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Sophocles's Oedipus Tyrannus, produced during the plague years in Athens, tells the story of a king discovering that he has caused the plague on his city by unconsciously re-enacting ancestral crimes. This paper uses the myth of Oedipus to explore the question: how has the "king," ruling principle of our age, led us into our current crisis in which a pandemic is unfolding? This paper traces the historical context of the Oedipus myth as a quintessential expression of the tragic paradoxes of consciousness and unconsciousness in what Jung called the Age of the Son and Greek cosmogonies called the Age of Zeus. This paper extends an earlier paper exploring Orphic cosmogonies as archetypal expressions of the revolution of consciousness occurring in this age, attended by the evolution of hemispheric lateralization in our brains and the dominance of the left hemisphere, spurred by literacy. The archetype of Oedipus chose Freud, who acted out the myth in abandoning his "seduction theory," and rendered the reality of ancestral crimes unfolding in childhood trauma to an abstract theory based in literal biology. However, Freud also unmasked the fiction of the ego's centrality in the psyche and established the reality of the unconscious. Psychoanalysis reopened the ancient Theater of Dionysos, a sacred rite of catharsis that transforms trauma into healing self-knowledge and reconnection in a divine cosmos, the unus mundus. Jung's journey as recorded in The Red Book and Oedipus's in Sophocles's Oedipus at Colonus show us the hero/ego as initiate, contrasted with Freud's hero/ego as dragon slayer; they offer us a path into a new age. This new age is hinted at in the Orphic cosmogony, described by Jerome Bernstein as an evolving "borderland" consciousness, and is expressed by Jung as the Age of the Holy Spirit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The drama of King Pentheus, ritual adversary and victim of the god Dionysos in Euripides's Bacchae, bears striking resemblance to the drama of the alcoholic-addict in the progression of his or her disease. The chorus of the Bacchae sings of the holy rites and ancient wisdom that could cure the "madness" of Pentheus, in which resonances with the tenets of Alcoholics Anonymous can be found. In a larger context, the Bacchae is also the nightmare of the end of what the Greeks called the Age of Zeus, our present age, characterized by the increasing hemispheric lateralization of our cerebral cortex and the hyperdevelopment and dominance of our left-hemispheric powers of abstract reasoning. This neurological evolution transformed human consciousness and reality according to its logos, rejecting and banishing to the unconscious the mythos of the knowing body: the heart, the gut, and all our embodied, direct, holistic powers of perceiving. This transformation of consciousness is described archetypally in three myths of the god Dionysos's birth. These depict how the god of life was dismembered to become an abstract, deathless Olympian; the soot and ashes of the Titans from which humans were made; and the literal form of the god, that is, wine. In our Western psychohistorical and cultural history, these myths depict the rescue of the idealized, masculine, impenetrable hero/ego from the vicissitudes of mortal life. Over time, the archaic meaning of initiation and of "hero" as initiated human embedded in community and the lineage of ancestors, was lost in the glorification of the ideal Apollonian hero's power to escape the limitations of embodiment by making others (or the unconscious/body) suffer and die for him. This article explores the necessity to re-member the dismembered incarnate god from the shadows of the abandoned body of need and desire for communion. AA offers a template for the acceptance of essential limitation and personal suffering as initiation into experience of the embodied divine in and through community as well as in individual relationship with a greater reality. Such initiatory practices constitute rebirth in a divine self and world, described by Jung as the inauguration of the Age of the Holy Spirit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A. Marina Aguilar’s Alchemy of the Heart: The Sacred Marriage of Dionysos & Ariadne offers a study of the archetypal myth of Dionysos through the lens of Jung’s spiritual alchemy. Focusing on the sacred marriage of Dionysos and Ariadne, the author illuminates the journey to wholeness, both horizontal and vertical, that culminates in the coniunctio of opposites, which has the power to heal not only a broken psyche on the road to individuation but also a broken world mired in destructive hedonism, deformed sexuality, and environmental crises. This is a penetrating reading of an archetypal Greek myth brought to life by a Jungian psychotherapist that is itself Dionysian in its analysis and insights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]