An early agrarian Deity from the Aegean and Cyprus whose story has become inextricably mixed with that of the hero Theseus. In that tale,
she is a mortal carried off by Theseus after he defeats the Minotaur, but inadvertantly abandoned to die before he reaches Athens. On Naxos, though,
a cult to an Ariadne as a seasonal or vegetation Goddess was preserved, in which the later Thesean tale was introduced into her rites as a sad
counterpoint to a joyful rite of springtime renewal, thus completing a seasonal cycle.
