The Rolling Stones and Philosophy_ It's Just a Thought Away - Luke Dick [138]
That’s when “history” began, but there was definitely civilization of a highly complex sort long before there was writing. They had cities and politics and agriculture and markets and probably even rock’n’roll. I’m not kidding. Music, dance, and art came along way before writing, so if not practitioners of the oldest profession in the world, the Stones are certainly in the first five—along with the priests, politicians, and pimps (that’s only one profession, if you go back far enough, or if you read between the lines in the present).
Some scholars believe that our civilized pre-history was, gasp, organized around the sense and vision of the females of the race. “Matriarchy” may not be quite the right word for it, since the idea that women “ruled” would be a very manly interpretation of what was going on. It might be truer to say that women were “civilized” and men had to be “managed”—and note that “man” is the operative location of all management. Back in the day, an otherwise sensible Swiss scholar named Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815–1887) pretty much ruined his own life by suggesting that the evidence points to the existence of whole civilizations in which the Crone, the Mother, and the Maiden were the central figures of reverence—and of authority, such as it was. Bachofen was mainly ignored, but some took the trouble to mock him.
Frankly, I don’t know whether the “civilization of the goddess” (as it was called by the archaeologist Marija Gimbutas) ever existed, and I don’t need to know. What I’m sure of is that the stories of the orgiastic rites of the fertility cults that do survive point very clearly to a deep division that is still alive and well in our present civilization, a division between heavy-handed control (patriarchy), and whatever opposes that, which upsets the patriarchy and gets condemned and persecuted by the control freaks. Both The Beatles and The Stones tapped into that division, as had Elvis before them. Their prancing for the girls puts male insecurities on public display, but to be a man in a male-dominated civilization is to carry that division within yourself.
Bachofen had a young friend, none other than Friedrich Nietzsche, who became obsessed by this “division,” which he called the Apollonian and the Dionysian energies. Nietzsche didn’t care for the womanly aspects of the Dionysian, but he was fascinated by the way that the Dionysian energies kept popping up and breaking out into the frenzy. Apollonian energy is regimentation and order. Dionysian energy is the overflow of life energy, the accursed share. Every time the lovers of control get the upper hand, the cult of Dionysus springs up again, and like Keith said, there is just no stopping that energy. What happened in the 1960s has happened many, many times before. The Stones rode a wave of Dionysian energy that would not be bottled up by a heavy handed, patriarchal Cold War. But if loose lips sink ships, big lips offer a wagging tongue to the danger. The god that sacrifices himself will have his day. But long before this oscillation of Apollo and Dionysus, there was at least five thousand years of something else.
Mother’s Little Helpers
There was a Cambridge scholar and philosopher named Jane Ellen Harrison (1850–1928) who wrote a whole bunch of books that trace the development of Greek religion from a swampy matriarchy up through the age of the Olympian gods that we all know, the age that Nietzsche talked about. The pivotal figure in her story was indeed Dionysus, the god of the vine, and yes, of the frenzy and the orgy, and he was the holy child of the Mother (the central manifestation of the goddess); the holy infant was the original man-child, the child hero, and the sacrificial victim at the rites, flayed and divided among the faithful.
If this sounds a little