59 It is a fitting image for the god of the here and now, of overwhelming immediacy, who is at the same time the god of inexpressible distance, the god of eternity—the god who holds life and death together. As the only Olympian god to be born of a mortal mother, Dionysos is from the beginning more closely associated with death than any other god except Hades. His mother's death by the fire of Zeus' lightning-bolts while he was still in her womb and his second birth from the body of Zeus himself strengthen his connection to the mystery of life and death cemented together in an eternal unity. It is a connection which persists in all his myths as he thrusts men into a new life, overflowing with rapture and vitality—a life into which they can only be born by dying to their past and to everything they cling to for security, an inexhaustible life born of pain and death.


 60 Nowhere do we see this more clearly and more movingly than in the myth of Dionysos and Ariadne, the woman whom the god of women chooses and to whom he remains eternally faithful—the only faithful husband among the amorous gods. But before Dionysos' beloved can be fully united with him in inexhaustible life and immortality, she must go through deep suffering and, in some versions of the myth, even death. In Monteverdi's opera Arianna, Arianna's Lament so caught the public's imagination that it became overnight the most popular piece of music of the moment. The Cretan princess, daughter of King Minos, wakes on a lonely beach on Naxos to discover that Theseus, the man whose life she has saved, has abandoned her.


 61 Theseus had arrived in Crete as part of the Athenian tribute of seven men and seven women who were sent to Crete every nine years to be sacrificed to the Minotaur—the terrible monster that was half-bull and half-man. Theseus could only be saved and be free to return to Athens if he entered the Labyrinth and slew the Minotaur. All who had gone before him had perished, but Theseus, guided by the thread Ariadne had given him, was able to to make his way into the Labyrinth and come out of it alive and victorious. He left Crete, taking Ariadne with him only to desert her on the first island where their ship put anchor for the night. He abandons her because, as Homer implies, she has to be abandoned. Her desertion by Theseus, by the mortal part of herself, is the necessary prelude to her relationship with Dionysos, who embodies the transcendent in her. "At times we are pulled to an involvement with a human other as an escape from a connection with the transcendent, a connection with a prior claim on us that is somehow too much. We flee to the heroic mortal lover, escaping from the deeper experience.... At the moments when what Dionysos represents is more than we feel we can handle or stay in touch with, we turn our backs on it." The prior claim of Dionysos, of the divine, is expressed in the myth in concrete terms: Ariadne was already Dionysos' beloved before she betrayed him for Theseus.


 62 "I will never love again, and therefore in some sense I will never live again," cries the deserted Ariadne in Richard Strauss' opera. At the moment of her deepest despair, Dionysos is heard singing off-stage. She hails him as the longed-for messenger of death. But when he appears before her, she recognizes in him her true lover for whom, transformed through her pain, she is now ready. The opera ends with a ravishing love duet; the myth ends with Ariadne's ascent to heaven in the god's chariot. Her suffering and lamentation are transformed into bliss in the god's arms.


 63 Ariadne's thread is the symbolic counterpart of Dionysos' mask: it connects this world with the other, the outer with the inner, mortality with eternity. Ariadne's cult on Naxos, with its festivals of joy and of sorrow, captures the spirit of the god: sorrow, suffering, terror, even death, are all in the service of a greater life, liberated from rationalist limitations and conventional imprisonments. It is this greater life that Dionysos embodies—life in the round, forever coming into being, forever renewing itself, forever dying and being reborn.