So yeah, as I was saying, I had a revelation a while ago about how the Tasmanian Devil is a kind of pagan throwback symbol to a figure of ecstatic excess. Some kind of wild generative life force. I think directly linked to whatever the Greeks were getting at with Dionysus (Bacchus).

The other is the idea that under the influence of wine, one could feel possessed by a greater power. Unlike the other gods, Dionysus was not only outside his believers but, also within them. At these times, a man might be greater then himself and do works he otherwise could not.

Apparently Nietzsche also talked about the Dionysian force, although I don’t know much of anything about him.

Nietzsche considered reality as an endless Becoming (Werden). Apollinian power is associated with the creation of illusion - the plastic arts deny the actuality of becoming with the illusion of timeless beauty. Dionysian frenzy threatens to destroy all forms and codes. Only the Apollinian power of the Greeks was able to control the Dionysian flood.

This page has a bunch of interesting stuff about Apollonian possession, and also a nice little passage about the Dionysian frenzy:

The Dionysian frenzy is a giving in, a letting go:
Dionysus is not a useful god who helps weave or knot things together, but a god who loosens and unties. The weavers are his enemies. Yet there comes a moment when the weavers will abandon their looms to dash off after him into the mountains. Dionysus is the river we hear flowing by in the distance, an incessant booming from far away; then one day it rises and floods everything, as if the normal above-water state of things, the sober delimitation of our existence, were but a brief parenthesis overwhelmed in an instant.

A page about Dionysian Excesses:

The women who shared in the frenzied rites of Bacchus were themselves called Bacchae even as the men were Bacchi. Each one, without distinction of sex, by the very experience of divine possession became a personification of the god. Their delirium, induced by purely physical means, was for them a spiritual experience, and eventuated in the conviction, deep and strong, that they had their god within themselves.

… Bacchic experience also caused a break with the customs and conventions of ordinary life and a return to the freedom of nature. The devotees of Dionysus deserted their homes temporarily, wandered free on the mountains, and indulged in certain wild, primitive, half-animal passions. … With this return to the life of nature there was mingled a recrudescence of certain very primitive impulses. There was a lust for hot blood and a certain ferocious cruelty in the tearing to pieces of hapless victims.

Here’s a really good thing that talks about the Dionysian cult and the Bacchanalia, which I think directly relates to the Tasmanian Devil and what he’s all about:

Since Bacchic rituals involve the direct possession of the initiates with the spirit of Dionysus himself, their actions are representative of the nature of Dionysus. When the Bacchanals become possessed in The Bacches, they exhibit signs of ecstatic predominance as they start to live in an alternate reality where conscious responsibility, control, and rationality become secondary in importance to following the flow of nature and truly acting in accord with their inner selves. All worldly inhibitions set upon the Bacchanals by society are rendered void, and the initiates become true to their inner guides in life. In this way, we see Dionysus as above and beyond all worldly influence.

Thus we can define Dionysus as the embodiment of nature…

Here’s the Wikipedia entry about the Tasmanian Devil. I’ll have to look at this in a bit though, cause my monitor just went crazy. I hope its not broke for good.