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‘In the end the only events in my life worth telling are those when the imperishable world irrupted into this transitory one’ (Jung 12, p. 4).
At the conclusion of Euripides's play, The Bacchae, as Agave awakens to the realisation that the creature she has dismembered under the intoxication of Dionysus's power is her own son Pentheus, she cries to her father Cadmus:
O Father, now you can seehow everything is changed. I am in anguish nowtormented, who waked in triumph minutes past (Euripides 1, p. 222).
From her ecstatic fusion with the god she plunges, in a jarring descent, into agony, ambiguity, and human limitation. Agave, who danced and leapt over mountains, suckled wild beasts, and made wine flow from the earth, comes to know that it was she who also brutally and ruthlessly rent her own son to pieces. Abandonment to the god has led to dismemberment, fusion to fragmentation, ecstasy to an abyss of sorrow and inconceivable horror, possession by a wild, boundless energy to emptiness and annihilation, frenzied communion to isolation and despair. Her father Cadmus, destroyed by Dionysus as well and cast out of Thebes, is able to respond to her agony and aloneness only with impotence:
Poor childlike a white swan warding its weak old father,why do you clasp those white arms around my neck?…Your father can no longer help you.