguity, multiplicity, contradiction, and instability is essential. (Wolf 355)

Therefor, the metaphor of a mirror fails to show the deeper inconsistencies present within a culture; it obscures the Other, and in turn causes the scholar to get lost in their own narcissistic reflection.

Keeping the self distinct from the Other means keeping firm boundaries intact, while at the same time allowing for messiness and projections to exist. The metaphor of a multi-paned, multi-colored window allows for a perspective in which the ethnographer can see through to the Other, while allowing some play with surface reflections on the glass. Sometimes the window panes will be clear and sometimes they will be clouded and distorted, but still the Other “will appear [...] sharply distinct in their differences, yet recognizably human in their resemblances” (Wolf 357; quoting Rosaldo 1989: 39-40).

Like religion and culture, the soul is full of complexity and cannot be viewed in a one-sided fashion, without becoming flat and one-dimensional. Each angle that a scholar uses to view the Other’s soul will contribute to a more realistic and true-to-life, though still imperfect and sometimes paradoxical, interpretation. My sense then is to allow the soul images gathered from fieldwork to live a messy, three-dimensional, multi-valenced life.

So, how can a scholar disclose information, which is essentially their interpretation, about another culture without getting caught up in their own projections? And: Is this even a possibility, or are we just kidding ourselves and putting on the mask of scholarship to cover up our cultural need for self-discovery?

These difficult questions, and more, are tackled by David J. Hufford in his essay, “The Scholarly Voice and the Personal Voice: Reflexivity in Belief Studies,” in which he states:

Reflexivity is a response to the egocentric predicament, and it parallels responses to awareness of the ethnocentric predicament. Both risk mere self-justification, but both have the potential to reveal the culturally-situated, human quality of all knowledge. (Hufford 295)

Knowledge, and its integrity, is at stake when scholars undertake fieldwork without including reflexivity as part of their methodology. Part of this problem is solved by keeping in mind one’s own spiritual beliefs, which are also a sort of bias, while observing the Other and their religious systems. I agree with Hufford that if religion represents a “people’s ultimate concerns,” it is impossible as an observer of an Other’s religion to stay impartial (Hufford 297). He asks, reflexively, “Is disbelief in the study of spiritual belief a view from nowhere?” The answer is decidedly “no” because belief and disbelief both represent a point of view, each with its own set of prejudices. In his book, Interpreting the Sacred, William Paden makes similar remarks in his chapter on “The Contextuality of Interpretation”:

Interpretation is never disembodied. When we see the world and when we see religion we always do so from somewhere. (Paden 111)

When studying an Other’s religion, we are really looking at their soul, and then translating the Other’s images of soul into a vocabulary that comes from our own set of beliefs, our own categories and language. Paden calls this phenomenon “the hermeneutic circle,” and goes on to say “that what we say about any object is already interwoven with what we have asked and assumed about it” (Paden 116).

To be honest, I have been interested in the topic of reflexivity because of my own deepest doubts about doing fieldwork in Brazil for my dissertation topic on Candomble. Candomble, like all religions, is complex and messy. For example, in Candomble there are many different nations, depending on which part of Africa their set of beliefs come from. Presently, some Candomble houses, called terrieros, are calling to remove the Catholic saints from the religion and worship the orixas directly, while others wish to keep the traditional ways intact, which developed out of experiences during the slave trade.

I will also be dealing with the fact that I am a female drummer, and therefor may often be excluded from my preferred mode of participation in many Candomble houses. Through pre-dissertation research, I have learned that even though women are highly regarded in Candomble, they traditionally do not play drums during ritual. Their role is to trance dance and become the horse for the orixas to mount. This bothers me because I am used to playing whenever and wherever I wish, within reason. I’m also not partial to be excluded from activities because of my gender. As much as this feels like “patriarchal oppression,” it is part of the reality of the Candomble tradition which I must respect in spite of my personal feelings and cultural biases regarding gender issues.

Like other scholars working in the field of ethnography, abroad and at home, I will need to be aware of as many of my biases and presumptions as I possibly can. I will also need to be aware that no matter how much preliminary research I conduct before starting my fieldwork, I will never be prepared for the messiness that will naturally occur. All I can do is back dive in with my eyes, arms and heart wide open, and enjoy the dialogue that emerges from multiple views.

Works Cited
Geertz, Clifford. “‘From the Natives Point of View’ : On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding.” The Insider/Outsider Problem in the Study of Religion: A Reader. Ed. Russell T. McCutcheon. London & New York: Cassell, 1999. 50-67.

Hufford, David J. “The Scholarly Voice and the Personal Voice: Reflexivity in Belief Studies.” The Insider/Outsider Problem in the Study of Religion: A Reader. Ed. Russell T. McCutcheon. London & New York: Cassell, 1999. 294-310.

Merriam-Webster Online. “Reflexivity.” 8 April 2005.
.

Online Etymology Dictionary. “Reflexus.” 8 April 2005.
.

Paden, William E. Interpreting the Sacred: Ways of Viewing Religion. Boston: Beacon Press, 2003.

Wolf, Margery. “Writing Ethnography: The Poetics and Politics of Culture.” The Insider/Outsider Problem in the Study of Religion: A Reader. Ed. Russell T. McCutcheon. London & New York: Cassell, 1999. 354-361.

The Postmodern Apocalypse and Dionysian Rebirth

How many times has the human race killed God? In the course syllabus, two particular historical moments are recalled:
In the late nineteenth century Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God. Two thousand years earlier Plutarch reported in similar fashion that “Great Pan is dead.” (Slater, Class Syllabus)

From a larger, telescopic perspective(1) , God lives whether or not humans kill him/her/it. God does not die, in the literal sense. Rather, like Christ, Dionysus and Osiris, a god image is killed, dismembered, and then remembered and resurrected. This particular mythic pattern may be superimposed upon many times, places and things. The fertility of the Nile, the awakening of spring out of winter and the renewal of the spirit through baptism, all follow the pattern of birth, death and rebirth. This myth is uroboric and signifies a continual, cyclical transformation of psychic and physical reality.

On the other hand, each particular time in history has its own microscopic perspective of God and its own way of killing him/her/it off. For the present time, and in the American culture, the prevailing mythos has a Christian apocalyptic flavor. I am using the word “flavor” because I cannot say that the American modern mythos is Christian; the early Christian movement itself sprung out of a Jewish and Gnostic matrix, and at that time emphasized newness, new life, rebirth.

In class, James Hillman discussed the “curse of newness” in relation to the notion of a new myth. Part of Hillman’s thinking is that Nietzsche’s “God is dead” proclamation has not permeated the culture. We have not cleared away the old god image to make room for the new one to arise; the dead, dismembered carcass of the old god image needs to be buried and laid to rest. Although, Hillman’s idea is potent and intriguing, I would like to add that this dead god image is waiting to be resurrected, not buried.

Within apocalyptic thinking and discourse there is a “link between the end of the world and its renewal” (Kumar 202); this renewed world has been referred to as Utopia or the New Jerusalem. The end times are signaled by catastrophic events which are followed by an idealized vision of peace, beauty and unity on earth. In Christian fundamentalism, the end times will be heralded by the Rapture, the time when certain Christian individuals will be “beamed up” (BBC Online 2005) by Jesus into heaven, along with their bodies. After this event, there will be great wars and destruction of the natural world, called the Great Tribulation, for anyone “left behind.” The powerful imagery in the scenario of the Rapture is that the body is taken up to heaven, along with the spirit, paralleling closely to the myth of Dionysus.

In a world that disregards the body and the earth itself, it is no surprise that the Destructor and the Savior comes in the form of Christ for modern fundamentalist Christians, and Dionysus for some who are more psychologically and polytheistically inclined; both Christ and Dionysus represent God incarnate. In Christian theology, Christ rises from his grave and is taken up to heaven in corporeal form. Dionysus is dismembered and killed by the Titans and later remembered and brought back to life as fully divine by Zeus.

Another myth of Dionysus features his journey into the lower realm, Hades, to bring his mother, Semele up to Mount Olympus. The drama begins with Dionysus’ traumatic birth. Hera tricked Semele into requesting Zeus to show himself to her in all of his glory, and of course, Semele’s mortal frame turns to ash when the radiance, the heat emanating from her God-Lover, hits her body. Semele “possesses some of her son’s qualities–such as the tendency to annihilate individual boundaries (including her own) and merge with the void” (Strong 2001).

Dionysus is associated with the initiation rites of birth and death, and is a god that is paradoxical in so many ways. He is the postmodern poster-child of the gods, so to speak, because he is “twice born”: “so beneath the lightning flashes of Dionysus grew the certainty that the enigmatic god, the spirit of a dual nature and of paradox, had a human mother and, therefore, was already by his birth a native of two realms” (Otto 73).

A postmodern apocalypse does not emphasize a final vision of the new world, just an endless, solipsistic collapsing upon itself. Hillman’s desire to cleanse away the old, dead god may be a release from an endless ending: “the postmodern apocalypse comes not with a bang but a whimper. It is a version of the apocalypse that dwells obsessively on the end, without any expectation of a new beginning. It is, Jacques Derrida has said approvingly, ‘ an apocalypse without vision’, without redemptive hope; it is ‘an end without an end’” (Kumar 207).

In spite of the postmodern vision of the end of the world, a new myth of god is being reborn, and I can feel the labor pangs in the emerging imagery that makes my heart shudder and pulse quicken, both in fear and ecstasy.
In Dionysian anthropology the heart muscle is like an internal maenad in the body of the possessed, constantly leaping within. (Detienne 59)

The throbbing, beating heart muscle is the receptacle of the soul, and if the new god image is related to Dionysus, then this is the location from whence comes all living, breathing images. The heart is also, according to Hillman in The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World, the eyes through which humanity sees beauty. “Beauty is that great category which specifically refers to the Deus revelatus, “the supreme theophany, divine self-revelation” (Hillman 43).

The Dionysian quality of rebirth is epiphanic; it is the sudden unveiling of revelation after the apocalyptic event. Friederich Nietzsche describes the unity and harmony of a New World, so longed for by humanity, in his Dionysian/Apollonic analysis, “The Birth of Tragedy.”

Now that the gospel of universal harmony is sounded, each individual becomes not only reconciled to his fellow but actually at one with him–as though the veil of Maya had been torn apart and there remained only shreds floating before the vision of mystical Oneness. (Nietzsche 23)

One vision of the apocalypse, which is inclusive of the new god image, is highlighted in the HBO program, “Carnivàle,” in which the struggle between good and evil, Christ and the Antichrist is dramatized over the backdrop of pre-World War II (and the dropping of the nuclear bomb), depression America.

The main character is a beaten-down young vagrant named Ben Hawkins, who works and travels in a carnival. He is a hands-on healer; however, in order to give life, he must also take it. It is the paradox of life and death that Hawkins holds in his hands, and relates him to Dionysus and the Messiah. Hawkins and the carnival move from town to town, searching for clues about who the Antichrist is and how to kill him. It becomes increasingly clear that the Antichrist is connected to a great weapon, "A false sun wrought by the hands of men" (Carnivàle Official Website 2005). Hawkins is told that something is going to happen at Trinity–the first test site of the nuclear weapon. Again, the show pulls in Christian symbolism and theology to create the pre-Apocalyptic world, just before the Great Tribulation, which will be signaled by the use of nuclear weapons.

The Antichrist is a powerful, fundamentalist preacher named Brother Justin Crowe. Crowe, like Hawkins, has supernatural powers. He is not a healer, but has apocalyptic visions and the power to take over a person’s will. In one episode, he carves a giant tree into his chest that he sees in a recurring dream. The tree is an important symbol for The Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden. Crowe builds his mighty church and congregation under the shadow of this dream-tree and calls the place, the New Eden and New Jerusalem.

Through this power Crowe becomes connected to local, powerful government officials, in a way associating him with Cronos and Titanism–Crowe has now fully stepped into his inflated power and starts to seek out the One who is meaning to kill him, Hawkins.

The plot also features symbolism of the Templars and Masons. One of the most powerful Templars in the show is Hawkin’s father Henry Scudder, who is murdered by Crowe as a way to absorb his powers. Another main character, Sophie, who becomes Hawkins’ lover, and later turns out to be Crowe’s own daughter, is said to be “the Omega,” and Hawkins is “the Alpha.” The name Sophie itself is connected to Sophia, goddess of wisdom. Notably, in alchemical and Cabalistic sacred text, Sophia is the divine consort and feminine counterpart of God.

In “Carnivàle,” the eclectic use of symbols and images from many myths, paint a dreamlike image of Apocalyptic events. In the god image of Dionysus/Christ, is “pathos, the Greek root of our word “suffering,” originally meant “something that happens,” “experiences,” a being moved and the capacity to be moved” (Mogenson 26, quoting Hillman). A god image cannot take hold of our hearts, or take possession of our souls, unless it moves us. The sublimity of a god image is traumatizing because experiencing the sublime, or experiencing the numinous, can be both beautiful and terrifying.

The boundary between humans and the god image is slowly being taken down, perhaps bringing us closer to a symbolic apocalyptic annihilation, as opposed to a literal one. This is a transgression, and as such, it makes sense that people first need a sense of safety in order to resuscitate and resurrect God. Dionysus obliterates boundaries, while at the same time liberating both spirit and matter from the confines of a dull, Titanic materialism. The sacrifice to the God that will bring him/her/it back to life, is our willingness to withstand chaos, staggering ambiguity and wild imperfection.

(1) “Through microscope we see details of culture, through telescope we see unifying themes.” Doniger, Wendy. The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth, page 10.

Works Cited

“About the Show.” Carnivàle Official Show Website. 25 March 2005.


Detienne, Marcel. Dionysos At Large. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge:
Harvard U P, 1989 .

Hillman, James. The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World. Dallas:
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