Both tell of the god with the two faces, the spirit of presence and absence, of the Now and the Then, who is most grippingly symbolized in the mask. With him appears the unfathomable mystery of life and death cemented together into a single entity, and the mystery of the act of creation affected with madness and overshadowed by death. This is why he bears with him not only all of the energy and exuberant joy of a life which is at the height of its activity but also his entire destiny. From his all-too-early birth, from his origin in his mother who perished in flames, sorrow and pain pursue him. His victories become defeats, and from radiant heights a god plunges down into the horrors of destruction. But it is just because of this that the earth also brings forth its most precious fruits through him and for him. Out of the vine, "the wild mother," there erupts for his sake the drink whose magic extends all that is confined and lets a blissful smile blossom forth out of pain. And in the arms of her eternal lover rests Ariadne.
— Walter F Otto
Dionysus does not arrive to rescue you from the two faces — he is the two faces held together, presence and absence as a single grammar, joy as something that has not escaped sorrow but carries it forward into the very gesture of reaching for wine. Otto sees this clearly: the victories become defeats, the radiant heights are inseparable from the plunge, and the drink that dissolves confinement erupts precisely from what he names "the wild mother," that ambivalent, flame-destroyed origin. There is no Dionysus purified of his mother's burning.
What the mask symbolizes is not concealment but the coincidence of the real with its opposite held at the threshold of face. The soul that reaches for the Dionysian — for dissolution, for the bliss that opens the chest and lets confinement fall away — is not wrong to reach. The wine does what wine promises. But the logic underneath the reach, the one that says *if I dissolve far enough I will not have to suffer*, encounters in Dionysus himself its most devastating refutation: a god for whom sorrow and exuberance are not alternating states but the same breath. Ariadne rests in the arms of a lover who has already been destroyed and will be again. That is the embrace on offer — not consolation, but company in the fullness of it.
Walter F Otto·Dionysus Myth and Cult (1965)·1965