Our Scapegoats are Coming Home

“Scapegoats will eventually return to those who sent them away.

Our Scapegoats are coming Home, and leading them is Dionysus — emerging once again from the sea of the collective unconscious, reborn in our world and asking to be humanized before his archetypal energy runs amok. As he did in ancient times, the god is throwing off his chains, flowing as glorious wine, and demanding to be heard.

And he will be heard, because this is the inescapable Truth: You cannot kill a god. You can only repress him, sacrifice him, drive him to The Underworld and to a new epiphany. But you cannot get RID of him. We carry The Archetype of Ecstasy deep within us, and it must be lived out with dignity and consciousness. 

The Scapegoat, Dionysus, is returning; and we must recognize him and welcome Him back gladly.”

— Excerpt from: "Ecstasy : Understanding the Psychology of Joy" by Robert A. Johnson.

"My family lived to be outdoors, especially Granny, who got cross if she didn’t breathe at least an hour of fresh air each day. What we did outdoors, however, what we said, wore, ate, I can’t conjure. There’s some reporting that we journeyed by the royal yacht from the Isle of Wight to the castle, the yacht’s final voyage. Sounds lovely.

  What I do retain, in crisp detail, is the physical setting. The dense woods. The deer-nibbled hill. The River Dee snaking down through the Highlands. Lochnagar soaring overhead, eternally snow-spattered. Landscape, geography, architecture, that’s how my memory rolls. Dates? Sorry, I’ll need to look them up. Dialogue? I’ll try my best, but make no verbatim claims, especially when it comes to the nineties. But ask me about any space I’ve occupied—castle, cockpit, classroom, stateroom, bedroom, palace, garden, pub—and I’ll re-create it down to the carpet tacks.

  Why should my memory organize experience like this? Is it genetics? Trauma? Some Frankenstein-esque combination of the two? Is it my inner soldier, assessing every space as potential battlefield? Is it my innate homebody nature, rebelling against a forced nomadic existence? Is it some base apprehension that the world is essentially a maze, and you should never be caught in a maze without a map?

  Whatever the cause, my memory is My Memory, it does What it Does, gathers and curates as it sees fit, and there’s just as much truth in what I remember and how I remember it as there is in so-called objective facts. Things like chronology and cause-and-effect are often just fables we tell ourselves about the past. The past is never dead. It’s not even past. When I discovered that quotation not long ago on BrainyQuote.com, I was thunderstruck. I thought, Who the fook is Faulkner? 

And how’s he related to Us-Windsors?"