His duality has manifested itself to us in the antitheses of ecstasy and horror, infinite vitality and savage destruction; in the pandemonium in which deathly silence is inherent; in the immediate presence which is at the same time absolute remoteness. All of his gifts and attendant phenomena give evidence of the sheer madness of his dual essence: prophecy, music, and finally wine, the flamelike herald of the god, which has in it both bliss and brutality. At the height of ecstasy all of these paradoxes suddenly unmask themselves and reveal their names to be Life and Death.
— Walter F Otto
Otto is not describing a symbol that means something — he is describing a force that refuses to mean anything except what it is. The antitheses he names (ecstasy and horror, vitality and destruction, presence and absolute remoteness) are not opposites waiting to be reconciled. They are the same thing seen from two angles that cannot be held simultaneously, and the god refuses to let you rest in either one.
This is why wine is the most honest of Dionysus's gifts. Not because it loosens inhibition, which is the modern reading, but because it is already both things at once — bliss and brutality in the same cup, the same swallow. You cannot drink the one without the other being present. The soul that reaches for wine — or for ecstasy in any of its forms — as relief from suffering has not misunderstood the gift; it has understood it perfectly and is about to learn the second half. At the height of ecstasy the paradoxes unmask themselves: they were Life and Death the whole time.
What Otto preserves here is the quality of the Dionysian that every spiritualizing reading eventually softens — the absolute refusal to save you. The god arrives. Nothing is resolved. That is the arrival.
Walter F Otto·Dionysus Myth and Cult (1965)·1965