THEBIRTH OFTRAGEDY 1041
Dionysiac forces subdued them. Doric art has immortalized Apollo’s majestic rejection
of all license. But resistance became difficult, even impossible, as soon as similar urges
began to break forth from the deep substratum of Hellenism itself. Soon the function of
the Delphic god developed into something quite different and much more limited: all he
could hope to accomplish now was to wrest the destructive weapon, by a timely gesture
of pacification, from his opponent’s hand. That act of pacification represents the most
important event in the history of Greek ritual; every department of life now shows symp-
toms of a revolutionary change. The two great antagonists have been reconciled. Each
feels obliged henceforth to keep to his bounds, each will honor the other by the bestowal
of periodic gifts, while the cleavage remains fundamentally the same. And yet, if we
examine what happened to the Dionysiac powers under the pressure of that treaty we
notice a great difference: in the place of the Babylonian Sacaea, with their throwback of
men to the condition of apes and tigers, we now see entirely new rites celebrated: rites of
universal redemption, of glorious transfiguration. Only now has it become possible to
speak of nature’s celebrating an aesthetic triumph; only now has the abrogation of the
principium individuationisbecome an aesthetic event. That terrible witches’ brew con-
cocted of lust and cruelty has lost all power under the new conditions. Yet the peculiar
blending of emotions in the heart of the Dionysiac reveler—his ambiguity if you will—
seems still to hark back (as the medicinal drug harks back to the deadly poison) to the
days when the infliction of pain was experienced as joy while a sense of supreme tri-
umph elicited cries of anguish from the heart. For now in every exuberant joy there is
heard an undertone of terror, or else a wistful lament over an irrecoverable loss. It is as
though in these Greek festivals a sentimental trait of nature were coming to the fore, as
though nature were bemoaning the fact of her fragmentation, her decomposition into
separate individuals. The chants and gestures of these revelers, so ambiguous in their
motivation, represented an absolute novumin the world of the Homeric Greeks; their
Dionysiac music, in especial, spread abroad terror and a deep shudder. It is true: music
had long been familiar to the Greeks as an Apollonian art, as a regular beat like that of
waves lapping the shore, a plastic rhythm expressly developed for the portrayal of
Apollonian conditions. Apollo’s music was a Doric architecture of sound—of barely
hinted sounds such as are proper to the cithara. Those very elements which characterize
Dionysiac music and, after it, music quite generally: the heart-shaking power of tone,
the uniform stream of melody, the incomparable resources of harmony—all those ele-
ments had been carefully kept at a distance as being inconsonant with the Apollonian
norm. In the Dionysiac dithyramb man is incited to strain his symbolic faculties to the
utmost; something quite unheard of is now clamoring to be heard: the desire to tear
asunder the veil of Maya, to sink back into the original oneness of nature; the desire to
express the very essence of nature symbolically. Thus an entirely new set of symbols
springs into being. First all the symbols pertaining to physical features: mouth, face, the
spoken word, the dance movement which coordinates the limbs and bends them to its
rhythm. Then suddenly all the rest of the symbolic forces—music and rhythm as such,
dynamics, harmony—assert themselves with great energy. In order to comprehend this
total emancipation of all the symbolic powers one must have reached the same measure
of inner freedom those powers themselves were making manifest; which is to say that
the votary of Dionysos could not be understood except by his own kind. It is not difficult
to imagine the awed surprise with which the Apollonian Greek must have looked on
him. And that surprise would be further increased as the latter realized, with a shudder,
that all this was not so alien to him after all, that his Apollonian consciousness was but a
thin veil hiding from him the whole Dionysiac realm.