This essay sketches a mythic-energetic typology of human temperament as a grammar of how different kinds of people metabolize reality. The aim is to locate one’s native current within a civilization that increasingly suppresses the deeper energies of the psyche. As modern systems demand ever-greater mimicry and adaptability, understanding one’s metabolic type becomes a matter of psychological survival.

Welcome back.

In this post I would like to discuss the concept of energy metabolism, which is how we take in information and process it in our bodies – how we deal with stresses, ambitions, surprises, ideas, oppositions, challenges, victories, failures. Most typologies (such as Myers Briggs, which has poor explanatory power, and the Big 5, which I am a fan of) are concerned with external descriptions comprising the features, traits, preferences, and behaviors that characterize a person. They produce maps of how people present themselves and how they tend to act, but even when they gesture toward archetypal or symbolic depth they focus of surface patterns.

The impetus for this post is a long-standing observation: the way my psyche metabolizes reality differs markedly from how most people seem to. This is meant observationally, not morally; I am puzzled why I think I am so different than everyone else – I feel like an alien. The way I metabolize information is bifurcated: my internal dynamic is Dionysian – wild, aggressive, manic, drunken, creative, beastly, disrespectful of boundaries – but my exterior is a restrictive Saturnian energy – compressive, prison-like, austere, severe, intense, cold. These conflicting energies are not meant to be inhabited within one person, and I find myself modulating between these polarities through interpretation, symbolic mapping, and metaphysical excavation.

The Greek story of the God Dionysus is illustrative. In Eurpidies’ most famous play The Bacchae, the king, King Pentheus, bans the public worship of Dionysus and imprisons him, yet Dionysus escapes and his worshippers, including Pentheus’s mother, capture the king and murder him. The moral is that Pentheus, representing a restrictive Saturnian influence, was too rigid to integrate a chaotic and ecstatic Dionysus, and yet too weak to contain him. The analogy is not quite apt for me; my Saturnian energies respect my Dionysian energies, they don’t try to destroy them, and they are uneasily mediated through Hermetic writing; for me Saturn likes Dionysus, but cannot risk letting it out freely without risking destruction. You may notice that my writing oscillates between austere and ecstatic forms, and that the combination propels the writing forward, it makes it alive, and it is necessary as an integrative tool.

This Dionysian surge and the Saturnian clampdown has held for my adult life, and the regulation between these polarities is quite taxing energetically. Such energies are sometimes associated with mystical writers, those whose symbolic life is richer than their lived life, people who oscillate between long-term body tension and periodic energy spikes, and the need for creative output as pressure regulation.

My increased resonance with looking at energy profiles phenomenologically as planetary and God archetypes led to thinking about how others metabolize their energies. This isn’t an astrological approach (although I believe in that), and neither is it physiognomy based (although I believe in that too) but instead applying mythic labels and language to bodily processes: Dionysus as an eruption of vitality that breaks inhibitions, Saturn as contraction and boundary, Hermes as circulation and interpretive movement, Apollo as clarification and measured light. This distinction matters, because two people may have the same traits yet radically different metabolic profiles. For example, a calm person may be calm because they have low internal intensity, or high intensity but impeccable sublimation pathways, or high intensity trapped behind defensive rigidity. The outward presentation is identical; the metabolic reality is not. The origin of these metabolic profiles – whether merely descriptors of internal processes, the effect of external processes on the psyche, or actual active external forces is deliberately left unsettled.1

Energy Metabolic Profiles

With this metabolic lens in place, let’s explore nine of the dominant energetic types, which is not meant as all-encompassing:

1. Hermes / Mercury: Social, adaptive, imitative, clever-but-shallow, conflict-avoidant. This is most people who go with the flow – they want to fit in. In terms of their psychic economy they want smoothness, belonging, consensus, novelty without danger, stimulation without transformation. Mercury governs mimicry, trend-following, verbal fluency without depth, shifting identities, surface-level curiosity, social navigation. This is probably 65% of people (my percentages are rough heuristics based on a lifetime of observation, not empirical science). Examples: Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, Andy Warhol, most influencers, Tom Hanks.Risks: Anxiety, identity diffusion, social exhaustion, superficial stress responses, nervous tension from constant adaptation.Patterns: Usually resilient, avoids catastrophic collapse, but may struggle with inner depth or existential meaning.
2. Aphrodite / Venus – 10–15%. Aesthetic instinct, comfort, attachment, pleasure, harmony. This group orients toward relationships, beauty, comfort, relational attunement, sensual experience. They’re not Dionysian, they’re not wild; they want a beautiful life and avoid psychic extremes. Most artists who are not mystics fall here. Example: Marilyn Monroe, Matisse, Paul McCarthy, Zendaya, most lifestyle/aesthetic creators.Risks: Stagnation, dependency, comfort-overload, psychosomatic stress from emotional attachment patterns.Patterns: Generally physically and mentally stable; risk comes from overindulgence or avoidance of necessary struggle.
3. Ares / Mars – ~10–12%: Aggression, competition, struggle, boundary enforcement. This is the classic masculine-active pole: fighters, entrepreneurs, soldiers, people who process reality through dominance structures. Very straightforward psychology, high energy, low subtlety. Not Saturnian – Saturn inhibits, Mars pushes. Examples: Mike Tyson, Napoleon, Gordon Ramsey, Conor McGregor, General Patton, Mel Gibson.Risks: Musculoskeletal injuries, hypertension, cardiovascular strain, interpersonal conflict stress.Patterns: High-energy output, risk mitigated if balanced with recovery; prone to burnout through overextension.
4. Zeus/Jupiter – ~5–8%: Expansion, success, confidence, magnanimity, leadership. The “natural optimists” including CEOs, politicians, motivational speakers, institutional believers. Jupiterians have strong upward-drive, love of growth, love of purpose, belief in meaning. They are not deep, but they aren’t shallow either – they radiate. Examples: Oprah, Reagan, Tony Robbins, Richard Branson, Walt Disney.Risks: Weight gain, metabolic stress, hubris-related burnout, neglect of detail due to overexpansion.Patterns: Usually robust and long-lived; psychological stress minimal unless expectations collapse.
5. Cronus/Saturnians – ~3–5%: Structure, discipline, authority, inhibition, pessimism, fate. Saturn requires solitude, seriousness, self-limitation, confrontation with mortality. Most people can’t tolerate Saturn’s atmosphere for long; long-term austerity, seriousness, and mortality awareness are socially unwelcome, and modern systems prioritize flexibility, short-term gains, and social fluidity. Those with strong Saturnian energy either burn out from social friction or are forced into niches (monastic, scientific, legal, military). Examples: Kant, Judge Dredd, Cato the Younger, Kafka, Calvin.Risks: Chronic contraction, rigidity, depressive slowing, cardiovascular restriction, autoimmune issues, bone/joint tension, psychological calcification.Patterns: Can age well if self-regulated, but prolonged social isolation or over-discipline can cause structural rigidity and internalized stress.
6. The Dionysians – ~1–3%: ecstasy, dissolution, intensity, transgression, mysticism, madness. These people often burn out, implode, drink themselves into oblivion, become mystics or madmen, produce art or revolution, feel out of place everywhere. Dionysus is an initiatory energy, not a socially stable one. Societies suppress transgressive ecstasy due to risk – danger, excess, social disruption. Only highly artistic, mystical, or countercultural spaces allow for expression. Mass culture favors control, mimicry, and containment, which Dionysus resists. Rurik seems to me to be a solid Dionysian, and he seems to agree, although perhaps he is more Vulcanic. Examples include Jim Morrison, Alan Watts, Jack Kerouac, David Foster Wallace (a quieter form), George Bataille.Risks: Nervous system overload, mania, burnout, substance abuse, psychotic breaks, cardiovascular strain from high-energy eruptions, digestive stress from excess indulgence. Nietzsche, for example, was intensely Dionysian but lacked compensatory stabilizers, so he went mad with intense, aggressive, creative mania.Patterns: Extreme oscillation; often collapses after periods of ecstatic activity. Mystical or artistic breakthroughs may mitigate destructive tendencies. Men and women change in relation to Dionysian energy as they age.2
7. The Apollonians – ~3–5%: Clarity, order, harmony, intellect, artistic perfection. These are classical artists, mathematicians, rationalists with aesthetic senses, balanced, introverts, monks of the mind. Apollo is rare today because modernity favors Mercury/quick rewards, superficial knowledge, and social validation, while deep aesthetic discipline and reflective order are undervalued. Society rewards speed, trendiness, and mimicry over sustained clarity. Examples: Bach, Spinoza, J.S. Mill, Marie Kondo, T.S. Eliot.Risks: Perfectionism, dissociation, emotional dryness, obsessive control, tension headaches, digestive stress from suppressed emotion.Patterns: Usually physically stable but psychologically constrained; prone to burnout through overstructuring.
8. Hephaestian / Saturn-Mars – ~1–2%. Craftsman, the wounded worker, the maker; deep, stubborn, unglamorous, productive. Builders, coders, engineers, artisans who are almost invisible socially. Examples: Nikola Tesla, Alan Turing, Werner Herzog, traditional craftsmen.Risks: Chronic pain, overuse injuries, burnout from obsessive work, social isolation stress.Patterns: Enduring, self-sufficient, physically resilient but socially invisible; psychological risk lies in perfectionist obsessions.
9. Lunar/Hecate – ~1–2%. Psychic sensitivity, dream-consciousness, symbolic perception; this covers mystics, oracles, injured empaths, the psychologically porous. Some overlap with Dionysus but without the ecstatic aggression. Examples: Carl Jung, Terrance McKenna, William Blake, Daphne du Maurier.Risks: Dissociation, depression, anxiety, sleep disruption, psychosomatic sensitivity, vulnerability to psychic overwhelm.Patterns: Highly sensitive nervous system; creative and mystical capacity high but requires protective boundaries to avoid burnout.

Most people metabolize energy via Mercury-Venus blends with light Jupiter; they can’t metabolize Saturn or Dionysus at all, which they actively avoid and socially punish. Venus types often conflict with Mars type (pleasure vs. struggle), while Apollo conflicts with Dionysus types (clarity vs. ecstasy, risk of creative destruction vs. obsession with order). Rare archetypes today survive only in enclaves: artists, mystics, revolutionaries, visionary engineers, or solitary thinkers. There are hybrids archetypes, just as I mentioned my own. I’ll leave description of some hybrids as a footnote so as to not overwhelm the piece.3 Furthermore, a useful cross-frame is that energetic profiles tend to correlate with dominant psychological stabilizers. I’ll briefly discuss that as well in this footnote.4

Modes of Manifestation

A person’s symbolic orientation has at least three distinguishable layers. There is:

1. the style of consciousness (solar, lunar, chthonic) which determines where attention naturally rests and how the psyche relates to truth. A solar mode is oriented upward, social, visible, culturally legible, expresses the god’s energy in its “daylight” form and is rewarded by coherence, expression, recognition while risking inflation, rigidity, hubris. A lunar mode is oriented inwards, and is reflective, ambiguous, and relational. A chthonic mode is oriented downward, underworld, unconscious, anti-structural, expresses the god’s energy through negation, inversion, wound, or depth, has a reward of insight, truth-from-below, disillusionment and risks alienation, paranoia, solitude, excessive descent.5 For example, a chthonic Mercury interprets through negation, paradox, breakdown as a psychopomp; a chthonic Saturn becomes a metaphysician of collapse rather than a builder of order, a chthonic Dionysus plunges into psychic dissolution rather than ecstatic expansion;
2. the interpretive mode, typically keyed to a planetary archetype, which shapes how information is metabolized: Mercurial, Jovian, Saturnine, etc; and
3. Beneath both sits the inner energetic polarity, the deep mythic charge of the soul – Dionysian, Apollonian, Saturnian, Martial, and so on – which governs conflict, longing, self-sabotage, and vocation.

Confusions arise when these layers are collapsed or mistaken for one another. For example, I have a lunar/inwardly directed analytical conscious style (i.e. I relate to truth phenomenologically, how it reacts within my body), a chthonic-Hermetic interpretive mode (symbolic mapping, metaphysical excavation), and a Dionysian/Saturn internal internal polarity. As another example, the great Guido Preparata’s style is complimentary but orthogonal to my own.6 And for another, I would describe Jasun Horsley as a chthonic Hermetic psychopomp with an inverted Dionysian wound-pattern.7 Or take Elon Musk, who is Hermes-dominant under Uranian acceleration, with Saturn externalized rather than integrated.8

Conclusion

The goal here is to learn to metabolize one’s own psychic energy efficiency without burnout or distortion: even rare types like Dionysus-Saturn must learn modulation for internal coherence and balance, while Mercury-Venus types must learn to tolerate intensity or structure. Knowing one’s type allows one to more carefully engage with society and routes to personal growth, to more consciously integrate natural strengths while mitigating vulnerabilities with the hope of increasing one’s knowledge and functional individuation, ultimately producing increased resilience, fulfillment, and mastery appropriate to your archetypal energy.

For intuitive individuals one’s may feel natural, where your inner energy flows in a way that resonates with the archetype. For others, a more systematic approach may assist:

1. Observe internal energy flow: When stressed, excited, or challenged, where does your energy go? Outward to action, inward to reflection, in bursts, or evenly distributed?
2. Track recurrent behaviors and preferences: Patterns over years reveal the substrate: Do you seek intensity (Dionysus), structure (Saturn), clarity (Apollo), connection (Venus), or adaptability (Mercury)?
3. Consider health and somatic response: Body tension, posture, and habitual somatic patterns often reveal underlying energetic type. Example: Saturn = chronic tension/contraction; Dionysus = visceral, eruptive energy.
4. Test through challenge or creation: Place yourself in situations that stress your core energy. Your default metabolism emerges under challenge.
5. Cross-referencing archetypal traits: Compare self-observations to mythic descriptions (Dionysus, Apollo, Hermes, etc.) rather than mere surface personality tests.

The next post will discuss how an archetypal or pagan understanding of psychic processes serves as an operational, stable approach toward living under an Abraxas God image, because the differentiated gods provide what Abraxas cannot: a livable partitioning of the unbearable. They distribute contradiction across distinct psychic functions, allowing movement between opposites without requiring the psyche to inhabit undifferentiated totality, which cannot be sustained without dissolution.9 This is different from Hillman’s approach in critical respects.10 Furthermore, this approach assists in removing upper elite control over the noetic commons which governs perception, because recognition of metabolic type is a necessary precondition for psychological sovereignty in an age of manufactured consensus.

I hope you found this typology and discussion helpful. Thanks for reading.

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1 Throughout this essay I refer to planetary and mythic figures (Dionysus, Saturn, Hermes, etc.) as shorthand for energetic patterns of perception, affect, and response. Whether these figures are to be understood as merely descriptive symbols, as internalized residues of once-external ordering forces, or as active transpersonal agencies that act through the psyche is a question I am intentionally leaving unresolved. All three interpretations are phenomenologically viable. These energies behave as autonomous, law‑like forces within the psyche: they impose demands, override conscious intention, generate compulsions, and exact costs when ignored. In that limited but important sense, they function as gods, regardless of their ultimate ontology.

My concern here is psychic containment, not metaphysical truth. Historically, attempts to live under a fully explicit unity‑of‑opposites god‑image (e.g., Abraxas) have proven psychologically unsustainable for most individuals. The framework offered here allows one to orient within such a limit‑condition implicitly by differentiating partial energies and their tensions without requiring direct identification with or submission to a totalizing god‑image.

This ambiguity is deliberate. Collapsing the gods into “mere metaphor” evacuates their force; treating them as literal beings invites inflation or paranoia. Holding the tension without resolution is itself a Saturnian necessity.

2 Metaphorically women become more Saturn as they age (especially over ~45), men become more Dionysus (or more Logos, depending on the type). Women tend to close the portal to the interior underworld, shift into the Crone archetype, and have less capacity for Dionysian chaos (see: Angelina Jolie), because keeping open Dionysus is energetically expensive. Alternatively, aging men with Dionysian energy move toward the archetypes (the Magician, the Prophet, the Hermit, the Trickster, the Sage, the Madman, the Artist, the Outcast, the Sorcerer). The difference between men and women here is that women are vessels while men are channels of energy.

3

1. Dionysus + Saturn: Dionysus’ eruption clashes with Saturn’s constriction. Can produce creative output or chronic tension. Partial matches for Saturn/Dionysus mixes include Robespierre (Saturnian exterior, inner revolutionary fire (but colder and less ecstatic)), John Brown (moral severity containing apocalyptic fire), perhaps Carl Jung himself in energetic form (Saturn/kingly containment over a volcanic unconscious), Ayn Rand (Saturnian armor with Dionysian inner rage, but lacking mysticism).
2. Apollo + Dionysus: Complementary in theory (clarity vs. ecstasy), but hard to maintain; imbalance leads to aestheticized mania or chaotic perfectionism.
3. Mercury + Venus: Smooth blend; most people fall here. Socially adaptive, harmonious, but emotionally shallow; little capacity for existential extremes.
4. Mars + Jupiter: Amplification of active expansion; leadership and action-oriented. Risks overreach and hubris.
5. Hephaestus + Saturn: Complementary; disciplined work ethic + structural containment. Stable but can lead to social invisibility or isolation.
6. Luna + Dionysus: High psychic permeability + ecstatic intensity; mystical or visionary but prone to collapse without grounding.
7. Hermes + Dionysus: Social adaptability tempers chaos; creates charming, manic, surface-level geniuses.

4 Regarding stabilizers, I had written in a prior post, “Broadly speaking, human psyches tend to regulate around one of a few primary stabilizers: (1) attachment and belonging, (2) esteem and status, (3) meaning and narrative, (4) control and agency, (5) coherence and truth-consistency. Most people have several, but one dominates.” These models compliment each other, but have different focuses: energy profile model = how the psyche moves, stabilizer model = what the psyche protects. Movement vs anchor. Energy profiles cluster toward stabilizers, strongly, but not one-to-one; it’s a tendency, not a law. Saturn-dominant psyches typically regulate around coherence and truth-consistency; Dionysian around meaning and intensity; Lunar around belonging; Solar around esteem; Hermetic around control or agency. These are regulatory priorities, i.e. what must remain intact for the psyche to stay integrated.

5 Pluto names the absolute limit-case of the chthonic where depth becomes irreversible transformation, the point at which descent becomes mutation. It is the archetype of annihilation-as-renewal, the pressure that strips away everything not aligned with necessity.

6 His consciousness is fundamentally Apollonian-solar, i.e. he approaches truth as something structured, architectonic, illuminated from above. Yet he applies that solar clarity to the most chthonic material imaginable: state secrecy, elite engineering, manufactured wars, psycho-political design. His descent into darkness is never Dionysian; it is a controlled plunge, analytical rather than experiential. He remains outside what he studies, throwing light downward. My orientation is the inverse, lunar–Dionysian, metabolizing reality from the inside out, moving through experience rather than illuminating it from a distance. Where he reveals the underworld through form and structure, I move through the underworld as an interior landscape. The contrast isn’t opposition but perpendicularity, two different angles on the same abyss. This explains why we see similar things, distrust official narratives, sense the same hidden machinery, but narrate from entirely different psychological altitudes.

7 He has a chthonic style of expression (fundamentally oriented downward toward the underside of experience – trauma, double binds, parasitic structures, parasocial distortions, the unconscious residues of culture, the “understories” behind institutions, where his attention moves into holes, gaps, inversions, wounds, misalignments), his interpretive function is chthnoic Hermes (psychopompic, excavational, connective, uncanny), and his inner energetic polarity is a Dionysian–Lunar inner polarity (drawn to experiences of psychic rupture, possession, initiation, and the breakdown of false personas (Dionysus) while processing these events through a reflective, introspective, dreamlike mode that seeks pattern, metaphor, and symbolic coherence rather than ecstasy for its own sake (Lunar)).

The key difference between him and I under this paradigm is that I have tension leading to discipline while he has tension leading to endless reinterpretation, and that I generate structure under pressure while he generates insight. This is why my writing is severe and ecstatic while his is uncanny excavation plus vulnerability.

8 He operates almost entirely in symbolic, technical, and communicative space, translating abstractions into systems at inhuman speed, where constraint appears to him as an external enemy (physics, markets, time), not as an internal regulator, which produces immense leverage alongside chronic instability.

9 Briefly, this is not a revival of premodern paganism or an aesthetic return to earlier religious forms. It follows from a sequence of constraints:

1. Reality is experienced as a crucifixion of opposites (irreconcilable goods, incompatible demands, simultaneous creation and destruction).
2. When this condition is made explicit at the theological level, it culminates in a god-image that contains all opposites (e.g., Abraxas).
3. Such a god-image functions as a limit condition for consciousness: sustained identification with undifferentiated totality is psychologically uninhabitable for embodied human beings.
4. Because the Abraxas limit cannot be lived directly, life necessarily returns to the local, the partial, and the embodied – to the specific energies through which a given psyche can metabolize contradiction.
5. These energies are not passive objects of understanding but autonomous forces that act on the psyche whether or not they are conceptually grasped. They cannot merely be “known about”, they must be engaged: invoked when needed, propitiated when overwhelming, resisted when destructive, and released when their function is complete. This requires a relational grammar, not an analytical one. Abstract principles (e.g., “the principle of restriction” or “the force of dissolution”) can be understood but not related to; they remain inert concepts. Personification here is structural necessity: only personified forces can be addressed, negotiated with, and distinguished from the self. The gods are the minimal relational architecture through which autonomous psychic energies become navigable rather than merely conceptual.
6. This requires differentiation. Distinct god-images emerge as structural partitions of the totality, each carrying a subset of reality’s contradictions in a form that can be borne, navigated, and relinquished.

In this sense, the “return of the gods” is a post-totality necessity: a differentiated psychic architecture that acknowledges the whole while remaining livable within human limits.

It should be noted that this return to interior differentiation is not the only historical solution to the problem of totality. Certain traditions preserve the unity of opposites by locating it entirely outside the individual psyche, within law, text, lineage, or collective discipline. In such systems, the individual is not required to metabolize contradiction consciously; the structure bears it. This preserves stability and power at the cost of psychic differentiation and interior consciousness. The sequence outlined here applies only where the burden of totality is internalized.

10 Hillman begins from psychic plurality and defends the gods as irreducible imaginal realities, rejecting unity or totality as a distorting, monotheistic imposition on soul; this approach, by contrast, fully accepts the truth of totality, follows it to its psychological limit (Abraxas), and then insists on a return to differentiated, pagan-like god-images as a post-monist necessity rather than a primary ontology. For Hillman, plurality is ultimate and must be protected from synthesis; in this approach, unity is conceptually true but unlivable, and plurality is reintroduced as a load-bearing interior architecture that makes embodied life possible after totality has been internalized.