Ritual and Rapture, From Dionysus to the Grateful Dead

Ritual and Rapture, From Dionysus to the Grateful Dead
11/01/1986 AD met

University of California Berkeley Extension held a day long conference at The Palace of Fine Arts In San Francisco, CA entitled Ritual and Rapture: From Dionysus to The Grateful Dead. Participants included mythologist Joseph Campbell, Jungian analyst John Weir Perry MD, and Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart.

Bob Weir first encountered one of Campbell's associates while jogging. Both Weir and Mickey Hart were fans of Campbell, Weir of his 1949 opus The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Hart of his The Way of the Animal Powers. Garcia was equally enamored of Campbell's A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake (1944), cowritten with Henry Morton Robinson. (Campbell drew his concept of the monomyth, the cycle of the hero's journey, from Joyce's Finnegans Wake.) Weir and Hart hosted a dinner for Campbell shortly before one of the band's stands at the Kaiser Auditorium in Oakland, and Campbell repaid the compliment by attending one of the band's concerts shortly after-not something that he was known for, having long before abandoned any interest in popular culture.

But Campbell was intrigued to find out that his work had influenced the band, saying he was “absolutely delighted” to discover such prominent adherents, even if they were working in an idiom he found lacking. “Rock music has never seemed that interesting to me,” he commented in a lecture shortly after the concert. But what the Dead did was profoundly inspiring: “when you see 8,000 kids all going up in the air together … Listen, this is powerful stuff!” What he saw reminded him of the Dionysian festivals, palpable proof of his theory that the ancient myths and rituals he studied still echoed today. “This is more than music,” he told his audience. “It turns something on in here [the heart]. And what it turns on is life energy. This is Dionysus talking through these kids.” Campbell's understanding of Dionysus was far deeper and more nuanced than the popular caricature of the happy, wine-soaked god, but his point was not to rehabilitate that older understanding. “It doesn't matter what the name of the god is, or whether it's a rock group or a clergy,” he concluded. “It's somehow hitting that chord of realization of the unity of God in you all.”

References * John Weir Perry, MD, Ritual and Rapture: From Dionysus to the Grateful Dead * Nicholas Meriwether, Documenting The Dead: Joseph Campbell and the Grateful Dead

San Francisco, CA

Lattitude: 37.7832° N
Longitude: 122.4166° W
Region: North America

Modern Day United States

Events in 1986 MORE