“Dionysus incarnates desire’s excess, madness, and mortal fascination. The women loved and abandoned by Dionysus move toward inevitable death. Dionysus is an absent god, who tires easily of his lovers, forgets and abandons them, after having possessed them, at times with deceit and violence. The seduction of Dionysus echoes madness and death because it constitutes an initiatory threshold for the soul. Being open to desire and pleasure implies the death of a virginal consciousness that knows no contact or relationship with the other. The seduction of Dionysus should be seen in this context of merging. By abandoning his lovers, the god obliges them to free themselves from a fusional embrace, to return to themselves – something they do not always succeed in doing. Dionysus rules over the threshold of love passion, marking its confines with the madness of unbounded desire, such as that to which the maenads abandon themselves. The orgiastic fury that possesses the Bacchantes in the retinue of the god leads, for example, to Agave tearing Pentheus to pieces, in punishment for having refused to honor the god.”
– Aldo Carotenuto, Rites and Myths of Seduction