He is the mad ecstasy which hovers over every conception and birth and whose wildness is always ready to move on to destruction and death. He is life which, when it overflows, grows mad and in its profoundest passion is intimately associated with death. This unfathomable world of Dionysus is called mad with good reason. It is the world of which Schelling was thinking when he spoke of the "selfdestroying madness" which "still remains the heart of all things. Controlled only by the light of a higher intelligence and calmed by it, as it were, it is the true power of nature and everything she produces" (Die Weltalter). The fullness of life and the violence of death both are equally terrible in Dionysus. Nothing has been mitigated, but neither has anything been distorted and changed into something fantastic, as would be the case in the Orient. Everything follows the Greek way of looking at things and is seen as clear and structured. The Greek endured this reality in its total dimensions and worshipped it as divine. Other peoples were touched by the same entity, so that they had to respond to it with a variety of representations and practices. This is made clear by their birth celebrations, puberty initiations, and many other customs. But to the Greeks this entity appeared as a god in the form of a god. And the mad god who appeared with a host of raving female attendants summoned mortal women to share his madness with him. He brought the primeval world along with him. This is the reason why his onslaught stripped mortals of all of their conventions, of everything that made them "civilized," and hurled them into life which is intoxicated by death at those moments when it glows with its greatest vitality, when it loves, procreates, gives birth, and celebrates the rites of spring. There the most remote is near, the past is present, all ages are mirrored in the moment of the now. All that is lies locked in a close embrace. Man and animal breathe in the same maternal warmth. Cries 142 DIONYSUS of joy fill the air everywhere at the miracle of the springs which flow forth from an earth unlocked-until madness becomes a loweringstorm and lets the frenzy of horror and destruction burst forth from the frenzy of ecstasy. We should never forget that the Dionysiac world is, above all, a world of women. Women awaken Dionysus and bring him up. Women accompany him wherever he is. Women await him and are the first ones to be overcome by his madness. And this explains why the genuinely erotic is found only on the periphery of the passion and wantonness which make their appearance with such boldness on the well-known sculptures. Much more important than the sexual act are the act of birth and the feeding of the child. But more will be said about this later. The terrible trauma of childbirth, the wildness which belongs to motherliness in its primal form, a wildness which can break loose in an alarming way not only in animals-all these reveal the innermost nature of the Dionysiac madness: the churning up of the essence of life surrounded by the storms of death. Since such tumult lies waiting in the bottom-most depths and makes itself known, all of life's ecstasy is stirred up by Dionysiac madness and is ready to go beyond the bounds of rapture into a dangerous wildness. The Dionysiac condition is a primal phenomenon of life in which ~even man must participate in all of the moments of birth in his creative existence.
— Walter F Otto
Otto is describing something the soul knows before it theorizes: that the boundaries between ecstasy and destruction are not sequential but simultaneous. Dionysus does not bring joy and then, when it runs too long, tip into horror — the horror is already in the joy, already latent in the moment the earth unlocks and the springs flow. This is what makes the Dionysiac insupportable to any logic of not-suffering. The pneumatic move — ascent, transcendence, the light of higher intelligence Schelling invokes to *calm* the self-destroying madness — takes the madness as raw material and domesticates it. Otto notices this without quite saying it: the Greeks did not domesticate. They worshipped it. To worship is not to overcome.
The women in this passage are not incidental. They awaken him, accompany him, are first overcome. Otto's reading routes Dionysiac madness through motherliness and birth, not through sexuality — the erotic is peripheral, the primal act is the one that produces another life at the cost of the mother's own coherence. What churns at the bottom is not libido in any comfortable sense but the body's capacity to be the site of something it did not choose and cannot stop once it begins. That is the madness Otto means: not metaphor, not symbol, not spiritual experience elegantly described, but the condition of being alive in a body that generates life and is already moving toward its own destruction.
Walter F Otto·Dionysus Myth and Cult (1965)·1965