Dionysos was wont to confuse his mother for his wife. For years of his life, he wandered in search of the woman who died when he was born. As do all men look for their lost young mother when looking for a woman to wed. Semele died when seven months pregnant because, when she asked her unknown lover to reveal himself as he truly was, he came to her in the deadly magnificence of a lightning bolt. Out of disguise he was the great God Zeus. He reached for the unborn child, opened his own thigh, and sewed the child in, securing his "womb" with golden clasps. When the child Dionysos leapt forth "twice-born," once from his mother, once from his father, he was given into the care of Semele's nurse who raised him, hidden in the mountains, disguised as a girl.

This apparent "girl with the heart of a boy" grew in loveliness and strength until he was ready to go search for his lost mother. In one account he was wandering over the sea and came, forlorn, to the Isle of Naxos where he thought he might find her. Just then, Ariadne had awakened from the sleep of her marriage night to discover she had been abandoned by Theseus, the mortal hero and husband who had brought her this far out of the labyrinth of her girlhood. Her impulse to throw herself over the cliff met his drive to find Semele, and they embraced in mid-despair, he thinking ht'd found his origin and she thinking it was her death. The myth singers say she had been betrothed to the God from the beginning, but it was not until she found herself utterly alone, betrayed, and deserted that she could locate this other undying masculine force that was primordially hers.