Note 2 — Chapter II · THE ENVIRONMENT

Of kindred character and equivalent range with the cults of Attis and Adonis was that of Dionysos, the most many-sided of the divinities adopted by the Greeks from Asia. Figuring first as Bacchus, a Thracian God of beer,2 and later as the God of wine, he seems to have made way in early Greece partly by virtue of the sheer frenzy set up in his women worshippers by unwonted potations. But such phenomena caused their own correction; and the adoption of the cult by the cities brought it within the restraining sway of Greek culture. Of all the older Greek worships, the most popular was that (perhaps oriental in origin) of Dêmêtêr and Persephonê, the Mourning Mother and the Virgin Daughter, who had primarily signified mother earth and the seed corn; and with their worship in the great Eleusinian mysteries was bound up that of Dionysos. Son of Zeus and the Virgin Goddess Persephonê or the mortal virgin Semelê—for the myths were legion—he was carried in effigy as a new-born babe in a manger-basket on the eve of the winter solstice. In this capacity he was pre-eminently the Babe-God, Iacchos, “the suckling.” Further, he figures in one myth as being torn to pieces by the Titans,3 and as restored to life or reborn (after Zeus has terribly avenged him) by his mother Semelê (really an old Earth-Goddess) or by the Mother-Goddess, Dêmêtêr; wherefore he is represented as a suckling at Dêmêtêr’s breast. In the triennial dramatic mysteries in his honour an eating of raw flesh by the devotees was held to commemorate his sacrificial death, which was, however, mystically conceived to mean the making of wine from grapes. In other and commoner forms of the sacred banquet, the wine figured specially as his blood, and the bread as Dêmêtêr=Ceres; and in this transparent form the symbolism of “body and blood” was a household word among the Romans. In their popular religion, being assimilated to an ancient Roman God, the Wine-God was known as Liber, “the child,” as “Father Liber,” and as Bacchus, while Ceres or Proserpine was paired with him as Libera. The doctrine, found among the Manichæans in the fourth century, that “Jesus hangs on every tree,” is in all likelihood a development from this worship, in which Dionysos was God of the vine in particular, but of all vegetation besides. For such mystics as wrote and conned the Orphic hymns, however, he was a God of manifold potency; and there centred round him a whole theosophy of ascetic ethic, in which the ideal of the worshipper was to strive, suffer, and conquer in common with the God, who was the giver of immortality.