Dionysian myth and cult: the ambivalent god

Abstract

This study examines Dionysus, the Greek religious deity, as the supreme symbolic expression of the coincidentia oppositorum, emphasizing his constitutive ambivalence. God of ecstatic release and madness, of life and death, of pleasure and horror, Dionysus embodies the rupture of all stable oppositions. His cult and myth operate through the tension between antagonistic forces that do not cancel each other out but coexist in productive conflict. Born of a mortal woman and Zeus, he is born, dies, and is reborn; he brings wine that both delights and deranges; he fosters communion and the dissolution of the self. The mask, a central symbol of his epiphany, reveals by concealing, embodying his fluid identity and dissonant presence. In worship, his rites – dances, cries, trances – open a passage to a liminal experience where opposites touch. As xénos, he is always the outsider who destabilizes the polis, mediating the threshold between human and divine, order and chaos. The recurring motifs of dismemberment, feminine death, and collective madness expose the tragic underside of ecstasy. Dionysus is simultaneously redemption and threat, healing and wound, light and abyss. His cult, far from celebrating life alone, reveals the essential paradox of the sacred: there is creation only where there is rupture.