Note 2 — IV. TOTEM-SACRAMENTS AND EUCHARISTS

(2) For a description of this orgy see Theocritus, Idyll xxvi; also for explanations of it, Lang’s Myth, Ritual and Religion, vol. ii, pp, 241-260, on Dionysus. The Encyclop[ae]dia Brit., article “Orpheus,” says:—“Orpheus, in the manner of his death, was considered to personate the god Dionysus, and was thus representative of the god torn to pieces every year—a ceremony enacted by the Bacchae in the earliest times with a human victim, and afterwards with a bull, to represent the bull-formed god. A distinct feature of this ritual was [gr wmofagia] (eating the flesh of the victim raw), whereby the communicants imagined that they consumed and assimilated the god represented by the victim, and thus became filled with the divine ecstasy.” Compare also the Hindu doctrine of Praj[pati, the dismembered Lord of Creation.