The god, in whose honor the wild dance rages, is himself mad! Whatever explanation is advanced must then be applicable to him, first of all. The oldest reference to him, Homer, calls him /xatvd/icvo?, and a series of important titles, descriptions, and presentations leaves no doubt that almost everything which is said of the maenads also applies to him-in fact, to him most of all. He, himself, is the mad one; he, himself, is the brandisher of the thyrsus, the eater of raw flesh.
— Walter F Otto
Otto's point cuts deeper than a comment on Dionysus's mythology. The god does not stand outside the frenzy as its cause or its object — he is identical with it. The maenads do not bring madness to the rite; they catch it from something that already is madness. This collapses the usual distance between the worshipper and the worshipped, between the one who suffers and the source of suffering, in a way that most religious grammar actively resists. Ordinarily the divine is what rescues you from the condition the divine provoked. Here, the condition is the god.
What that means for how you encounter Dionysus — in dream, in compulsion, in the quality of an overwhelming state — is that the search for the transcendent solution is already inside the wound. The thyrsus is his before it is the maenads'. The raw flesh is eaten by the god, not administered by him. If something in your life has the texture of Dionysian possession — the loop that won't close, the hunger that exceeds its object — the divinity involved is not watching from above it. It is the hunger itself, the loop itself, and no amount of distance from the condition will locate the god anywhere else.
Walter F Otto·Dionysus Myth and Cult (1965)·1965