One of many names behind which Dionysus conceals his total visibility is Lysios, ‘The One Who Unties’. This seal, this trace of wax, marks nothing but a seismic vow and a promise of otherness. Thus, another epigraph of this text could have been the alchemic motto: “Solve et Coagula” (Separate and Join Together), since the inclination of Lysios lies precisely in this imperative of dissolution. In fact, the very lineage of Dionysus is formulated under the umbra of a perpetual camouflage which reveals that every genealogy is the erratic result “of a multiplicity of flows, of forking paths, of different sedimentations.” (Georges Didi-Huberman). The stalking archetype that, more than the others, is tied to the figure of Dionysus is the androgyne, the fluid creature that bears on its body the impression of an utter alterity that always defers itself, unfolding new spiral movements and rejecting the clinical bisection of the body. In the androgyne, what Mario Mieli calls the “innate transsexuality” of the human being is manifested beyond the necrotic domain of the Norma and declares its presence either as a sulphurous vocation or as a bleeding wound. In his treatise called The Androgyne: Reconciliation Of Male And Female, Elemire Zolla provides an account of the subincision ceremonies of Australian aborigines, during which a cut is opened into the lower part of the penis, baring the urethra. Later in time, this wound is periodically made to bleed as a “proof of the adept’s link with the source of life and with the central archetype of the androgyne.” This passage says something more than just its anthropological account, unveiling what is buried in the word archetype, i.e. the ἀρχή (arche). Certainly, the arche is the beginning somewhat linked with the “source of life”, but it is also the power of the command, of an utter authority that must be acknowledged, being able to ‘pierce’ the body.

 At this point, we can consider two examples or symptoms of this twofold nature that also belongs to the androgyne, e.g. the paradigmatic Dionysius of The Bacchae and Heliogabalus, the Dionysiac crowned anarchist depicted by Antonin Artaud as a portrait of what is beyond-gender. Heliogabalus is the expression of a struggle, of an always impetuous attempt to make the reality androgynous through a subversion of the stable powers. When this young emperor dresses in female clothes like a prototypical drag queen, he exhibits what neither the history nor the power can tolerate or limit, i.e. an identity based on a communion of the contraries, on an uncovered otherness: “The entire life of Heliogabalus is anarchy in action, since Elagabalus the unitary god who brings together again man and woman, the hostile poles, the One and the Two, is the end of contradictions, the elimination of war and anarchy”.

 From a theatrical point of view, Artaud’s Heliogabalus is the actorial machine par excellence since the emperor constantly fabricates himself anew through a multiplicity of prostheses and through a line of unpredictable shiftings, becoming the definitive suppression of the narrative character. He also embodies (in the most literal way) the abolition of political authority because he accepts and reintroduces in Rome what the king Pentheus vehemently refuses in The Bacchae, i.e. the Dionysiac and solar aspect of life. Heliogabalus comes from a foreign country, that is Roman Syria. In the same way, Dionysius (particularly the Dionysius of The Bacchae) is depicted as a foreigner (Xenos) who brings with himself the fever of the otherness, perturbing the common reality of the land. Hence, he is another expression of the uncanny (unheimlich or l’inquiétante étrangeté), a creature which unties (Lysios) the very knots of the heteronormative geography, being what Jung would have called a synchronic field or perhaps another filiation of the Dogon’s Aduno Tal, as in the egg of the world described by the anthropologist Marcel Griaulae and used by Deleuze and Guattuari as a depiction of the body without organs. The very tragedy of The Bacchae consists in the missed acknowledgement of the authority of this innate (in-nata or mai nata, manifested but without an origin) alterity.

 Nowadays, Dionysus lives a life upturned in a double camouflage, like the Nonexistent Knight which has no-body underneath his armour, being himself the body or the printed character of an illusion. Nevertheless, he is still ubiquitous since his masked presence is necessary to overcome the conflict of the opposites that otherwise would turn the world into a bloodshed. In this modern age, finding the androgynous trace of Dionysus is to witness the sudden appearance of an errant archetype.