The initiation of the depths

This flamboyant scene, titled Dionysus at the Rabbit Hole, transposes the god of wine and ecstasy into a twilight forest where the marvelous and the absurd converge. At the center, Dionysus appears in his full muscular monumentality, draped in a red cloth and crowned with vine leaves, holding a thyrsus, the staff surmounted by a pinecone that embodies his distinctive attribute. A symbol of vitality, fertility, and ecstasy, the thyrsus always accompanies Bacchus and his followers.

The Gatekeepers

At his feet and around him, a brotherhood of anthropomorphic rabbits clad in armor seem to serve as guides and guardians. The first, pointing toward the gaping entrance of a black burrow, shamelessly displays his little backside, like a literal play on the rabbit hole. Just above, oak acorns — associated with the glans of the phallus — frame the hole and add an explicit sexual allusion. To the right, satyrs and human companions, half-laughing, half-conspiratorial, extend a torch whose flame seems destined to guide the exploration of the depths. The atmosphere oscillates between initiatory theater and parody, where baroque codes are subverted to open a narrative of passage.

Erotic Heralds

In classical iconography, Dionysus was the god of transgression, of festivity, and of the blurred boundaries between reason and intoxication¹. Here, this role is extended by the presence of armed rabbits, transformed into figures of power. Their symbolism, inherited from Antiquity where they accompanied Aphrodite and Eros², affirms fertility and sexual drive. They embody a vital and sensual force that leads Dionysus toward the passage. It is this erotic energy that guides the god to the threshold of the burrow, transforming entry into the maze into a rite of desire and initiation.

Night Lessons from Dionysus

The composition also draws on the imagery of Dionysian mysteries. Celebrated at night, away from the city, these rites combined dances, music, and torchlight processions, until provoking in the initiate a state of ekstasis, of “stepping outside oneself,” to commune directly with the god. They broke down the established boundaries between sexes, classes, and roles, and opened a space of sexual freedom where homosexuality found a ritualized and acknowledged place³. In this painting, the descent into the burrow echoes these nocturnal passages: it condenses into image the dissolution of norms and the promise of another world, sensual and egalitarian.

Down the Digital Burrow

A modern reading of the work draws on the very term rabbit hole. Popularized by Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), it evokes the fall into an unpredictable world without apparent end. In the digital age, and especially on the Internet, the expression describes the familiar experience of one search leading to another, one subject linking to a second, then a third, until creating a spiral of exploration where time itself is lost. Viewed this way, the painting transposes Dionysian intoxication into a contemporary metaphor: the burrow becomes the image of an infinite plungeinto layers of knowledge, desire, or distraction, where each détour reveals a new horizon to explore.

Queer Rites and Baroque Light

Beneath its playful surface, Dionysus at the Rabbit Hole thus stands as a reflection on the desire to cross thresholds — between heroic masculinity and animality, between religious solemnity and carnivalesque play, between the visible world and the depths of the imagination⁴. It is precisely this blend of irony and gravity that makes it an image of queer rite: the crossing of prohibitions and the invention of another space, where intimacy and myth converge in the trembling light of a baroque clearing.

Curiosity Piqued?

1.     Walter Otto, Dionysos: Myth and Cult, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965.

2.     Pausanias, Description of Greece, Book IX, 31, 4; see also H. Leclercq, “Lapin,” Dictionnaire d’archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie, Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1913.

3.     Euripides, The Bacchae; Walter Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults, Harvard University Press, 1987.

4.     Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, New York: Pantheon, 1991.