The Birth of Tragedy (1872)

The Buddha arrived at a practical and dynamic theory of the embodied mind no less than 2500 years ago, far in advance of anything the west could even think of—at least until Freud. The west comes close to such a theory only in its mystical fringes: St Teresa, William Blake, the Kabbalah. But there is no more controversial and lurid mystical tradition than that of the cult of Dionysius that flourished in ancient Greece for some millennia (itself—probably?— derived from the Egyptian sex-magic cults of Isis). Orgiastic drug fueled pagan raves in the night time forest produced in the culture an outflowing of ecstatic affirmation of life in all its tragedy and bliss, translated by Greek proportion into the basis of western art. The “witch’s brew” that powered these festivals was not only wine, but also psychedelic; it would become the placebo eucharist of the Christian church. Nietzsche—a true psychonaut in his own right—arrives at a very modern1 acceptance of the mortal and embodied mind through an injection of Buddhism2 into the Hellenic past. He reads a non-duel mystical attitude—no self and no other—in the nighttime mystery cults that so captivated the era (and that traces of which are now found in certain forms of witchcraft and at raves). The diamond hard idea that he brings out of his philological excavation is extimacy itself—or what he would later refer to as it: “it thinks us.”  Freud claimed to never having read Nietzsche and yet this diamond of mystical extimacy becomes the basic axiom of psychoanalysis: das es, the id, the unconscious. One becomes aware of this it only in those limit experiences taking place at the twilit borderlands between soma and psyche: in dreams, in breathwork, in drugs and in sex.