That Dahok represents the dark side of Dionysus, the "purity" of his darkness, you might say, is shown in the first scenes, when we see a young woman being sacrificed to a horned god--the bull is the sign of Dionysus, and we're reminded of a line from The Bacchae, when the blind prophet Teiresias explains Dionysus's power:
"He has his share of Ares, too -
For soldiers, fully armed, drawn up in
Battle ranks, may fly in flight before
They've even touched their spears:
This too is madness put in men by Dionysus." |
In other words, even the god of war is powerless before the god of wine, and this episode will show Ares going to extreme lengths to avoid becoming a victim of Dahok. When we learn the young sacrificial victim's name is Seraphin, and that she's a childhood friend of Gabrielle, we know we're back in Black Orpheus territory, with Eurydice telling her friend Serafina about being pursued. According to Paul Robert Coyle01, the basic elements of the Sacrifice episodes were laid out before he and Steve Sears began writing them, including Seraphin. The sacrificial victim that Renee O'Connor played in Hercules and the Lost Kingdom, pursued by the figure of Death, is reenacted here, and the result is that her character will indeed be sacrificed, to all appearances at least.
The "Rift's" borrowing from Ion continues in these two episodes: The climactic scene takes place in the cave of the "Sister Peaks," which have not been identified. They don't exist in Greece under that name, but they do exist in Ion under another name: the Twin Peaks. It's referred to in a scene in which Creusa, unaware that Ion is her son by blood, plans to kill him with a drop of Gorgon's blood. A messenger relates the story:
| "As soon as Xuthus left the temple with his new son for the feast he was preparing, he went off to the mountain where they perform the torchlight dance of Bacchus, to offer a sacrifice of blood at the Twin Peaks, in place of the ritual he neglected when the boy was born."02 |
When Ion discovers this plot, still not knowing Creusa is his natural mother, he goes into a fury:
| "What utter audacity--as venomous as the Gorgon poison she tried to kill me with! Seize her! Throw her from Parnassus, send her bounding down the cliff-ledges, let the crags comb out her dainty hair!" |
These images are clearly brought into the Sacrifice episodes, rearranged to create a new story, but the logic that connects them is still intact.
Another key reference to Ion comes when Ares makes a deal with the Fates: if Hope dies, Xena's thread will be cut. This solution comes from The Greek Myths, chapters 10 and 60, about the Fates, and the myth of the Danaids. Their measuring out of a life's thread was derived from an earlier goddess myth: "Originally she bound the wailing infant with a linen swaddling band on which his clan and family marks were embroidered and thus assigned him his destined place in society." Graves does not mention this in conjunction with Ion; instead, he says a priestess at Delphi tells Creusa who Ion is. It's Euripides who makes the connection of the Fates with Ion, using the myth that inspired Pandora's box by having the cradle's swaddling clothes reveal his identity as the child Creusa left to die. Since the clothes a child is given mark his place in society, they are his "fate," and that's demonstrated here when the weaving Fates are brought in to protect Hope, Ion's stand-in.
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