Regatta De Mort: The Mad God

How do you gain access to the sacred? The sacred is never found in the ordinary, familiar, normal world. Normal people cannot show you it. The sacred has a space of its own. It is a separated, guarded space, unlike anything in the ordinary world. Only the special ones can enter it. When they return, they are at a higher level. They are no longer normal. Only then are they qualified to say sacred things, extraordinary things, the things that none of your neighbors could ever tell you. The enemy of the sacred is the banal, the bland, the conventional, the ordinary, the familiar, the normal.

Normality is a fatal condition. Humanity would not survive if everyone were normal. Yet nor can humanity be too abnormal. That would prove fatal too. If everyone were radically unique, completely unlike everyone else, everything would be chaos. So, humanity has to be mostly normal, but with a few abnormal individuals who ascend the highest mountains, or descend into the deepest caves, or walk into the wilderness, or enter the labyrinth, or dive to the bottom of the ocean, or travel to the unknown land, or venture across the uncharted sea, or go to new places in the mind and have thoughts no one else has ever imagined. When they return - if they return - they are different from everyone else. They are now abnormal. When they say they have communed with the gods, their very "otherness", their manifest loss and lack of normality, is the proof of their claim. Their minds think differently. Their eyes see different things. They speak in new, thrilling and utterly unusual ways. They have become spellbinding. They have an aura no normal person could ever possess. They radiate with charisma. They are electrifying.

Everyone needs a bit of strange. The more normal you are, the greater your need. Everyone needs the god Dionysus, the perpetual stranger, the embodiment of strangeness, the strange god who brings strangeness wherever he goes. Dionysus delivers strange epiphanies that estrange people from themselves, that take them out of themselves. He makes them ecstatic. Ecstasy means "standing outside oneself." It concerns a state of rapture that stupefies the body while freeing the soul to contemplate divine things.

Dionysus can appear anywhere at any time, and always as a stranger. He can beguile you, inspire you, grip you with mania … destroy you. Do not disrespect this brutal god. Don't turn your back on him. Above all, do not fail to acknowledge his divinity. Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make victims of Dionysus, the trickster god, the maker and conjurer of madness.

Yet Plato said that our greatest blessings come to us through the gift of madness. Therefore, Dionysus, the mad God who brings madness, is humanity's greatest boon. Where would humanity be without Dionysus's wine, without its ability to transform our feeble state of consciousness into something glorious and elevated?

While, all around us, the old religions fail and become ever more decrepit, anachronistic, and downright embarrassing, Dionysus remains eternally fresh and relevant. Humanity will never turn its back on wine, on the magic vine. Wine is the most ancient cure for the illness of normality, for altering normal, tedious, trivial, boring, conservative states of consciousness. Even Jesus Christ had the good sense to turn water into wine. It was the only interesting thing he ever did.

To do honor to a strange and mad god, any book about him must be strange and mad too. This book is a Dionysian tale, part fact, part fiction. Its purpose is to disorient, to disrupt, to open the mind to radical new possibilities.

Do you want to be visited by strangeness and madness, to have your mind expanded as never before? Then let the insanity begin.

Welcome to the Extraordinary World, the sacred space, the space where the most solemn and ineffable quest takes place, where humans at last encounter the gods face to face.