Note 30 — PART II CHAPTER VIII ORIGINS OF THE BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY THE THRACIAN WORSHIP OF DIONYSOS

ταυρόφθογγοι δ’ ὑπομυκῶνταί ποθεν ἐξ ἀφανοῦς φοβεροὶ μῖμοι: A. Ἠδωνοί describing the Thracian worship of D. (fr. 57). This was “certainly intended to increase for the participants in the festival the feeling of the god’s presence and thus to add to the wildness of their orgies”, as Rapp, Dionysosc., 19, very rightly observes. The invisible bellowing bull is the god himself. (Dionysos appears as a bull to the insane Pentheus: E., Ba. 920 ff.).—“The Batloka, a tribe in the Northern Transvaal, hold a yearly festival of the dead in which hidden magicians make weird sounds with flutes which the people take for the voice of spirits; they say ‘Modimo is there’.” Schneider, Relig. d. Afrikan. Naturv. 143.