Ariadne was a minor figure of classical myth, but behind her lay the great goddess of Minoan Crete.
An underworld deity, goddess of the Labyrinth, both a licentious dancing ground and a prison, signified by the meander.
The ‘utterly pure one’ whose epithet connects her with Proserpine (or Persephone), Dark Queen of Hades, whose lunar associations (linked waxing and waning crescents is her symbol) also connects her to the lunar, dying Artemis in Greece, and whose death in childbirth and romantic associations led to her association with Aphrodite in Cyprus. A triple aspected, chthonic goddess of Life and Death.
Seduced by Dionysos, and ‘woken from her sleep’, she is given the crown that became the corona borealis.
Children - Staphylos ‘the grape’ (Dionysos reborn?) and other vinicultural offspring.
Daughter of Rhea, whose identity she also shares as daughter and mother, paralleling Demeter and Kore.
She is also seen as a kind of female Dionysos, a wild goddess who contains opposites, but more properly is a component of the Dionysian, the form giving, source of order within chaos. Reflecting in reversed gender the Mesopotamian dualism of chaotic Tiamat and Mammu, her ‘male’ form-giving offspring.
See the book Dionysos, by Karl Kerenyi for more details.