Note 1096 — Chapter XI

Payne Knight believes that Ceres was not a personification of the brute matter which composed the earth, but of the female productive principle supposed to pervade it, which, joined to the active, was held to be the cause of the organization and animation of its substance.... She is mentioned as the wife of the Omnipotent Father, Æther, or Jupiter (“The Symbolical Language of Ancient Art and Mythology,” xxxvi.). Hence the words of Christ, “it is the Spirit that quickeneth, flesh profiteth nothing,” applied in their dual meaning to both spiritual and terrestrial things, to spirit and matter.

Bacchus, as Dionysus, is of Indian origin. Cicero mentions him as a son of Thyoné and Nisus. Διόνυσος means the god Dis from Mount Nys in India. Bacchus, crowned with ivy, or kissos, is Christna, one of whose names was Kissen. Dionysus is preëminently the deity on whom were centred all the hopes for future life; in short, he was the god who was expected to liberate the souls of men from their prisons of flesh. Orpheus, the poet-Argonaut, is also said to have come on earth to purify the religion of its gross, and terrestrial anthropomorphism, he abolished human sacrifice and instituted a mystic theology based on pure spirituality. Cicero calls Orpheus a son of Bacchus. It is strange that both seem to have originally come from India. At least, as Dionysus Zagreus, Bacchus is of undoubted Hindu origin. Some writers deriving a curious analogy between the name of Orpheus and an old Greek term, ὀρφος, dark or tawny-colored, make him Hindu by connecting the term with his dusky Hindu complexion. See Voss, Heyne and Schneider on the Argonautis.