Dionysus, however, is both life and death, for his spirit reveals itself from out of the immeasurable depths where life and death are intertwined. That is why the myth also has him die.

Just as the women in Dionysiac madness tear their little boys into pieces, just as the maenads, following his example, tear apart young animals and devour them, so, he himself, as a child, is overcome by the Titans, torn apart, and consumed. It is a fearful struggle, in spite of the superiority of the enemies, for the kingly child assumes the shapes of the most dangerous of the animals, becoming in the end a raging bull. As bull he finally collapses. He is rent apart and devoured in the first flowering of his youth because he is himself the render and devourer of young life.

Thus Dionysus presents himself to us in two forms: as the god who vanishes and reappears, and as the god who dies and is born again. The second conception has evolved into the well-known doctrine of numerous rebirths of the god. Basically, however, both conceptions (his vanishing, which is paired with his reappearance, and his death, which is followed by his rebirth) are rooted in the same idea. Both tell of the god with the two faces, the spirit of presence and absence, of the Now and the Then, who is most grippingly symbolized in the mask. With him appears the unfathomable mystery of life and death cemented together into a single entity, and the mystery of the act of creation affected with madness and overshadowed by death.