Chapter V · DIONYSUS THE MYTHICAL GOD

The last chapter ended on a note of tragedy and despair. This one opens with glad tidings and the promise of great joy. Hesiod tells us that after the Promethean crime and all its consequences to man, only Hope remained, and that Hope, too, was the gift of Zeus the Almighty Benefactor.

But Hope was not the only mitigation of their suffering which Zeus reserved to primeval men. And here we light again upon a new interpretation of another section of the Prometheus myth which hitherto has been passed over without comment by the majority of scholars.

It will be remembered that at the end of my own subdivisions of the myth, I referred to the tradition that Zeus ultimately relented and forgave Prometheus—in fact, that he sent one of his own sons, Heracles, to release him from the torment of the eagle.

What is the psychological explanation of this? How do a people, responsible through generations for an oral tradition in which a supposed enemy of the race is subjected to infinite and miraculous torture, come to suppose that their god has relented? How do they arrive at the conclusion that the Arch-criminal can be forgiven by the deity whom they trust as their benefactor and protector?

It seems to me that the answer is a simple one. They can do so only when the evils to which this Arch-criminal gave rise appear to have been overcome, modified, corrected, or neutralised. I suggest that, as the ills and woes directly associated with the possession of fire-production came to be relieved, the anger of the protecting deity was conceived as dying down, as vanishing, so that it was possible for his protégés to imagine that the severity of his punishment of Prometheus must have a term. Hence the relenting of Zeus, and the merciful mission of his son Heracles.

But how did the ills and woes come to be relieved?—I mean, of course, the worst ills and woes that befell mankind after the unlimited use of fire: disease, premature death, decline in sexual potency, etc., etc., not the ills to which C. O. Müller and Völcker allude—these could scarcely have been relieved once a Promethean civilisation had been established; but then, as I have shown, they were neither as alarming nor as insufferable as the other ills.

I suggest that the ills and woes gradually abated from the moment when Zeus gave his only begotten son by Semele, the god Dionysus, as a Saviour to mankind.

From that time everything began to mend in the lives of the archaic Greeks. From that time life became once more possible on earth; sexual potency, the source of one of the greatest joys, was restored; disease was overcome, and the disfigurement of faulty and arrested growth passed away.

This is a bold interpretation of the great myth of Dionysus. Is it possible that an analysis of the myth itself, and of the mysteries attending the cult, will confirm its general validity? This remains to be seen. In any case it covers most of the facts, includes most of the mysteries, and in lucidity and plausibility leaves the other attempted interpretations leagues behind.

We must now turn to the myth of Dionysus itself and deal with it piecemeal as we dealt with the myth of Prometheus. But to begin with, who was Dionysus?

His name tells us who he was. He was the son of Zeus. He is the only god who is definitely connected with Zeus by name. In fact, so close is the connection between father and son in this case, that like the Christian god and the Saviour, they are frequently identified one with another—a kind of one in two, two in one, identity, which found expression in the earliest products of Greek art.⁠[151] This is only a further proof, if one were needed, of the perfect trust the ancient Greeks had in their supreme deity, as a benefactor and bestower of happiness, health and vigour.

1. According to common tradition, Dionysus was the son of Zeus and Semele, and was born at Thebes. Hera, the sister and wife of Zeus, having grown jealous of Semele, owing to her attraction for Zeus, visited her in the disguise of a friend, an old hag, or Semele’s own nurse, and prevailed upon her to request Zeus to appear to her in the same glory and majesty in which he was accustomed to approach his own wife Hera. To press her point Hera suggested that Zeus was a false lover to Semele, and that this would be a means of testing his devotion.

2. Semele fell into the trap laid for her, and begged her lover Zeus to appear before her as he appeared before his real wife—a very human and comprehensible desire, which Hera showed some penetration in suggesting. When all entreaties to desist from this request were fruitless, Zeus is said to have ended by complying, and he appeared to her in thunder and lightning.

3. Semele was apparently terrified and overpowered by the sight, and being seized by the fire, she gave premature birth to a male child.⁠[152] Zeus, however, saved the child from the flames; he was sewed up in the god’s thigh, and thus came to maturity.

4. Many stories are told about his education. It was entrusted to various nymphs. Mystis, for instance, instructed him in the mysteries; Macris, the daughter of Aristæus, is said to have received him from the hands of Hermes and fed him with honey. When Dionysus had grown up, Hera, still suffering from jealousy, threw him into a state of madness, in which he wandered about through many countries. He is supposed to have travelled through Egypt, Syria and Asia, preaching the Gospel of the Vine wherever he went, in spite of occasional opposition of the bitterest kind—and instructing those he met in its cultivation and care.

5. Another important legend about him is to the effect that both as Sabazius (Dionysus Sabazius) and as Zagreus, he was torn to pieces by the Titans, who, in some accounts, are alleged to have been incited to the deed by Hera. He is said to have been restored and cured by Rhea or Demeter.

6. After he had made his divine nature known to all the world, he led his mother out of Hades, called her Thyone, and rose with her to Olympus.

Now though this is a very ancient myth,⁠[153] we know that Dionysus was adopted into the Hellenic pantheon very much later than the myth of Prometheus. This, however, is only what we should have expected. The salvation cannot precede the fall. Dionysus as the Saviour, or Releaser of mankind, must appear at a time subsequent to man’s tribulation as a result of his unlimited use of fire. Thus we find Dionysus called variously:—

Charidotes, or the Joy-giver.

Eleuthereus, or the Bestower of Freedom.

Hygiates, or the Healer.

Lampter, or the Light.

Liknites, or the Purifier.

Luaios, or the Deliverer from Care.

Lysios, or the Releaser,⁠[154] and

Soter, or the Saviour.

Truth to tell, the number of his epithets and the legends concerning him would lead even the uninitiated to suspect that he is either the embodiment of a variety of deities, all probably older than himself, but connected with the same functions as those with which he is connected; or else—and this is the belief to which I incline—that although he represents a very old cult and worship, and a very old fact as well (the fact of a remedy having been found for the ills resulting from the unlimited use of fire), his name was probably changed through the ages, just as that of Prometheus and Zeus may have been changed, although denoting the same original ancestor; and the cult connected with his name may have been influenced from time to time by Egyptian as well as by Indian and Persian legends connected with parallel deities. That different Greek tribes called him by different names, and held fast to slightly different versions of the myth, would also be sufficient to account for the numerous appellations, virtues and adventures connected with the notion of his majesty and divinity.

The root-idea underlying all his virtues, however, was that he reigned as the divinity and the protector of the fructifying moisture of nature—the guardian deity of the productive, invigorating, overflowing and intoxicating powers of life. In modern language, which is more colourless and less figurative, he might aptly be surnamed, in memory of Dr. Robert Bell, the protector of “nuclein,” or in memory of Funck, the dispenser and custodian of “vitamines.”

I do not mean this as a joke. I firmly believe that, as far as modern scientific jargon has any meaning at all, these epithets borrowed from the modern science of dietetics reveal precisely what he signified to the remote ancestors of the ancient Greeks. They worshipped him as a bestower of mysterious strength and health, as a healer, as a θεὸς σωτήρ against raging disease.⁠[155] The fact that the frantic orgies connected with his worship appear to have been introduced somewhat late, is no argument against the antiquity of this god, as a deified ancestor who discovered the panacea against most of the ills and woes resulting from the unlimited use of fire.

It is contended, for instance, that he is not known to Homer as the discoverer of wine; also, that the fanatical service of Dionysus, although to some extent known to Homer, finds in him only a passing mention. But if we are going to argue in this way from instances of omission in works which in any case are alleged by some to be a compilation of fragments, then, as I believe Mr. Robert Brown has pointed out,⁠[156] there is scarcely a myth or legend of Greek antiquity that would survive the test.

His worship is said to have been introduced from Thrace. This also is not surprising. Other myths and legends, besides that of Dionysus came along this northeastern route. The myth of Prometheus itself probably came viâ Thrace from the region of the Caucasus, nor is it unlikely that the remote ancestors of the ancient Greeks followed this same route.

What I feel certain about is this, that after generations, maybe centuries, of intense suffering, following upon the unlimited use of fire, a great man, born of a simple Greek maiden, appeared among the Greeks, who, realising with a poet’s instinct, and not by means of a scientist’s tedious, endless and elaborate studies, that all his people needed was a corrective against debility, a cure for the maladies which a deficiency of the vital juices of nature had created in them, taught his fellows the virtues of the foodstuffs which their bodies lacked; taught them the regenerating quality of the fermented semi-germinated seed, whether of barley, oats, millet, or what not; taught them the tonic and invigorating properties of the fermented fruit of the vine and the ivy, and, above all, instructed them in the life-giving principle of honey, fermented and unfermented.⁠[157]⁠

That the insignificant though real father of this great man was ultimately buried in oblivion is not an insuperable objection; such total eclipses of fathers is not an uncommon occurrence in the history of geniuses. Who hears of the father of Confucius, or of Muhammed, or of the real father of Jesus Christ? Once his greatness was established, his father could have been none other than Zeus himself; because how could so great a benefactor fail to be the offspring of the greatest benefactor of all? Posterity, therefore, pre-dated his birth, made him the son of Zeus, and ultimately deified him too. But that this process of deification was gradual and not immediate, as in the case of the clash of a superior with an inferior race, is shown by the fact that we can trace his promotion from the rank of one of the minor deities to one of the greatest of all. Indeed, this gradual promotion may account for the fact that in the Homeric poems Dionysus does not appear as one of the great divinities at all.

Let us now return to the myth and discuss it in subdivisions.

1 and 2.⁠[158] As the reader will have observed, I take Dionysus to be a divinity of the kind resulting from ancestor worship, and not, like Zeus, as a divinity resulting from the deification of a member or members of a superior race. It is obvious that as he came very much later than Prometheus, he must have appeared long after all trace of the original superior and inferior races had disappeared, and when one had entirely absorbed the other. He was not, therefore, like Zeus, a member of the superior race. He received post-mortem honours, and was raised to the rank of the highest gods only centuries after his death. In his case, therefore, there was a subsequent deification of his parentage also. Thus, as I point out, his real father was probably entirely forgotten, and when his pedigree had to be prepared, as he was already too great to be conceived as having had a mortal father, paternity was traced to Zeus. Likewise, Semele. She was, as I suggest, probably a simple Greek maiden, just as the Virgin Mary was a simple Jewish maiden. It was only subsequently that her pedigree was adjusted to include the ancient family of Inachus of Argos, and Poseidon himself, on the one side, and on the other, through Harmonia, the old divinities of Samothrace, as her forebears.

The story of Hera’s jealousy of Semele may have had some foundation in fact, although Hera could not have been the woman concerned. But seeing that most women are jealous of one another, either for one possession or another, the fact is really not important. It is far more likely that here we have a piece of fiction intercalated in the story of Dionysus’s life in order to account for what follows.

3. This, as the reader will probably have divined already, is by far the most important and most interesting subdivision of the fable. Here, as in the case of the punishment of Prometheus, we encounter the miraculous, and, as I have pointed out before, in such cases it is impossible to apply the Spencerian, the euhemeristic, or the anthropological method of interpretation. In the face of the miraculous, psychology is the only science that can come to our assistance. Let us therefore look into this story a little more closely. We have seen that Hera could not have been the woman concerned, because she only becomes a party to the domestic scandal owing to the deification of Dionysus. But on the same principle Zeus could not have been the lover concerned, because he was only made the father of Dionysus owing to the stupendous greatness to which the latter attained during his lifetime. Hera and Zeus, therefore, both fall out of our story. But if Zeus falls out of the story, the facts about the premature birth, the burning of Semele, and the saving of Dionysus from fire, have no satisfactory explanation.

Is it possible, then, that in addition to Zeus serving as the putative father of Dionysus, he served another important purpose in the myth—that is to say, his personality provided the necessary stage-properties for accounting for an awkward though vital part of it, for which no explanation could be found by those who, in the remote prehistoric period of Greece, were responsible for the oral tradition by which the whole story was transmitted to us?

Altogether the story is not satisfactory, and bears the stamp of having been twisted into its present shape, or forced to account for what was otherwise an incomprehensible though genuine fragment of the myth. For if Zeus by appearing before Semele in all his glory consumes her, why should he not consume Hera in the same way?

It is clear that some fact must here have required explanation and that a rather clumsy story has been invented to explain it. Of course, once Zeus is introduced as the father everything becomes possible; nevertheless, there is the suspicion that his consuming glory is required by the stage-manager to overcome a difficulty which is certainly not either the premature birth of Dionysus or the death of Semele. For both could have been achieved by more simple and less miraculous means. Neither is the premature birth of Dionysus essential to his life-story. As far as his subsequent career is concerned it might never have occurred, except, perhaps, that it lent him distinction in the eyes of the ancient world, as a person who had been “twice born.” Semele’s death is also gratuitous. The life-story of the hero appears to have been in no way affected by it. We are reduced then to one fact—a fact for which all this domestic upheaval appears to have been contrived as a clumsy explanation by a generation of men who, though possessed of the leading features of the myth, were too remote from the time in which Dionysus lived to be able to account satisfactorily for them.

And what is this one fact?—Clearly it is this: that Dionysus was saved from fire. In some mysterious way, for which it is now difficult to account, the fable was amazingly and profoundly true in this respect. Dionysus, surnamed Hyes, or the Lord of fertilising moisture, the custodian and resuscitator of that precious principle in nature, which fire and its unlimited use had killed for the remote ancestors of the ancient Greeks, comes down through tradition as himself having had a miraculous escape from fire. The connection, as we are now able to see, is so true and so undeniable, and the confusion of the person of the deity with the good or the bounties he dispenses is so common in oral traditions,⁠[159] that there can be no mistake regarding the meaning here.

Dr. Kuhn, in his famous work on the Prometheus myth, is one of the few scholars who sees an inevitable connection between the theft of fire and the vivifying and invigorating drinks associated with the name of Dionysus and Soma, although I must admit that he sees this connection more on etymological than on anthropological grounds.⁠[160]⁠

However, here is the connection described plainly enough in the myth itself—the fact that I had anticipated it by setting forth my reasons for regarding Dionysus as the Saviour of the Greeks, after the worst consequences of the unlimited use of fire had fallen upon them, merely adds weight to the further evidence I shall proceed to adduce in the sequel in support of my thesis.

The marvellous feature of this fable, however, is the manner in which this essential fact about Dionysus has been preserved, apparently by means of a most clumsy and transparent fiction.

(4) This section of the myth depends upon such a multitude of different and frequently conflicting stories that it is difficult to interpret it plainly. It all depends upon which stories or story you care to concentrate.

On anthropological grounds I incline to the account given in the twenty-sixth Homeric Hymn, because it is consonant with the principal elements in the subsequent career of the great man. If a great medicine chief, such as Dionysus probably was, is to be well versed in the mysteries of nature’s most secret workings, he cannot study these better than in forests and wooded glades. Here he has the life of the birds, vegetation in its most luxuriant form, the small fauna of the undergrowth, and above all honey. These he can study; using himself as an experimental animal, he can learn the secret of proper dieting and acquire the knowledge of plants and trees. The fact that one of his most important epithets is Dendrites, Lord of the Trees, the fact, too, that he is said to have been taught by Silenus, son of Pan, how to control the wild beasts of the forest; as also his epithet Brisaios (a name applied to Dionysus as the discoverer of honey),⁠[161] all point not only to his having grown up among the trees of the forest, but also to his having been well versed in plant, tree and animal life.⁠[162] For as I have already suggested, I think, it was only the wild honey, the honey to be found in tree-hives, that the remote ancestors of the Greeks were able to obtain.

The account in the twenty-sixth Homeric Hymn is as follows:—

“I begin to sing of ivy-crowned Dionysus, the loud-crying god, splendid son of Zeus and glorious Semele. The rich-haired nymphs received him in their bosoms from the lord his father, and fostered him and nurtured him carefully in the dells of Nysa, where by the will of his father he grew up in a sweet-smelling cave, being reckoned among the immortals. But when the goddesses had brought him up, a god oft hymned, then began he to wander continually through the woody coombes, thickly wreathed with ivy and laurel.”

Sabazius is also said to have been reared by a nymph Nysa. I take it that these nymphs are wood-nymphs or dryads. Nonnus, however, deliberately says they were water-nymphs; but he is scarcely to be relied upon. Pherecydes of Athens, on the other hand, calls them the Dodonean nymphs,⁠[163] and seeing that the oak-forest of Dodona is famous, it is probable that wood-nymphs are meant. In any case the probability is that Dionysus was an inhabitant of the woods throughout his childhood and youth, for the reasons I have already stated. There may even be truth in that part of the legend which implies that his mother died at his birth, and he may have been abandoned in the woods by his mother’s relatives on that account. This was not an unusual procedure among primitive peoples, when a child was born whom nobody wanted, particularly if the child had no proper father.

Whether Hera’s alleged continued hostility to him, owing to Semele’s relationship to Zeus, is worth troubling about, now that Hera has been dropped out of the fable, is very doubtful. I mean by this, that I doubt whether there is any more in the legend of his having been stricken mad by Hera, than an attempt on the part of oral tradition to account for those rumours of madness which have been, I suppose, in all ages, and will continue to be, associated with the early innovating feats of a creative genius. Hera’s fictitious relationship to Semele happens to offer a good setting for the explanation of these rumours of early madness; hence, probably, they were accounted for in this way.

His wanderings through many countries—Egypt, Syria and Asia—may be a true piece of history preserved by the myth, or it may simply be an early attempt at explaining the parallel rites and observances of a Dionysian nature, known to have been found in those parts of the ancient world. That the cult of Dionysus spread from Greece is proved; but its Egyptian and Indian counterparts can scarcely be regarded as importations from Greece. Hosts of scholars, Creuzer among them, have maintained the reverse. In my opinion the similarities are too superficial to have any claim to identity based upon them. There was probably inter-influence between all three—the Shiva of India, the Osiris of Egypt, and the Bacchus of Greece—which in historical times made them seem wondrously alike; but in its origin each had unique features that distinguished it. A study of the Shiva of India and the Osiris of Egypt is sufficient, I think, to establish the truth of this contention.

The various legends relating to the opposition the doctrine of Dionysus received while it was being spread are most probably founded on fact. We have ample evidence even in modern times of the difficulty with which a new doctrine makes any headway, and, as a rule, the bitterness of the opposition is in equal ratio to the soundness of the innovating creed. The accounts contained in various versions of the myth, of the extreme hostility Dionysus encountered while attempting to spread his credo abroad, are, therefore, probably based upon actual historical truths, and only help to lend colour to the general plausibility of the whole fable.

(5) We now come to subdivision five of the myth, which from my point of view is almost as important as subdivision three. It brings into prominence another link between the myth of Prometheus and that of Dionysus. It will be remembered that Prometheus was a Titan; that, as I have tried to show, his crime proved a disaster to mankind, and that benevolent Zeus was conceived by his worshippers as being so deeply outraged by their suffering and the cause of it that he subjected the arch-criminal Prometheus to a supernatural form of torture. Zeus, therefore, stands for the sound principle in Greek life, for the beneficent power meaning well by man; Prometheus stands for the reverse, for the malign power—the power that descends to any shift, however base, in order to satisfy the blind Promethean ambition, which is a fool’s notion of “Progress.” Zeus and Prometheus, therefore, are properly opposed in the fable. But we have seen that Dionysus also means well by mankind. We have seen that he also is a Saviour, a bestower of bounties, a beneficent deity. We have also seen that he is at times identified with Zeus himself. We should expect, therefore, that as the representative of the good principle, like Zeus he would be opposed to the Titans, and they to him. But is not this precisely what this important subsection of the myth reveals? When Dionysus is said to be destroyed, it is the Titans who are alleged to have destroyed him. When Hera is depicted as casting about her for some ally with whom to pursue her feud against her hated rival Semele and her seed, she is described as appealing to none other than the Titans. The hostility of these to Dionysus, and vice versâ, is taken for granted, it is accepted without further explanation, as if it were inherent in the nature of the two sides.

Once again, therefore, we encounter this Promethean spirit, as the wrecker of mankind’s happiness on earth. In the first myth, it manifested itself as a blind will to complication or to “Progress,” and led to the poisoning of the human race. In the present Dionysian myth, with which a wonderful corrective is introduced, neutralising the evil effects of the first Promethean crime, another crime is perpetrated: the Saviour of man, who has come to release humanity from the torments resulting from the first Promethean “progressive” enterprise, is torn into pieces by the Titans.

It is significant, too, that those who are alleged to have restored Dionysus to life again, are two goddesses notoriously friendly to man—Rhea, the mother, and probably lover of Zeus the All-benevolent, and Demeter the great, bountiful goddess of corn.

Evidently the two myths contained from their very inception this common factor, the hostility of the race of Titans to any power beneficent to man; and oral tradition handed down the evidences of this hostility without further explanation, because it was probably too well known in early times to need any comment.

(6) From my point of view, except that it places on record the ultimate apotheosis, or canonisation, of Dionysus and his mother Semele, this part of the myth is not of very great interest. If the date of its first appearance could be approximately determined, we should have some indication of the time when the great medicine man Dionysus was first deified; but otherwise, as the reader will perceive at once, it neither assists me nor does it add very much to the general interest of the myth. It again introduces the miraculous or supernatural element to which, this time, we shall not go to the pains of applying any psychological analysis.

Having disposed as briefly as possible of the outlines of the myth, there now remain two tasks, as important as that just performed, before I can leave Dionysus and round off my thesis. I must deal with the general aspect of Dionysus as a deity, and with the cult connected with his name.

I have spoken of Dionysus as the Saviour of mankind, and shown that he was actually known in this aspect to the ancestors of the ancient Greeks. I have also hinted at the reason why he was regarded as their Saviour. But as this last point will receive elaboration later on, I will not pause to deal further with it at present. Suffice it to say that he discovered for them an art of life, including several important additions to their diet, such as mead, the juice of the ivy-berry, the fermented juice of the grape, and of partly germinated barley and other grain,⁠[164] with which it became possible for them to face the future with more courage, spirit, and vigour, and to develop what was undoubtedly a high civilisation, upon beginnings which, thanks to Prometheus, were certainly unfavourable. He may also have taught them how to ferment meat, mare’s milk, and the milk of cows. These new additions to their diet corrected the poisoning and the deficiency from which they were suffering owing to the exposure of these foods to fire,—hence he was known as Hygiates, the great healer, and Luaios, the releaser from ills and woes.

Owing to the fact that the juice of the grape when fermented yields by far the most striking, most potent, and at the same time most abundant product of all the natural sources which he tapped, it became, as I have already said, the typical attribute of his divinity, and so much overshadowed the other attributes that, particularly to the later Christian world, he became known chiefly as the god of wine. Of course there was another reason for the emphasis which, for the last two thousand years, men have thought fit to lay upon this single aspect of his godhead. The Christian religion is radically puritanical in tone. It differs from the Pagan cosmogony principally in the attitude it has always adopted towards sex. Sex is sinful. Carnal knowledge is a necessary evil. It is tolerated only because there appears to be no means of circumventing it; but it is nevertheless deeply regretted by the true Christian, and in his heart of hearts he regards it as the one blot on the otherwise superb design of the universe.

Now to the Pagan, such an attitude towards sex was inconceivable. He was, therefore, never obsessed by the purely bibulous aspect of his great god Dionysus. He retained, until the end, the wider view of the god, which I am attempting to make clear in this chapter, and by the cult which he developed around Dionysus, he revealed the full meaning which he ascribed to that god’s powers. Wine was, therefore, but one among many ideas connected with the ancient Greek’s concept of the myth and the cult associated with his name; hence, although the epithets relating to this aspect of the divinity are the most numerous,⁠[165] their number is not a very trustworthy index to the relative importance of the attribute they stand for.

Among the most striking we find:—

Botryokosmos: The Grape-decked.

Choöpotes: The Deep-Drinker.

Komastes: The Reveller.

Lenaios: The Lord of the Wine Press.

Methydotes: The Wine-giver.

Oinops: The Wine-flushed, and

Theoinos: The Wine-god.

The list of phallic epithets, or names relating to sexual potency, are also numerous. Here are some of the more striking:—

Aigobolos: The Goat-smiter.

Choiropsalas: The Sow-seeker.

Ephaptor: The Caresser.

Eukarpos: The Fruitful.

Gunaimanes: The Erotic.

Hymenios: The God of Marriage.

Karpios: The Fruitful.

Pantodynastes: The All-powerful.

Phales: The God Phallus.

Phlias: The Flowing One.

Polyparthenos: The Maiden-loving.

Priapos: The Power of Reproduction.

Taurogenes: The Bull-sprung.

Thyrsomanes: The Thyrsos-maddening.

Thyrsotinaktes: The Thyrsos-shaker.

What do all these epithets mean? Why is so much importance ascribed to Dionysus on the sexual side? Why was an erect phallus carried in the processions of the Dionysian festivals? Why was there a phallus, frequently carved out of fig-wood, carried in the baskets filled with fruit, which were borne by the virgins known as Canephoria, who formed part of the procession in the Dionysia?

“How monstrous!” cries the modern investigator, male and female. “How unnecessarily gross!”—“If these horrible things had to be carried, why select precisely a virgin to perform the office?—Surely some male member of the working-classes of the period, a respectable married man preferably, would have been willing, for a sum that did not require to be princely, to bear these unmentionable objects in the procession! And need they have been exposed among the fruit? Might they not have been carried concealed in a hand-bag?”

So questions the modern mind, the cultivated mind of modern Europe, the stupid mind of Western civilisation.

But to ask these questions is to misunderstand the whole meaning of the Dionysian cult. Once this cult is understood, it is immediately clear to the meanest modern intelligence, that if a respectable married man of the working classes had been hired to bear this particular emblem in the Dionysia, the whole rite would have become an absurdity, an empty parade, a piece of modern buffoonery after the style of our celebrated pageants,—that is to say, merely a pretext for an idle class to get pleasantly busy, without incurring the stigma of doing hard productive toil.

The fact that maidens carried these emblems, that the emblems themselves were carved out of the wood of the fig-tree, in order to convey the idea of fertility and reproduction, has never been satisfactorily explained. In fact very little about the whole of the great Dionysian myth has been satisfactorily explained. It is, of course, on its sexual side, one of those “unpleasant” aspects of Greek mythology which are slurred over as quickly as possible,—particularly, I suppose, since there have been lady undergraduates at the Universities. Nevertheless, you would have thought that a few venerable old men between themselves, and unbeknown to their families, might have endeavoured to arrive at the correct explanation.

I will deal with some of the attempts that have been made to explain it, and at the same time submit my own explanation in the next chapter.

FOOTNOTES: