Amethyst: Brief Reflections on My Birthstone and Dionysian Philosophy

All things at the end of time become amethyst ...

 

Amethyst is a violet-coloured variety of quartz; i.e., a hard crystalline mineral made from silica (SiO2). It owes its beauty - as do most things - to its imperfections; namely, impurities of iron and the presence of other trace elements, including, if Remy Belleau is to be believed, a few drops of sacred wine [1].

 

It's also, according to astrologers, my birthstone. Which is somewhat awkward for a Dionysian philosopher, as the English name derives from the Hellenistic Greek term amethystos [αμέθυστος], meaning unintoxicated (a reference to the belief that wearing the semi-precious stone protected its owner from drunkenness). 

 

However, it's important to remember that even Nietzsche - the major disciple of Dionynsus in the modern world - doesn't approve of piss-heads, placing alcohol alongside Christian morality as one of the two great European narcotics and who, for the most part, drank only water, preferring as he did to keep both a clear-head and a cool-head (as I do).

 

Ultimately, whilst Nietzsche admired the transfiguring power of intoxication, he strongly recommended that all spiritual natures abstain from alcohol and he didn't sacrifice human reason in the name of a wild irrationalism. Throughout his writings, cognitive activity is itself conceived as a drive of some kind, or even a form of passion; the will to make an intrinsically chaotic world intelligible and thus a world we might inhabit with a degree of security. 

 

And, for Nietzsche, whilst not denying the ecstatic element of the Dionysian experience, the god speaks differently to him: he speaks of this world (as the only world); of love as an earthly reality and of the eternal delight of existence in all of its aspects (even the most terrible) [2].

 

 

Notes 

 

[1] In his poem L'Amethyste, ou les Amours de Bacchus et d'Amethyste, 16th-century French poet Remy Belleau invents a myth in which Bacchus - the Roman version of Dionysus - was pursuing a maiden named Amethyste, who refused his affections and called on Diana to safeguard her chastity. This the goddess did by transforming Amethyste into a pure white gemstone. Impressed by the girl's determination to remain chaste, Bacchus pours wine over her new mineral form as an offering, thereby staining the crystal purple.  

 

[2] In a note from 1888, for example, Nietzsche writes: 

 

"Philosophy, as I have hitherto understood and lived it, is a voluntary quest for even the most detested and notorious sides of existence. [...] Such an experimental philosophy [...] wants [...] a Dionysian affirmation of the world as it is, without subtraction, exception, or selection - it wants the eternal circulation: the same things, the same logic and illogic of entanglements. The highest state a philosopher can attain: to stand in a Dionysian relationship to existence - my formula for this is amor fati."

 

See The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, ed. Walter Kaufmann, (Vintage Books, 1968), Book Four, Pt. II, §1041, p. 536. 

 

 

Beyond Good and Alcohol

Alcoholic drinks do not agree with me. A single glass of wine 

or beer is amply sufficient to turn life into a valley of tears.

 

Nietzsche didn't just despise the moral narcotic of Christianity; he also hated alcohol and often wrote of the negative effect that booze has on the character.

Thus, although he'd enjoyed a drink or two in his student days, Nietzsche was pretty much a teetotaler all his adult life and insisted that for free spirits, such as himself, a refreshing drink of water was enough (or, on special occasions, maybe a small glass of milk). 

 

Alcohol, he insisted, dulled intellectual and emotional intensity and those who consume it - like the beer-swilling Germans - do so at their peril; they wilfully make themselves stupid as well as obese.      

 

Having said that, it's hard to imagine Nietzsche lending his support to the temperance movement of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, which is clearly a form of finger-wagging puritanism that coincided with Christian revivalism and women's suffrage (something else that Nietzsche was not a fan of).

Thankfully, Nietzsche is liberal enough to call for individual decision making on the basis of personal need, rather than a general prohibition on the production, sale, and consumption of alcohol; for this saves him from falling into fanaticism on the subject.