Now, in what sense could Apollo be made into a god of art? Only inas-much as he is the god of dream-representations. He is the 'luminous one' through and through; at his deepest root he is a god of the sun and light who reveals himself in brilliance. 'Beauty' is his element, eternal youth his companion. But the lovely semblance of the world of dreams is his realm too; the higher truth, the perfection of these dream-states in contrast to the only partially intelligible reality of the daylight world, raise him to the status of a prophetic god, but equally certainly to that of an artistic god. The god of lovely semblance must be the god of true knowledge as well. But the image of Apollo must also include that delicate line which the dream image must not overstep if its effect is not to become pathological, in which case the semblance does not simply deceive but also cheats; it must include that measured limitation, that freedom from wilder impulses, that wise calm of the image-making god. His eye must be 'sun-like' and calm; even when it is angry and shows displeasure, the consecrated aura of lovely semblance surrounds it.
Dionysiac art, by contrast, is based on play with intoxication, with the state of ecstasy. There are two principal forces which bring naive, natural man to the self-oblivion of intense intoxication: the drive of spring and narcotic drink. Their effects are symbolized in the figure of Dionysos. In both states the principium individuationis is disrupted, subjectivity dis-appears entirely before the erupting force of the general element in human life, indeed of the general element in nature. Not only do the festivals of Dionysos forge a bond between human beings, they also reconcile human beings and nature. Freely the earth brings its gifts, the fiercest beasts approach one another in peace; the flower-decked chariot of Dionysos is drawn by panthers and tigers. All the caste-like divisions which necessity and arbitrary power have established between men disappear; the slave is a free-man, the aristocrat and the man of lowly birth unite in the same Bacchic choruses. In ever-swelling bands the gospel of 'universal harmony' rolls on from place to place; as they sing and dance, human beings express their membership of a higher, more ideal community; they have forgotten how to walk and speak. Yet it is more than this: they feel themselves to have been transformed by magic, and they really have become something different. Just as the animals now talk and the earth gives milk and honey, something supernatural now sounds out from within man. He feels him-(21) self to be a god; that which had previously lived only in his imagination he now feels in his own person. What does he now care for images and statues? Man is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art; man him-self now moves with the same ecstasy and sublimity with which, in dream, he once saw the gods walk. The artistic force of nature, not that of an individual artist, reveals itself here; a nobler clay, a more precious marble is kneaded and chiselled here: the human being. This human being whom the artist Dionysos has formed stands in the same relation to nature as a statue does to the Apolline artist.
If intoxication is nature playing with human beings, the Dionysiac artist's creation is a playing with intoxication. If one has not experienced it for oneself this state can only be understood by analogy; it is rather like dreaming and at the same time being aware that the dream is a dream. Thus the attendant of Dionysos must be in a state of intoxication and at the same time he must lie in ambush, observing himself from behind. Dionysiac art manifests itself, not in the alternation of clear-mindedness and intoxi-cation, but in their co-existence.
This co-existence marks the high point of Hellenic culture; originally, only Apollo is a Hellenic god of art, and it was his power which so moder-ated Dionysos when he came storming in from Asia that the most beauti-ful brotherly bond could come about. Nowhere can the incredible idealism of the Hellenic race be grasped more readily than here: a cult of nature which, amongst the peoples of Asia, had meant the crudest unleashing of the lower drives, a panhetaerici animality which sundered all social ties for a certain period of time, was transformed amongst the Hellenes into a festival of universal redemption, a day of transfiguration. All the sublime drives of their character were revealed in this idealization of orgy.
Yet never was the Hellenic world in greater danger than during the stormy approach of the new god. Conversely, the wisdom of the Delphic god never showed itself in a more beautiful light. Reluctantly at first, he laid the finest of webs about his powerful antagonist so that the latter could hardly tell that he was wandering about in semi-captivity. When the Delphic priesthood perceived that the new cult had a profound effect on the processes of social regeneration, and promoted it in line with their political and religious intention; when the Apolline artist, with thoughtful moderation, learned from the revolutionary art of the rites of Bacchus; and, finally, when, in the ordering of the Delphic cult, sovereignty over the year (22)was shared between Apollo and Dionysos, both gods emerged victorious, as it were, from their contest: an act of reconciliation on the battlefield. Anyone who wants to see clearly just how powerfully the Apolline element held down the irrational, supernatural quality of the Dionysiac element, should consider that in the older period of music the genos dithyrambikon was also the hesuchastikon.2 The more vigorously the Apolline spirit of art now flourished, the more freely did his brother-god Dionysos develop; in the same period as the first of them was attaining to the full, one might say immobile, vision of beauty, at the time of Phidias,3 the other was interpreting the mysteries and terrors of the world in tragedy and giving voice in the music of tragedy to the innermost thought of nature: the weaving of the Will' in and above all appearances.
If music, too, is Apolline art, this applies, strictly speaking, only to rhythm, the image-creating energy of which was developed to represent Apolline states; the music of Apollo is architecture in sound, and, what is more, in the merely hinted-at sounds characteristic of the cithara. Cautiously it holds at a distance precisely that element which defines the character of Dionysiac music (and thus of music generally), the power of musical sound to shake us to the core and the quite incomparable world of harmony. The Greeks had the finest feeling for harmony, as their strict characterization of the modes obliges us to conclude, although the need for an elaborated, truly audible harmony was much weaker amongst them than it is in the modern world. In the sequence of harmonies, and even in their abbreviated form, so-called melody, the Will' reveals itself directly, with-out previously having embodied itself in a phenomenon. Every individual can, as it were, serve as a likeness, as an individual instance of a general rule; conversely, however, the Dionysiac artist presents the essence of everything that appears in a way that is immediately intelligible, for he has command over the chaos of the Will before it has assumed individual shape, and from it he can bring a new world into being at each creative moment, but also the old world with which we are already familiar as phenomenon. In this latter sense he is a tragic musician.
Nature expresses itself with its highest energy in Dionysiac intoxication, in the tumultuous, wild chase across all the scales of the soul under the influence of narcotic stimulants or when the drives of spring are unleashed; it binds individual creatures together again, and it makes them feel that (23)they are one with each other, so that the principium individuationis appears, so to speak, to be a perpetual state of weakness of the Will. The more degenerate the Will is, the more everything fragments into individual elements; the more selfish and arbitrary the development of the individual, the weaker is the organism which it serves. This is why there erupts in those states what one might call a sentimental (sentimentalisch) tendency in the Will, a 'sigh of the creature' for what is lost; out of highest joy there comes a cry of horror, the yearning sounds of lament at some irredeemable loss. Abundant nature celebrates its saturnalian festivals and its rites of death at one and the same time. The affects of its priests are most won-drously mixed, pain awakens delight, rejoicing wrings sounds of agony from the breast. The god ho lysios4 has transformed everything, redeemed and released everything from itself. The singing and the expressive gestures of a mass stimulated in this manner, and in whom nature acquired a voice and movement, was something new and unheard-of in the Homeric-Greek world; it struck the Greeks as something Oriental which they first had to tame with their enormous rhythmic and image-making energy, and which they did indeed tame, just as they tamed the Egyptian temple-style at the same time. It was the Apolline people who laid the chains of beauty on over-mighty instinct, who yoked and harnessed nature's most dangerous elements, her wildest beasts. The idealistic power of the Hellenic character is seen at its most admirable when one compares its spiritualization of the festival of Dionysos with what emerged from the same origin amongst other peoples. Similar festivals are very ancient and their existence is demonstrable everywhere, most notably in Babylon where they are known as the sacaea. Here, during five-day-long festivals, every political and social bond was torn apart; but the centre of the cult lay in the absence of all sexual discipline, in the destruction of all family life by un-restrained hetaerism. The very antithesis of this is to be found in the image of the Greek festivals of Dionysos, as drawn by Euripides in his Bacchae,5 an image which radiates the same loveliness, the same transfiguring musi-cal intoxication as Skopas and Praxiteles6 embodied in their statues. A messenger describes how he had withdrawn with his herds to the very peaks of the mountains during the midday heat; this is the right moment and the right place to see the unseen; Pan is now asleep, the sky is now the unmoving background of a glory, the day now blossoms. On an alpine meadow the messenger notices three choruses of women lying in scattered (24) groups on the ground and in decorous pose; many women stand leaning against pine trees; all slumber. Suddenly the mother of Pentheus breaks out in jubilation, sleep is banished, all leap to their feet, a model of noble comportment; the young girls and the women let their locks fall to their shoulders, the doe-skin is put in order if its ribbons and bows have become loosened during sleep. They gird themselves about with snakes which lick their cheeks confidingly, some women take young wolves and deer in their arms and suckle them. All adorn themselves with garlands of ivy; when the thyrsus is struck against a rock water bubbles forth, and when the earth is struck with a staff a fountain of wine rises up. Sweet honey drops from the twigs, and when someone touches the earth with just the tips of their fingers snow-white milk springs forth. This is an utterly enchanted world, nature celebrates its festival of reconciliation with mankind. The myth recounts that Apollo joined Dionysos together again after he had been dismembered. This is the image of Dionysos created anew by Apollo and saved from his Asiatic dismemberment.
2
The Greek gods, in the perfection with which they already appear in Homer, are certainly not to be understood as having been born of calamity and need; it is certain that such creatures were not conceived by a heart shaken by fear; it was not to turn away from life that a genial fantasy projected their images into the blue. What speaks out of them is a religion of life, not one of duty or asceticism or spirituality. All these figures breathe the triumph of existence, a luxuriant vitality accompanies their cult. They do not make demands; all that exists is deified in them, regardless of whether it is good or evil. Measured against the gravity, the sanctity and severity of other religions, Greek religion is in danger of being under-estimated as a playful fantasy — unless one includes in one's representation of it an often overlooked trait of most profound wisdom, so that the Epicurean life of the gods suddenly appears to be a creation of that incom-parable artist-people, indeed almost as its supreme creation. It is the philosophy of the people which the captive wood-god unveils to mortals: `The best is not to be, the second best to die soon.' It is this same phil-osophy which forms the background of that pantheon. The Greeks knew the terrors and horrors of existence, but they covered them with a veil in order to be able to live: a cross hidden behind roses, to adopt Goethe's (25) symbol. That luminous Olympian company only came to rule so that the sombre sway of moira, which determined Achilles' early death and the horrifying marriage of Oedipus, should be hidden by the radiant figures of Zeus, Apollo, Hermes, etc. If someone had removed the artistic semblance of that middle world, the Greeks would have had to follow the wisdom of the wood-god, the companion of Dionysos. It was out of this necessity that the artistic genius of this people created these gods. For this reason, theodicy was never a Hellenic problem; they took care never to attribute the exis-tence of the world, and hence responsibility for the way it is, to the gods. The gods, too, are subject to ananke;8 this is a confession of the rarest wisdom. To view its own existence in a transfiguring mirror and to protect itself with this mirror against the Medusa — this was the genial strategy adopted by the Hellenic Will' in order to be able to live at all. For how else could that infinitely sensitive people with such brilliant talent for suffering have been able to bear life, if that self-same life had not been revealed to them in their gods, suffused with a higher glory! The same drive which summons art into being in order to perfect existence, to augment it and seduce men into continuing to live, also led to the creation of the Olympian world, a world of beauty, calm and pleasure.
Under the influence of such a religion life is understood in the Homeric world as that which is inherently desirable: life beneath the sunshine of such gods. The pain of Homeric man related to departure from this exist-ence, above all to imminent departure. If a lament is heard at all, it sings again of short-lived Achilles, of the rapid succession of the generations of mankind, of the passing of the heroic age. It is not unworthy of the great-est hero to long to go on living, even as a day-labourer. The Will' never expressed itself more plainly than in the Hellenes, whose very lament is still a song of praise. For this reason modern man feels a longing for that time when he believes he can hear nature and mankind in complete harmony; for this reason the Hellenic is the solution for all those who need to look about them for radiant models for the conscious affirmation of their will; for this reason, finally, the concept of 'Greek cheerfulness' has emerged at the hands of pleasure-seeking writers, so that, with an utter lack of respect, a slovenly life of self-indulgence dares to excuse, indeed honour itself, with the word 'Greek'. In all of these representations, ranging from the noblest to the most (26)
common and misguided, the Greeks are understood in too crude and simple a manner and, to a certain extent, shaped in accordance with the image of unambiguous and, so to speak, one-sided nations (e.g. the Romans). After all, it ought to be suspected that some need for artistic semblance will be present even in the world view of a people which habit-ually turns everything it touches into gold. And we do indeed find, as we have indicated, an enormous illusion in this world view, the same illusion as nature regularly employs to achieve its goals. The true goal is obscured by a deluding image; we stretch out our hands towards the image, and nature achieves its goal by means of this deception. In the Greeks the Will wished to gaze on a vision of itself transfigured in a work of art; in order that the Will might glorify itself, its creatures too had to feel themselves to be worthy of glorification; they had to recognize a reflection of themselves in a higher sphere, elevated to the ideal, as it were, without feeling that the perfected world of their vision was an imperative or a reproach. This is the sphere of beauty in which they see their mirror images, the Olympians. With this weapon the Hellenic Will' fought against the talent for suffering and for the wisdom of suffering that is the correlative of artistic talent. Out of this struggle, and as a monument to its victory, tragedy was born. The intoxication of suffering and the beautiful dream have different pan-theons. By virtue of the omnipotence of its character, the former penetrates to the innermost thoughts of nature, it recognizes the fearful drive to exist and at the same time the perpetual death of everything that comes into existence; the gods which this intoxication creates are good and evil, they resemble chance, they startle us by the sudden emergence of a plan in their actions, they are pitiless and without delight in beauty. They are related to truth and approximate to concepts; rarely and only with difficulty do they become concentrated in figures. Looking at them turns the viewer to stone; how is one to live with them? Yet it is not intended that one should; that is their lesson.
If this pantheon cannot be concealed completely, like some punishable secret, the human gaze must be distracted from it by placing next to it the radiant, dream-born world of the Olympians; this is why the intensity of their colours, the sensuousness of their figures, grows ever greater, the more powerfully truth or its symbol makes its presence felt. Never was the struggle between truth and beauty greater than when the worship of Dionysos invaded Greece; here nature unveiled itself and spoke of its secret with terrifying clarity, in musical sound, in the face of which seductive
