All intoxication arises from those depths which have become fathomless because of death. From these depths comes music-Dionysiac music-which transforms the world in which life had become a habit and a certainty, and death a threatening evil. This world it obliterates with the melody of the uncommon which mocks all attempts at reassurance. "Richard Wagner says of civilization that it is neutralized by music as lamp light is neutralized by the light of day."26 From. this abyss come also ecstasy and inspired prophecy. These are no baseless "risings outside of one's self" nor clairvoyance. How could ecstasy be creative if it arose from an insufficiency from a not-having coupled with a desire to have? The elemental depths gape open and out of them a monstrous creature raises its head before which all the limits that the normal day has set must disappear. There man stands on the threshold of madness-in fact, he is already part of it even if his wildness which wishes to pass on into destructiveness still remains mercifully hidden. He has already been thrust out of everything secure, everything settled, out of every haven of thought and feeling, and has been flung into the primeval cosmic turmoil in which life, surrounded and intoxicated with death, undergoes eternal change and renewal. But the god himself is not merely touched and seized by the ghostly spirit of the abyss. He, himself, is the monstrous creature which lives in the depths. From its mask it looks out at man and sends him reeling with the ambiguity of nearness and remoteness, of life and death in one. Its divine intelligence holds the contradictions together. For it is the spirit of excitation and wildness; and everything alive, which seethes and glows, resolves the schism between itself and its opposite and has already absorbed this spirit in its desire. Thus all earthly powers are united in the god: the generating, nourishing, intoxicating rapture; the life-giving inexhaustibility; and the tearing pain, the deathly pallor, the speechless night of having
— Walter F Otto
Otto is not describing an altered state you move through and return from. The depths he points to are not a temporary condition — they are what death opens permanently beneath ordinary life, the fathomlessness that was always there once the ground gave way. Music, for Dionysus, does not lift you above this; it obliterates the reassurances that had made you comfortable with not knowing it was there. Wagner's image is precise in the right direction: lamp light does not compete with daylight, it simply ceases to exist in it. The smaller comfort is not defeated — it is cancelled by something of an entirely different order.
What stops most readings of this passage is the assumption that ecstasy means insufficiency — a not-having, a longing for more than one was given. Otto refuses that immediately, and the refusal matters because the longing-model is how the soul keeps ecstasy manageable, a desire that could in principle be satisfied, an absence that could be filled. But if the depths gape open not because you lacked something but because the monstrous creature already lives there, then no acquisition closes the gap. The god is not the object of longing; he is what longing was always circling without being able to name. He holds the contradiction — generating and tearing, life and deathly pallor together — not as a resolution but as a nature. The schism does not end. It becomes what the living thing is.
Walter F Otto·Dionysus Myth and Cult (1965)·1965