Otto is not describing a safety mechanism. The epithet *Lysios* — the Deliverer, the Loosener — does not mean that Dionysus moderates his own violence. It means that the god himself is what holds the worshipper inside the infinity rather than being consumed by it. There is no outside position from which to receive deliverance; the protection and the annihilation run on the same current.

This is what distinguishes Dionysian cult from the many forms of longing that want ecstasy without its price. The soul that approaches infinity imagining it will find expansion, aliveness, the fullness it has been missing — and there is always that imagination at work — discovers that the same force which fills also destroys. The ecstasy of life and the ecstasy of destruction are not sequential; they are identical in their root. What the cult held, at its most honest, was not a promise of liberation from ordinary suffering but an initiation into a register of experience where suffering and exaltation had not yet been separated. The Deliverer delivers nothing by removing the danger. He delivers by being the madness itself — present inside it, which is the only place anything like sanity can be found.