Originally a great nature-god of the Thraco-Phrygian stock, powerful over all vegetation and especially revealing his power in the vine, Dionysus was forcing his way into Greece at least as early as the Homeric period, and by the 6th century was received into the public cults of most of the Greek communities. We can gather with some certainty or probability his aboriginal characteristics and the form of his worship. Being a god of the life of the earth, he was also a nether divinity, the lord of the world of souls, with whom the dead votary entered into privi leged communion; his rites were mystic, and nightly celebrations were frequent, marked by wild ecstasy and orgiastic self-abandon ment, in which the votary became at one with the divinity and temporarily possessed his powers ; women played a prominent part in the ritual; a savage form of sacramental communion was in vogue, and the animal victim of whose flesh and blood the votaries partook was at times regarded as the incarnation of the divinity, so that the god himself might be supposed to die and to rise again ; finally we may regard certain cathartic ideas as part of the primeval tradition of this religion. Admitted among the soberer cults of the Greek communities, it lost most of its wildness and savagery, while still retaining a more emotional ecstatic character than the rest. But this cooling process was arrested by a new wave of Dionysiac fervour that spread over Greece from the 7th century onwards, bringing with it the name of Orpheus, and engendering at some later date the Orphic brotherhoods (thiasoi). This religious movement may have started like the earlier one from the lands north of Greece; hut Crete and even Egypt are supposed to have contributed much to the Orphic doctrine and ritual. Plato's contemptuous mention (Rep. 364A) of wandering Orphic initiators brings to our notice a phe nomenon unknown elsewhere in Greek religion ; the missionary spirit, the impulse to preach to all who would hear, which fore shadows the breaking down of the gentile religious barriers of the ancient world. And it is probable that some kind of "Orphic" propagandism, whether through books or itinerant mystery-priests, or both, had been in vogue some time before Plato. Orphism was known to Pindar (Olym. ii. and f rags. 129-133 v. Christ) and Euripides, see Hipp. and, yet more important, frag. (Nauck) which attests the antiquity of these mystic Dio nysiac associations in Crete. The initiated votary proclaims him self as sanctified to Zeus of Ida, to Zagreus and to the mountain goddess Rhea-Cybele; he has fulfilled "the solemn rite of the banquet of raw flesh," and henceforth he "robes himself in pure 'Eph. arch. (1883) p. 81.
'The best account of the origin and development of the Dionysiac religion is in Rohde's Psyche, vol. i.; for Orphic ritual and doctrine see Roscher's Lexikon, art. Orpheus; J. E. Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Religion, pp. 455-659, with critical appendix by G. Murray on the Orphic tablets ; and cf. ORPHEUS.
white and avoids the taint of childbirth and funerals and abstains from meat." And—what is most significant—he calls himself by the very name of his god—he is himself BecArs. In spirit and in most of its details the passage accords well with the Bacchae of Euripides, which reflects not so much the public worship of Greece, but rather the mystic Dionysiac brotherhoods. Through out this inspired drama the votary rejoices to be one with his divinity and to call himself by his name, and this mystic union is brought about partly, though Euripides may not have known it, through "the meal of raw flesh" or the drinking of the blood of the goat or the kid or the bull. The sacramental intention of this is confirmed by abundant proof ; even in the state-cult of Tenedos they dressed up a bull-calf as Dionysus and reverentially sacrificed it (Ael. Nat. an. 12. 34) those who partook of the flesh were partaking of what was temporarily the body of their god. The Christian fathers at once express their abhorrence of this savage c'o,uocPcryia and reveal its true significance (Arnob.
Adv. nat. 5. 119) ; and Firmicus Maternus (De error., p. 84) attests that the Cretans of his own day celebrated a funeral festival in honour of Dionysus in which they enacted the life and the death of the god in a passion-play and "rent a living bull with their teeth." But the most speaking record of the aspirations and ideas of the Orphic mystic is preserved in the famous gold tablets found in tombs near Sybaris, one near Rome, and one in Crete. These have been frequently published and discussed ; and here it is only possible to allude to the salient features that concern the general history of religion. They contain fragments of a sacred hymn that must have been in vogue at least as early as the 3rd century B.C., and which was inscribed in order to be buried with the defunct, as an amulet that might protect him from the dangers of his journey through the under-world and open to him the gates of Paradise. The verses have the power of an incantation. The initiated soul proclaims its divine descent : "I am the son of Earth and Heaven." "I am perishing with thirst, give me to drink of the waters of memory." "I come from the pure": "I have paid the penalty of unrighteousness": "I have flown out of the weary, sorrowful circle of life." His reward is assured him : "0 blessed and happy one, thou hast put off thy mortality and shalt become divine." The strange formula gptOos Es 71c.X' E7rETOV "I a kid fell into the milk," has been interpreted by Dieterich (Eine Mithras-Liturgie, p. 174) with great probability as allud ing to a conception of Dionysus himself as gptOos, the divine kid, and to a ritual of milk-baptism in which the initiated was born again'.
We discern, then, in these mystic brotherhoods, the germs of a high religion and the prevalence of conceptions that have played a great part in the religious history of Europe. And as late as the days of Plutarch they retained their power of consol ing the afflicted (Consol. ad. uxor., c. so).
The Oriental mysteries, associated with Attis, Cybele, Isis and Sabazius, which invaded later Greece and early imperial Rome, were originally akin to these and contained many concepts in common with them. But their orgiastic ecstasy was more violent, and the psychical aberrations to which the votaries were prone through their passionate desire for divine communion were more dangerous. Emasculation was practised by the devotees of Attis, whatever the reason may have been', and the high priest himself bore the god's name. Or communion with the deity might be attained by the priest through the bath of blood in the taurobo lium (q.v.), or by the gashing of the arm over the altar. A more questionable method which lent itself to obvious abuses, or at least to the imputation of indecency, was the simulation of a sacred marriage, in which the catechumen was corporeally united with the great goddess in her bridal chamber (Dieterich, op. cit. PP. 121-134). Prominent also in these Phrygian mysteries were the conception of rebirth and the belief, vividly impressed by solemn pageant and religious drama, in the death and resurrec 'See also C. W. Vollgraff, gporkos ES -y&X' lwerov (over den oorsprong der dionysische mysterien), Amsterdam, 1924.
'See H. J. Rose in Class. Quart., xviii. p. is, ff.; A. D. Nock, in Archiv f. Relig., xxiii., p. 25, ff.
lion of the beloved Attis. The Hilaria in which these were repre sented fell about the time of our Easter; and Firmicus Maternus reluctantly confesses its resemblance to the Christian celebration (Farnell, Cults, iii., 299).
The Eleusinian mysteries are far more characteristic of the older Hellenic mind. These later rites breathe an Oriental spirit, and though their forms appear strange and distorted they have more in common with the subsequent religious phenomena of Christendom. And the Orphic doctrine may have even contrib uted something to the later European ideals of private and per sonal morality'.