In the first place, an archaeology of religious experience is not just an objective study of religious phenomena. Daniélou affirms that “Dionysian” is the name of the Shaivite religion in the West, owing mainly to his conviction that pre-Christian cults and pre-Vedic religious forms share a common substratum. It is an in-actual book with a considerable potential both for Indian and Western readership, because it faces the most important challenges of our time. Alain Daniélou’s book belongs to the second category. The second is a book that goes against the (present) mainstream but has something important to say, a book compelled to wriggle its way through many different kinds of resistance in order to demonstrate its value. The first is one belonging to the past with no message whatsoever for the present. In view of this, does Daniélou’s book really deserve an attentive reading? Does it deserve a reading at all? Does it offer anything that may be deemed relevant for our present era? There is a difference between an “outdated” and (in the words “in-actual” book. Our time is one of relativism and fragmentation, characterized mainly by a cult of death and a denial of roots and experiential sources other than those serving pragmatic and ideological interests.
A study of Shiva and Dionysus would be impossible today, mainly because religious comparatism, which was quite acceptable – even beyond evolutionist parameters – after the Second World War, is now suspected of presenting arguments too general for the demands of specialized research and elements taken out of context and over-interpreted out of recognition, but also because one of the main ideas of Alain Daniélou’s book is about a primordial religion, a kind of trans- or pan-cultural substratum related to the forces of Nature and necessarily leading to a radical affirmation of Life (epitomized in the figures of Shiva and Dionysus). This book, which first appeared in 1979, is above all an archaeology of religious experience, and for this reason it is perhaps worthy of an attentive reading, especially in our own time. Sundanan Roy Chowdhury and Adrián Navigante at Sampark Literary Evenings, 17 march 2019.
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