8. The Return of The Scapegoats
“ … and Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat, and confess over him all the iniquities of the people of Israel, and all their transgressions, and all their sins; and he shall put them upon the head of The Goat, and send him away into The Wilderness. …
The Goat shall bear all their iniquities upon him to a solitary land; and he shall let The Goat go in The Wilderness.”
LEVITICUS 16:21–22
In Biblical times on Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, ALL The Sins of The Jewish People were heaped on The Back of A [•single•] Goat.
The Goat was then driven off into The Wilderness, ostensibly taking all the evils away with it. To this day we “scapegoat” certain groups of people, conveniently blaming them for ALL the ills of Society.
Somebody — I wish I knew who it was — defined Our Age as the time when the Old Testament scapegoats are coming Home. Leading them is the original scapegoat, Dionysus.
The Goat was now off-limits. So, what did Judaism and, later, Christianity do for a symbol? It adopted The Sheep, “The Lamb of God who taketh away our sins”: about as opposite a symbol as one could devise.
The Sheep is certainly •not• like the mischievous goat. It is docile, The Eternal Victim. The Bible refers many times to The Sheep being separated from The Goats. We have translated this in our modern Western minds as separating the right from the wrong, the noble from the ignoble, the righteous from the unrighteous. That mythology has been built into us so deeply that The Goat quality, the ecstatic Dionysian quality, still does not function in us today.
Sheep represent everything of value in our Judeo-Christian world. The sheep, in fact, is the chief determinant of our currency. Every currency in the Western world—the shilling, the franc, the deutsche mark, the lira, the peso, and the Austrian thaller (from which we get our dollar)—was the price of one sheep. For centuries there was no inflation in the Western world because one of our money pieces was worth a sheep. You could count on that anywhere, anytime.
The Scapegoat
So the sheep was in and the goat, Dionysus, was out totally. The ecstatic quality, the capriciousness of life that the Greeks enjoyed so much, was discredited. The goat became the scapegoat. It was given a very bad name—so bad that it came to represent the worst evil. Dionysus Melangius, "Dionysus of the Black Goatskin," was an ancient scapegoat-satyr form of the god, whose appearance greatly influenced the medieval Christian notion of what the devil should look like. To this day the devil is pictured with the goat's horns, cloven hooves, and tail. In medieval Christian Europe, goats were renowned for their lechery and were said to be familiars of witches.
Significantly, the scapegoated groups are usually those that are out of power. The classic example of this in our own time is the scapegoating of the Jews by the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s. In the West the decision makers are typically adult, white, Anglo-Saxon males who hold responsible positions.
OUR scapegoats, then, are the ones who do not fit the mold — women, people of color or other religions, youth, artists. To these groups we give the attributes of Dionysus.
Women are often said to be irrational, unpredictable, capricious, and likely to turn violent, especially sexually : "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned." (Remember Hera?) The stereotypical black or Latino is thought of as "naturally musical." Such groups are "not to be trusted" with rational decisions. And The Youth, of course, are considered to be hopeless. Their music screams, their dancing is wild, and they are completely unpredictable.
Return of the Scapegoat
What happens to a scapegoat? Does it disappear, never to be seen again? Absolutely not.
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 recognise him and welcome him back gladly.
Excerpt from: "Ecstasy : Understanding the
Psychology of Joy" by Robert A. Johnson.
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