Note 28 — PART II CHAPTER VIII ORIGINS OF THE BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY THE THRACIAN WORSHIP OF DIONYSOS

ἀφανισμός followed by ἐπιφάνεια of Dionysos represent, as we frequently learn, the varying relationship of the god with mankind. These are alternating and periodically repeated, and they are reflected in the trieteric period of the festivals. It is customary to explain this disappearance and return of the god as an allegorical typification of the destruction and restoration of vegetation. There is no reason at all to believe this, except for those who regard the doctrines of the Greek “Religion of Nature” as infallible axioms. The god is simply, and in the literal sense of the words, regarded as removed for a time from the world of men, during which period he is in the world of spirits. In the same way Apollo, according to the Delphic legend, is carried away from the human world for certain periods: he lives during that time among the Hyperboreans, whose land is inaccessible to mortal foot or ship. We ought not to be afraid to make use of the light thrown on these matters by parallel legends of the temporary disappearance of gods among uncivilized peoples (the god may be sometimes asleep or under constraint; cf. Plu., Is. et Os., 69 fin. 378 F); cf. what we are told in Dobrizhoffer’s Gesch. d. Abip. ii, p. 63 (E.T.), about the beliefs held by the Abipones of Paraguay; or, again, what is said of the negro races of West Africa, according to whom the god normally lives in the depths of the earth, but at regularly recurring intervals comes up to visit men; whereupon the members of a mystical society build him a house, receive his oracles, etc.; Réville, Rel. des peuples non-civil. i, 110–11. Thus Dionysos, too, is for a time in the underworld, in the world of spirits and the souls. This is clearly presupposed by the festival at Lerna, in which Dionysos is called up out of the bottomless spring Alkyonia by which there was an entrance to Hades (just as the inhabitants of Kos every year ἀνακαλοῦνται Hylas out of his spring, i.e. from the underworld: H. Türk, De Hyla, p. 3 f.; Welcker, Kl. Schr. i, 12; and see Maass, Litt. Ztg. 1896, 7–8). Hence also in Lerna a lamb was offered as a victim τῷ πυλαόχῳ, i.e. to Hades himself, and was thrown into the spring (Plu., Is. et Os. 35, p. 368 F, quoting Sokrates περὶ τῶν Ὁσίων; Smp. 4, 6, 2, p. 671 E; Paus. 2, 36, 7; 37, 5–6). Because he is in the realm of the dead a pragmatical myth represented him as slain by Perseus and thrown into the spring of Lerna: Lob., Agl. 574. In Delphi, too, something was known of the death and reawakening of Dionysos, but we have in Orph., H. 53, a quite unambiguous expression of the real conception, acc. to which D. “rested in the house of Persephone”, and appears again in the upper world at the time of the trieteric festival when he ἐγείρει his κῶμον, εὐάζων κινῶν τε χορούς. We may be all the more certain that the same idea is to be attributed to the trieteric festival in Thrace, since the same belief exactly occurs again in the legend of the Thracian (Getic) god Zalmoxis (see below)—he was believed to have disappeared into his infernal kingdom among the spirits and souls and to have made periodical returns to the world of the living. The reason why Dionysos, as worshipped both in Thracian and Greek trieteric festivals, stops for a time in the underworld of the souls, is clear enough: that too was his realm. We can now understand why it is that Dionysos is also ruler over the souls and can be called Ζαγρεὺς, Νυκτέλιος, Ἰσοδαίτης: i.e. he is simply given names of Hades himself (Plu., E ap. D. ix, p. 389 A). His real character of master of the souls and spirits (ἄναξ, ἥρως), as it had been originally in the Thracian cult, was thus preserved, in spite of much alteration in its Greek form, partly in Greek local cults, partly in the Orphic cult of Dionysos.—There is a legend which is based on a reminiscence of this periodic disappearance of Dionysos to the underworld, viz. the thoroughly Greek story of his descent on a single occasion into Hades in order to bring back Semele. Elsewhere his disappearance into the realm of the spirits gave rise to the legend of his escape and flight to the Muses; this was spoken of in the Agrionia at Chaironeia (Plu., Smp. 8 Praef.).