Dionysus-in-Chief: A Deeper Dive into Trickster

The velociraptors have learned to turn the door handles.
—Jeffry Goldberg, Editor-in-Chief, The Atlantic

“I need the kind of generals that Hitler had.” So said Donald J. Trump to his Chief of Staff John Kelly. If reelected, he may not find such generals at the Pentagon. But he has them lined up to staff the Oval Office and much of the federal government, many of them Trump-pardoned convicted felons, a plan laid out in Project 2025.

This time the velociraptors will know how to turn the door handles.

If con man Trump has all the personality traits of Trickster, the archetype he embraces is not Hermes, “the friendliest of gods” as the Homeric Hymn calls him, but the most extreme of Tricksters, Dionysus, who often sows nothing but chaos. For the Jungian Karl Kerenyi, Dionysus represents instinctual forces in the psyche that lie outside the bounds of all things civilized (Dionysos: Archetypal Image of the Indestructible Life).

Which could serve as Trump’s epitaph:

Instinctual Forces in the Psyche that Lie
Outside the Bounds of All Things Civilized

The Trickster archetype is complicated, and it is dynamic. The Trickster cycle starts with a naïf, an innocent who bumbles his way into creating or enriching culture. “In one Native American creation story,” writes Lewis Hyde, the Great Spirit speaks to Coyote about the coming of human beings:

“The New People will not know anything when they come, not how to dress, how to sing, how to shoot an arrow. You will show them how to do all these things. And put the buffalo out for them and show them how to catch salmon.” (Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art, 8-9).

In the Northwest Native myths, he invents the traps and weirs to catch salmon. Then, ever the fool, swims into one himself.

Hyde, in his superb study of the Trickster archetype, seeks to explain

a paradox that the myth asserts: that the origins, liveliness, and durability of cultures require that there be space for figures whose function is to uncover and disrupt the very things that cultures are based on. I hope to give some sense of how this can be, how social life can depend on treating antisocial characters as part of the sacred. (9)

But the Native American Winnebago Trickster archetype traces a cycle where the naïf bungler becomes something much darker. For Jung he is an “approximation to the figure of a savior.” But as the embodiment of our Shadow, “although he is not really evil, he does the most atrocious things from sheer unconsciousness and unrelatedness.” That’s where the Trickster cycle heads, toward “atrocious things from sheer unconsciousness and unrelatedness.”

Unrelatedness? Trump to a Tee.

Whereas many Native traditions offer a cycle in which the naïve bungler becomes dangerous, the Greeks split the charming Trickster from the dark one. Both sons of Zeus, Hermes’s half-brother Dionysus plays that dark role.

For Jung, the Shadow is where we stow those behaviors we feel the need to deny. Good boys don't hate their brothers, says Mom, so we push our sibling rivalry down into the unconscious. But for Jung, “what we do not bring to consciousness we act out as fate.” Brought to consciousness, our instinctive lives enrich culture. Perhaps in this instance, acknowledging our anger we develop a richer relationship with our sibling, one that builds upon the rivalry. Left in the unconscious, the Shadow festers. Cain slays Abel.

Dionysus, Light and Dark

Dionysus is a nature god, the oldest extant symbol in western culture, symbolized by the grape cultivation and wine fabrication he innovated. Dionysian intoxication represents transformation and rebirth, a challenge to hyperrationality. As Dionysus Eleutherius (“the liberator”), his wine, music, and ecstatic dance free his followers from fear and care and subvert the oppressive restraints of the powerful. He is an outsider, known as “the god who comes.” His coming is always an epiphany, always presenting himself in his charismatic state. He is “Bromios,” the loud-roarer. He takes the form of the panther and the bull.

Myth does not record that Dionysus ever before sported an orange tan.

But promising innovation fueled by intoxication, all he brings sometimes is chaos. In Euripides’s The Bacchae, intent on loyalty he incites regicide. Dionysian intoxication inspires his cousin Agavê to murder her son, the hyperrational king of Thebes, and to eat his flesh. She breaks the trifecta of taboos: eating raw flesh, filicide, and regicide. Dionysus’s own little January 6.

Autocrats in history rode in triumph as the “New Dionysus” to mobilize their base. Marc Anthony rode into Ephesus and Athens draped in grape leaves and carrying Dionysus’s staff, the thyrsus, and promising to renew the republic. What he sought was its end. Dionysus inspired two more autocrats, Caligula and Nero, to parade as the New Dionysus. Perhaps tweeting is the new fiddling, except that Nero’s fiddling was feckless, without purpose. Autocrats parade as Dionysus with purpose, to marshal their base.

In the Homeric Hymn, Hermes farts in his brother Apollo’s face, a perfect summation of improvisation’s playful response to decorum and rational limits. Here, on the other hand, is internationally acclaimed Chinese sculptor Chen Wenling’s portrait of a Dionysian fart. The bull’s victim, wearing the horns that in Trickster lore often morph from Hermes’s winged helmet, perhaps is Dionysus’s half-brother Hermes.

Hermes is the Shadow coming to consciousness. Dionysus is inveterate, stuck Shadow. When it assumes total control, watch out. When its autocratic control is sanctioned by the Supreme Court, take to your bomb shelters.

Pachinko and the Shadow

In a series of books and audio books, Jungian analyst and scholar Murray Stein has been exploring the Jungian imagery and symbolism in the globally popular BTS.

It is with that in mind that I read the folktale that ends Apple+’s second season of the superb series Pachinko.

Sunja, whom we have watched grow from a spunky kid in Yeongdo, Korea to a long-suffering family matriarch in post-war Osaka, Japan, tells her son about the Chollimas, the Chinese mythological flying horses that could travel 300 miles in a single day:

When I was little my father told me about the horses that used to run wild in Yeongdo. Chollimas. Night and day they would run. So fast their shadows couldn't keep up, and their bodies had to split from their shadows.  

I wonder sometimes why do some people in this world manage to survive while others do not? Is it those who find their shadows and those who don't? Because a body cannot live without its shadow. Those shadows tell us where we are.

Whatever it is, you and I are here.

Whatever it is, coming to consciousness or unreconstructed, we need our Shadow. It tells us where we are.

Where we are now is either enriching culture, renewing our democracy, or tearing it down. Think ill of those who would tear it down, motivated by fear and anger at NAFTA and globalization that is then ratcheted up by Trump and social media. But listen to them we must. They are our Shadow, unheard and running wild. If we listen to them, then they too can be “figures whose function is to uncover and disrupt the very things that cultures are based on” and so renew it.

But if Trump wins, Katie bar the door.