The juice of the vine is his, and like wise the many juices of life.  'Sovereign of all that is moist', Dionysus himself is liquid, a stream that surrounds us.

Clement of Alexandria speaks [in malice] of Dionyus as  choiropsales, 'the one who touches the vulva', the one whose fingers could make it vibrate like the strings of a lyre.
...

Dionysus is not a useful god who helps weave or knot things together, but a god who loosens and unties. The weavers are his enemies. Yet there comes a moment when the weavers will leave their looms and dash off after him into the mountains. Dionysus is the river we hear flowing by in the distance, an incessant booming from far away; then one day it rises and floods everything, as if the normal above-water state of things, the sober delimitation of our existence, were but a brief parenthesis overwhelmed in an instant.


Roberto Calasso   from The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony





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