Dionysus stands for the ecstasy that can come from tearing and being torn. The ecstatic wine comes only if the cluster of grapes is torn apart, trampled, enclosed. Dionysus is the clump of grapes that hands tore apart in the Greek villages and threw into the wine vat. When the men and women were tramping on those grapes, it is known that they would sing: "O Dionysus, I did not know, I did not know."
— Robert Bly
Bly is doing something careful here that is easy to miss: he is not romanticizing ecstasy. He is tracing its actual precondition. The wine does not arrive because something is elevated or transcended — it arrives because the cluster is torn, enclosed, trampled. The transformative substance is what falls out of the tearing, not what escapes it.
The song the villagers sang is the disclosure. "I did not know, I did not know" — not a confession of ignorance that has now been corrected, but a recognition offered *in the middle of the trampling*. They do not know from a safe distance looking back. They know it in the pressing-down. The god is not witnessed; the god is what you are standing inside when the floor is wet and the smell is too strong and your legs are doing something your mind did not fully authorize.
What the pneumatic imagination does with Dionysus is take the ecstasy and quietly drop the tearing — leaving a kind of sacred wildness that is really just another form of ascent, another bypass in vine-leaf costume. Bly won't let that happen. The god is not the elevation. The god is the cluster in the vat, torn apart by hands, and the wine is what drains out of that.
Robert Bly·Iron John: A Book About Men·1990