Have you read The King Must Die? One of my favorite books when I was a kid.
It's Mary Renault's attempt at anthropological reconstruction of events that may have led to the Theseus myth. The whole book is a series of standoffs between the Old Religion (disciples of the Mother earth goddess) and the New Religion (disciples of the Sky gods.)
In the Old Religion, kings are regularly knocked off, and their bodies are sowed in the ground to help the crops (a variation on hanging them in trees á la Sir James Frazier and hel-l-l-o Jesus! :-) )
After Theseus rescues Ariadne, he brings her to Dia - both the name of an island off Crete and the name of an ancient goddess whose origins are lost in the mists of time - where a Dionysian festival is in progress. Ariadne gets very drunk and joins with the other maenads in killing the king by ripping him apart. Broken heartedly, Theseus abandons her. 'Cause once you see your fiancée rip a guy's penis off, love is never the same.
Anyway, that's Renault's theory on the Ariadne/Dionysius love match!
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It's Mary Renault's attempt at anthropological reconstruction of events that may have led to the Theseus myth. The whole book is a series of standoffs between the Old Religion (disciples of the Mother earth goddess) and the New Religion (disciples of the Sky gods.)
In the Old Religion, kings are regularly knocked off, and their bodies are sowed in the ground to help the crops (a variation on hanging them in trees á la Sir James Frazier and hel-l-l-o Jesus! :-) )
After Theseus rescues Ariadne, he brings her to Dia - both the name of an island off Crete and the name of an ancient goddess whose origins are lost in the mists of time - where a Dionysian festival is in progress. Ariadne gets very drunk and joins with the other maenads in killing the king by ripping him apart. Broken heartedly, Theseus abandons her. 'Cause once you see your fiancée rip a guy's penis off, love is never the same.
Anyway, that's Renault's theory on the Ariadne/Dionysius love match!