The Disguised Archetype Androgyny And Otherness In Dionysus WORDS BY Giorgiomaria Cornelio
One of many names behind which Dionysus conceals his total visibility is Lysios, ‘The One Who Unties’. This seal, this trace of wax, marks nothing but a seismic vow and a promise of otherness. Thus, another epigraph of this text could have been the alchemic motto: “Solve et Coagula” (Separate and Join Together), since the inclination of Lysios lies precisely in this imperative of dissolution. In fact, the very lineage of Dionysus is formulated under the umbra of a perpetual camouflage which reveals that every genealogy is the erratic result “of a multiplicity of flows, of forking paths, of different sedimentations.” (Georges Didi-Huberman). The stalking archetype that, more than the others, is tied to the figure of Dionysus is the androgyne, the fluid creature that bears on its body the impression of an utter alterity that always defers itself, unfolding new spiral movements and rejecting the clinical bisection of the body. In the androgyne, what Mario Mieli calls the “innate transsexuality” of the human being is manifested beyond the necrotic domain of the Norma and declares its presence either as a sulphurous vocation or as a bleeding wound. In his treatise called The Androgyne: Reconciliation Of Male And Female, Female Elemire Zolla provides an account of the subincision ceremonies of Australian aborigines, during which a cut is opened into the lower part of the penis, baring the urethra. Later in time, this wound is periodically made to bleed as a “proof of the adept’s link with the source of life and with the central archetype of the androgyne.” This passage says something more than just its anthropological account, unveiling what is buried in the word archetype, i.e. the ἀρχή (arche). Certainly, the arche is the beginning somewhat linked with the “source of life”, but it is also the power of the command, of an utter authority that must be acknowledged, being able to ‘pierce’ the body. At this point, we can consider two examples or symptoms of this twofold nature that also belongs to the androgyne, i.e. the paradigmatic Dionysius of The Bacchae and Heliogabalus, the Dionysiac crowned
