The Geometry of Chaos: Dionysus and Marriage as a Principle of Civic Order in the Ancient Greek World

Abstract

The essay examines the Dionysian hierogamy as a polyvalent mythic and ritual motif, articulated through the figures of Ariadne, Erigone, the Minyads, and the Proetids. These narratives represent complementary expressions of the same structural paradigm: the encounter between the god’s generative force and the mortal sphere of female alterity. Ariadne’s union with Dionysus on Naxos manifests the harmonious reintegration of fertility and cosmic order; Erigone’s self-hanging reveals the inversion of nuptial fecundity into a deathly suspension; the Minyads’ and Proetids’ madness dramatizes the dissolution resulting from the refusal of divine possession. Through philological, iconographic, and ritual analysis, the study situates these myths within a coherent symbolic system in which the Dionysian wedding thus functions as a hieratic process of transformation, in which erotic and chthonic dimensions converge to regenerate both nature and community.