ABSTRACT
Dionysos and his relation to tragedy is discussed. As the god of generative life forces and, at the same time, the horrifying agent of death, he is the god of ek-static altered realities representing the dual nature of human identity: reality–illusion, human–divine, man–woman and, ultimately, life–death. Dismemberment (sparagmos) was a common theme in myths related to him, and he was, accordingly, known as anthroporraistes (“tearing humans apart”). In this chapter, the author proposes that Agave’s savage dismemberment of her son in Euripides’ Bacchae re-presents the original traumatic separation of the infant from his/her mother with whom s/he had been, until then, fused in a bio-psychic oneness. Inscribed in the human imaginaire as a violent fragmentation and equated with death, this rupture forms the basis of human ontological division and constitutes the essence of the tragic.
