S.

Rowland

and discovery. Such work unites individual subjectivity with objective collectivity, whether the
collective is of the unknown psyche or of human disciplinary knowledge. As Jung notes:

The essential character of hermeneutics, a science which was widely practiced in

former times, consists in making successive additions of other analogies to the analogy
given in the symbol: in the first place of subjective analogies found by the analyst in
the course of erudite research … in which certain ‘lines’ of psychological development
stand out as possibilities that are at once individual and collective. There is no science
on earth by which these lines could be proved ‘right’. Their validity is proved by their
intense value for life.
(1916: §495)

In espousing ‘intense value for life’, Jung is talking the language of a hermeneutics reaching
beyond Hermes to a more somatically rejuvenating deity. It is time to recognize the presence of
Dionysus animating Hockley’s cinematic frame.

Dionysus and dismembering/remembering for Jung and film

We come to Dionysus in film by way of psychologist James Hillman’s ground changing percep-
tion that this boundary transgressing god signifies a radical deconstruction of being to Jung. In
‘Dionysus in Jung’s Writings’, Hillman points out that Jung stresses ‘dismemberment’ as his key
narrative in the many stories of Dionysus (1972/2007). In Jung’s version, Hillman sees a possib-
ility of psychic rejuvenation in the corporeal dismembering of an ageing god. The god ripe for
dismemberment is for Hillman an Apollonian version of monotheism. ‘He’ is ageing because his
Apollonian distancing devices such as empiricism have become arid because they are too long
taken the dominant way of knowing. In his loneliness, ‘he’ condemns us to an over-­emphasis of
rational knowing and separateness taken to excess. The result is a repression of bodily and
instinctual life with tragic results for psychic wellbeing.
Born from an illicit union of mortal, Semele, and god, Zeus, baby Dionysus is ripped apart
by the titans, instigated by Hera, Zeus’s jealous wife. Rhea, daughter of Earth goddess, Gaia and
sky god Uranus re-­members the divine child. Subsequently, of course, Dionysus inspires what
he has suffered: for refusing to worship this dangerous deity, Pentheus is torn to pieces by
maenads, women maddened by Dionysian rites. Those who do not make a place for Dionysian
excesses in being are at risk of being dismembered by the savagery they have defied.
According to Hillman, Jung sees a two stage dismembering process: first comes a division into
opposites, such as the very notion of the Apollonian and Dionysian itself. Less prominent in Jung’s
writing is the second stage of Dionysian dismemberment, the god is scattered into pieces. There-
fore Hillman’s understanding of Jung’s Dionysus shows a dualistic opposition transfigured into
multiplicity. The god is dismembered, seeding the divine in matter. To both Jung and Hillman
inspired matter is archetypal, the multiplicity of psychic archetypes. As Jung comments: ‘Dionysus
is the abyss of impassioned dissolution, where all human distinctions are merged in the animal
divinity of the primordial psyche – a blissful and terrible experience’ (1944: §118).
Dionysus re-­forms, is re-­membered, in order to renew consciousness. Instead of a distant
divinity that has lost contact with the human psyche, a god of frenzy or of the shady woods (like
a darkened cinema) is torn apart to re-­member the divine in nature, including human nature.
Dionysus dismembered can find his way from the wild woods to the somatic cinematic frame as
I will show. He does so in the material presence of symbols rooted in the body and inspired,
in-­spirited, by movies.

30
 Dionysus and textuality

For Hillman we enter a new cosmos with the dispersed fragments of the body of the god
(1983/2007, p. 26). Distance from the divine is replaced, re-­placed, by interiority and animistic
multiplicity within the domain of the god. We are inside his instinctual being that also has a
home within us. ‘The movement between the first and second view of dismemberment com-
pares with crossing a psychic border between seeing the god from outside or from within his
cosmos’ (ibid., p. 26).
Do we not similarly experience film as a confounding of inside and outside? Cinema promotes
a sense of entry into the magical space of film, which we then take away as renewed interiority.
Symptomatically, Hillman notes that zoe, the life force of the body in Eros, is roused by this process
of divine dismemberment (ibid., p. 29). This new consciousness, or zoe, is an intimation of whole-
ness that does not remove differences. New enlivening zoe is animistic in a particular awareness of
its own partial consciousness, e.g. aware of itself as parts. Hillman comments:

Rather the crucial experience would be the awareness of the parts as parts distinct from
each other, dismembered, each with its own light, a state in which the body becomes
conscious of itself as a composite of differences. The scintillae and fishes eyes of which
Jung speaks … may be experienced as embedded in physical expressions. The distribu-
tion of Dionysus through matter may be compared with the distribution of conscious-
ness through members, organs, and zones.
(ibid., p. 28)

Renewed consciousness returns in Jung’s work as dismembered Dionysus, the fragmented

divine body seeding the universe with its archetypes, and so too film in the ‘third image’ acti-
vates bodily and instinctual life. But this is not all, since the Greek pantheon itself is by nature
polytheistic. One god alone makes no sense, is nonsense. It is no accident that these gods are
involved with each other, incestuous, quarrelsome and unable to leave humans alone. They
must be mated or related.
Dionysus brings with his energies a relation to human vulnerability. He rescues a forlorn
woman, Ariadne, who was abandoned by her lover, Theseus. She becomes his wife and is
deified. Here too is a suggestion that Dionysian renewal is a taste of the sacred; that cinema is a
path to rejuvenation because its symbolic properties transcend human limitations, just as a film
can outlive us.
Archetypalist Karl Kerenyi puts it this way, ‘Just as Dionysos is the archetypal reality of zoe,
so Ariadne is the archetypal reality of the bestowal of soul, of what makes a living creature an
individual’ (1976, p. 124). He describes zoe as instinctual life experienced without limits, just as
cinema takes us beyond our creaturely incarnation to other worlds (ibid., p. xxxvi). To Kerenyi,
Ariadne wedding Dionysus is the marriage of instinctual differentiated life force with soul focus
and the compassion of a human animal with its creaturely limits. Ariadne ensouls Dionysian zoe,
gives it humanity just as Hockley describes happening in the consulting room. There patients
possessed by Dionysian film symbols need to make a marriage with their actual pains, histories
and lives.
Ariadne, or the feminine, makes Dionysian limitlessness creaturely, bearable, experienceable. I
will propose that the marriage of Ariadne and Dionysus makes the rejuvenation by zoe knowable.
In this way Hockley’s third image becomes a Dionysian hermeneutics. It is a way of knowing film
texts by being dismembered by them, and re-­membered in the consulting room or wherever and
however we find ways to humanize those beyond-­human properties of cinema. To provide an
academic context for film’s Dionysian hermeneutics, I will introduce transdisciplinarity. First
approach to transdisciplinarity is by a closer look at the third image as Jungian symbols.

31
 S. Rowland

Holding symbols as Ariadne marriage to Dionysus

Whether a thing is a symbol or not depends chiefly on the attitude of the observing
consciousness; for instance, on whether it regards a given fact not merely as such but
also as an expression for something unknown.
( Jung, 1921: §818)

I suggest that Dionysian dismemberment as Jung and Hillman together see it is a fundamental
condition of fragmented modern consciousness that is directly addressed by the cinematic frame
and larger contexts. For not only does dismemberment haunt the fragile modern Western ego,
but it also pervades knowledge itself through its splintering into academic disciplines. So let us
consider the psychology of both Jung and Hillman as offering the opportunity of zoe as rejuve-
nated consciousness, by remembering the Dionysian body as parts.
Such remembering occurs individually in patients in psychotherapy, and, I have suggested,
collectively in the cinema. Could this psychic rejuvenation also happen collectively in academia
by re-­modelling disciplines as parts of a never entirely knowable (and so divine), body? It would
mean that the urge to know would be infused with the desire to be alive, just as cinema provides
such a Dionysian initiation.
Three aspects this mythical perspective on knowing could contribute to re-­membering dis-
ciplines as parts, which would, at the very least, re-­member film studies in relation to its adjacent
forms of knowing. They are the role of symbols in wedding immanent and transcendent modes
of being, Ariadne as symbol of feminine ensoulment of zoe, and, third, transdisciplinarity, which
will be considered below.
First of all, on the symbol: Jung saw its most defining quality as its capacity to express some-
thing unknown that wants to come into being. His symbols are dynamic and alive. They provide
what Hillman calls zoe, an experience of instinctual life, in their rebirthing of consciousness. As
Jung comments: ‘A symbol really lives only when it is the best and highest expression for some-
thing divined but not yet known to the observer. It then compels his unconscious participation
and has a life-­giving and life-­enhancing effect’ (ibid.: §819).
Jung’s reference here to the ‘best and highest’ is a clue to the symbol’s ability to unite tran-
scendence and immanence. For a symbol’s route to the unknown invokes the archetypal qual-
ities of psyche, those capacities possess roots in the instinctual body, while also extending to the
realm of spirit and rational knowing. In this context, even academic disciplinary concepts are
symbols when they do not forget their connection to the ‘living mystery’. As Jung puts it: ‘We
have to break down life and events, which are self-­contained processes, into meanings, images,
concepts, well knowing that in doing so we are getting further away from the living mystery’
(1922: §121).
Dionysus is the mythical embodiment of such ‘living mystery’ (ibid.). It follows that if know-
ledge can break down life and events into parts that retain awareness of the living mystery, then
that knowledge, written in symbols is Dionysian re-­membering. Such a renewed vision of the
array of different disciplines to be found in universities would return zoe to learning itself.
Such a reanimation of disciplinary relations as would see them as parts joined by immersion
in living mystery, in the body of knowledge as dismembering, remembering Dionysus, rather
than distant, dead Apollo. Such knowledge in zoe will be written in symbols. ‘Since every
scientific theory contains an hypothesis … it is a symbol’ (1921: §817). On the other hand,
Dionysus is a dangerous god to approach too closely, or to offend. Limitless instinctual life as
consciousness sounds like a prelude to a maenad condition of inhuman frenzy. Zoe must be
ensouled, so that Dionysus enters the human world through compassionate love, rather than

32