ARIADNE AND DIONYSUS:  MATURE EROS AT MIDLIFE

Dr. Lou Montgomery

    Myths can serve as roadmaps for certain potent life passages. In the words of Issac

Dinesen, “ All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.”  Through myths that speak to us directly we can find a legitimization of life and find consecration and self-awareness. This particular story can serve as a brilliant container to hold and illumine the passage through midlife because it is so closely tied to  themes of loss and empowerment. It is a marvelous tale about female and male mutual transformation, egalitarian co-creation, androgynous self-knowing and mature enlightened Eros. The myth, if fully ingested and metabolized, has an intitatory function in that by becoming fully accountable for the ways we betray ourselves and others or debase ourselves in the role of victim, we attain wisdom and wholeness.  Indeed, out of the ashes of my own mid-life humiliation and male desertion, like Ariadne spending a year on the sands of Naxos in an immobilizing depression, a creative Phoenix rose up and gave birth to deep theatrical artistry.

    The poignant story of Ariadne and Dionysus still serves as a guidepost whenever I find that the kicking creative fetus stirring in the womb of my imagination requires a certain midwifery. They are my mythic godparents.  Whenever I have been in the throes of an overwhelmingly complex and intimidating artistic project Ariadne’s ball of thread and crown of light has been the guiding force through the confusing convolutions of  the labyrinth back to the center—the way out, the way in,  the way beyond. The serpentine way is, as T.S.Eliot reminds us, the way that is the return to the place from which we started and yet know for the first time. As I have threaded my way through the twists and turns of rendering wrenching subject matter into theatre, Ariadne has gone ahead, unraveling her red thread.  More importantly, in the sense of the archaic Greek notion of ate, a being overtaken by the gods, in my creative process I have suffered alongside Ariadne in her abandonment, comatose sleep, and submission to death on the island of Naxos before her ultimate awakening and transformation by Dionysus. Ariadne epitomizes fully conscious mature womanhood in the sense that she is both betrayed and betrayer and lives out all of the consequences. She must not only embrace the tension of the victim/tyrant opposites; she must resolve and reconcile them.

     Let us briefly refresh our memories. Ariadne was the daughter of King Minos of Crete. Minos, who had been victorious in war against Athens and had been demanding a yearly tribute of youths and maidens which were devoured by the Minotaur, the beast who haunted the underground labyrinth .  Ariadne fell in love with Theseus, the hero who with his companions had come to Crete from Athens as part of the tribute, and whose only hope for freedom to sail back home, was to penetrate the labyrinth and slay the Minotaur. After killing the Minotaur, Ariadne assisted Theseus in his escape by leading him out of the underground passages by means of her red thread and crown of light. At morning’s light after escaping Crete together, Theseus sailed off and abandoned Ariadne at Naxos Island, where, pregnant and distraught, she feel into a death-like sleep. In one version of the story, she hung herself; in another version the goddess Artemis killed her. Thus, her mortal love was fraught with desertion, confusion, depression, possessiveness, and anima dependence.  But in the most widespread version of the story, she was found and awakened by Dionysus, who, having just returned from the underworld, gave her solace in her desertion and in recognizing her initiated her into becoming his queen, his equal consort.

      On the surface, it appears that Ariadne’s initiative and power have been selfishly appropriated by Theseus. For her efforts she has been thanklessly discarded.  The classic menopausal motifs of the aging wife thrown aside after decades of domestic servitude and child rearing are fairly obvious.   One of the myth’s great teachings is that if Ariadne is ever to grow past her projections, patriarchal submission, and colonized psyche she must be left. As Ginette Paris writes, ‘ she goes to sleep so that her destiny may change.” 2  She has to be deserted because she deserted her origins.

      As betrayer, some versions of the myth relate that Ariadne was  betrothed to Dionysus. He had a previous claim to her heart before Theseus even came along. Dionysus had given Ariadne the crown which Theseus used to light his way out of the labyrinth. The myth seems to say that it is necessary stage of feminine individuation to first pass through an absorption in the domain of the male intellect before a woman can be freed. So, in this sense, Theseus in his solar heroic role helps initiate Ariadne. But by denying Dionysus for the sake of mortal love, Ariadne not only betrays the Beloved but betrays the magnificence  of her own true transcendent Self—a claim that is simply too frightening. She has turned away from her own dark, earthy, underworld, labyrinth origins in the same way that I myself and so many women have turned away from our bothersome, messy, and bloody womb life. “ We flee to the heroic mortal lover, escaping from the deeper experience…At the moments when what Dionysus represents is more than we feel we can handle to stay in touch with, we turn our backs on it.” 3

    In becoming “nothing” in her death/sleep Ariadne comes to understand her guilt. Her psyche is pierced; she accepts her culpability. The myth seems to say that in becoming nothing we become everything.  Sometimes there is nothing left but a total submission and letting go—letting the last of the sand trickle through the hour glass. D.H. Lawrence expresses this paradox: “ Are you willing to be sponged out, erased, canceled out, made nothing? Are you willing to be made nothing? If not, you will never really change.” 4  Ariadne awakens and at first she does not recognize Dionysus. But his sudden appearance is shocking; it shakes her out of her former state. It is irrational, like a “ bolt from the blue,” ungraspable and unexpected. But in the ensuing dramatic reversal—the enantiodromia—death becomes life. The divine appears as human and the human becomes godlike.

       One of the tasks of the awakening mature woman is to become accountable for the self-betrayal we have inflicted upon ourselves—whether through colluding with introjected colonizing patriarchal forces, settling for less in terms of degrading relationships, abandoning ourselves through addiction to sex and romance, or obsessing over our aging body image.  Out of a full accountability, Dionysus can appear and Ariadne can awaken.  Women entering the ancient Greek mystery cults transformed through submitting themselves to the action of the sacred drama.  Dionysus’s sudden appearance only occurs when Ariadne has surrendered to death with the unborn child in her womb. In some versions of the myth she actually enters the underworld and gives birth there—the only account in Greek mythology of a birth in the land of the dead.

       This aspect of the story for me is the most mysterious, the most paradoxical, and the most profoundly evocative of Ariadne as guide to the inner mature artist. In the world of the dead Ariadne gives birth ! In dying completely to herself she becomes purely feminine. As the wise woman, she is naked and clear. When her essence nature reveals itself, she is no longer alone. As Ariadne finds her inner world she finds the god. Everything becomes simple, uncomplicated, and yet still entirely mysterious. My personal associations include the passing of youth with its attendant insecurity, the confrontation with my own looming mortality, the signifying losses in my personal life, as well as my grief over planetary losses and devastations.  The sandy beach of Naxos is inclusive of everything my self-as-woman mourns—species’ extinctions, child prostitution, dying seas, the possibility of solitary infirm aging. And yet in the midst of my own death realm, this artistry, the culmination of a lifetime of thought and experience, is birthed in the violent pangs of a mysterium tremendum.

     In order for Ariadne to become the nurse and awakener of Dionysus she has to suffer a kind of crucifixion. Like Ariadne, in the midst of spasmodic psychic death-throes, artistic work has been birthed from my female wound amidst anger, impatience, madness, outrage, terror, and loneliness.  Yet with Dionysus as midwife, the birth has at times also been ecstatic, hilarious, sublime, and transcendent.  Ariadne’s birth, sheparded by Dionysus, represents not only creative work gestated and cooked in the alchemical fire. It is the birth of soul; Ariadne is the mother of the soulwork child.

     There are a myriad ways that Dionysus inspires and infuses the artistic medium—the theatre in particular. The mask god, the god of confrontation, the one who assaults the senses, mixes the wine, links ecstasy with horror, Dionysus helps us see through our guises, plots, performances, and characters and reveals our lives as mythic enactments. The God of dramatic imagination accompanies our healing as we enter into the drama or our stories and re-write our scripts, since, James Hillman reminds us, it is the stories we tell ourselves and not just our persons who are sick.

     But I  would also like to articulate some of the many ways that Dionysus  speaks directly to women, mirrors female consciousness, and acts as a healing panacea to brutalizing patriarchy. Within every complex, Jung said, is an archetypal core. Within every archetypal core, there is a god. Each god casts a particular shadow.  Dionysus, as the god of shades, shadows, and the depths, points us toward what has been repressed, hidden, and outcast in the unconscious. At the center of the cults of Dionysus was the child , indicating that our psychological rebirth comes through the depths of the underworld. “Dionysian” refers not only to mythic attributes of the god but to a structure of consciousness that is inherently dramatic and imaginative. In my theatrical creations, I have often drawn inspiration from the borderlands of interior landscapes, ambiguities, polymorphous sensuality, female inherent bisexuality, and fluid Eros—all of which are realms of Dionysus, the Lord of Souls.

     As the persecuted god bringing destruction with blessedness, whose initiates must likewise suffer, there are many associations one can make between traits of the god, as he traipses about the countryside with his entourage and symptoms of women at midlife. His urgent appearances, sudden reversals, the lightning flashes that consume his mother Semele, his nocturnal wanderings, depressive sorrows, journeys to the underworld, aberrant maternal instincts, his at-homeness in the watery depths, intoxicated altered states, and maenedic frenzies, through vivid startling images, mytho-poetically enhance women’s mid-life woes.  Raging hormones, hot flashes, mood swings, insomnia, night sweats, and paralyzing depression are illuminated through the lens of mythic imagination so that these “symptoms” can be seen as the gods at war and at play. R. D. Laing believes that madness should not be looked at as a symptom but rather as the fever with which one fights illness. 

     The feminine is naturally attracted to Dionysus. From the milk in the breast to the sap in the tree and juice of the vine, everything is drawn forth and flows around the God of Women. His bursting energy is a path to freedom; hence he is both ally and guide for the oppressed feminine. Kerenyi points out that Dionysus is associated with zoe, the primal exuberant life force in nature that flows in and between women as relatedness. His magic phallic power was first revealed to women. Women await his bellowing bull call, ready to hurl themselves into a frenzied moon-struck orgiastic delirium.  They are thus the first to have their “body electric” overtaken by Dionysian madness.  In the wildness that can break loose in alarming ways, there is the presence of death in the midst of Eros, which is precisely women’s visionary capability.  “Where life stirs, death too is near” 5

       There is some deep structure in women that both abhors and erotically fantasizes  being ravished, abducted, and swept away. Touching directly into that dichotomy, Dionysus is the god torn by the contradictions of love and hate, massacre and celebration,  He is “both gentle and wild, cuddly and violent, brutish and witty, perverse and innocent, generous and demanding.” 6 That he can so bewitch his maenads that their maternal devouring instincts know no limits, as they suckle wild animals and pounce upon and rip apart both savage beasts as well as young life held dear in a destructive frenzy, captures the union of danger and ecstasy, the eruption of impulse, and the moment when death and life meet in a wild embrace.

     As an epiphanic god who bursts on the scene like a locomotive, his erratic  shape-shifting appearance is irresistibly compelling. He shakes everything loose. Dionysus can serve as a restorative image for the midlife woman who feels she is slowly unraveling in the mirror day after day. The maenad is she who enthusiastically follows the satyr, wraps her arms and hair in snakes, dresses in faun’s skins, flaunts decorum, leaves her “right mind,” and ultimately turns her back on society. She must be ripe and ready to let go, to let down, to let out. Like Ariadne, she can fall into the underworld and give birth to wine, which is clarifying. It is only when women remain passive and resistive that they become deadly and monstrous. A woman’s giving over to Dionysus is, as it were, a coming to herself. As he awakens his faithful, he is turn in awakened.

     The effeminacy of Dionysus, who was raised as a girl and who thus embodies an alternative mode of consciousness, a radical Otherness, is his hidden power. He was known to seduce men away from the battlefield. His bisexuality empowers women in their solidarity and autonomy from male control. His androgynous ecstasy infuses group ritual through altered states and empowers the theatre as the site of a religious event. As the Bringer of Ecstasy, to drink the wine of Dionysus, one becomes entheos—filled with his divinity. As the only god to take part in his own rites, Dionysus pours himself out on the altar of the theatre and thus brings good things to mortals. By affirming the whole self through ecstatic ritual, this god who was born miraculously, suffered in human form, gifted the world with the sacramental value of wine, championed the underclasses, kept company with prostitutes, and successfully returned from the land of the dead, was hailed as the Prince of Peace.

     Unfortunately, in his later Orphic manifestation is a savior and liberator god, Dionysus was split in two by Christianity and became the cosmic struggle between good and evil. God made flesh and animal made human, where once the tearing and eating of raw animal flesh fused the human and animal worlds, Dionysus as the Bull God had his horns, hooves, and sexuality attached to the Devil. The androgynous celebration of joy over time disintegrated into a male dominated religion of salvation and purification that sharply distinguished sexual from religious rites and subjugated women.  Out of what Arthur Evans calls a patriarchal psychosis what ensued was the need to degrade, hurt, or kill the persons who aroused sexual feelings resulting in rape, violence, and pornography. The Devil became projected on women as Pandora, Eve, the burning witch, and the Victorian hysteric.

     However, it is as the god who most represents “male sexuality as women experience

 it “ 7 that for me is most touching.  Because the sexuality of Dionysus is so earthy and gusty, we contact the deep-rooted source of animal life and drink from its well. Dionysus is the only god in the Greek pantheon that is not exploitative of women. He is the lover of women who are centered and grounded within themselves. He is faithful to Ariadne—the wife, the one chosen, the one immortalized. But in order to be consorts to each other, they both have had to become fully androgynous. The only way Ariadne can partner with the God of ecstasy, madness, and erotic magic is to have become comfortable with her own capacity for sensuousness and erotic pleasure. She is clear in her power, unapologetic for her autonomy, immortal in her soul essence, and a shining example of what Esther Harding calls “in-herself-ness.”

    In their co-reflective stature, maturity, intimacy with the underworld depths, badges of suffering, spirit of egalitarianism, and androgynous self-knowledge, Dionysus and Ariadne are mutually transformative. They initiate each other, intoxicate each other. The wine begins to flow.  Dionysus, who up to now has been the God of the Bull becomes the God of Wine. Ariadne takes her resplendent place among the immortal Olympians.

     Ariadne and Dionysus epitomize not only my vision of the inner alchemical marriage, the heiros gamos, but also a concretization of the literal relationship possible at mid-life between a man and a woman. Their union speaks not only of ageless sensuality, juicy connection, and creative compatability, but of responsible stewardship, acting on behalf of the unborn generations, and inspired spiritual eldering. Plus, in my imagination, they play, laugh, get wild and naked, toast their wine glasses, enjoy the Epicurean good life, tenderly care for one another, and respect each others’ woundedness. Afterall, they have both been to hell and back. If there is any invocation to mid-life sexual, psychological, and spiritual liberation, it is the spirits of Ariadne and Dionysus reigning blissfully and peacefully together and hopefully smiling down on us.