Note 40 — PART II CHAPTER VIII ORIGINS OF THE BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY THE THRACIAN WORSHIP OF DIONYSOS

Polak, Persien, ii, 245 ff.—We have only to read the accounts derived from personal experience of the sensations and hallucinatory states accompanying hashish-smoking—such as those given, for instance, by Moreau (de Tours) Du hachisch et de l’aliénation mentale (Paris, 1845), esp. pp. 23 ff., 51 ff., 59 ff., 90, 147 ff., 151 ff., 369 ff.—to have a complete parallel to the condition which underlay Bacchic excitement. There, too, is the complete ἔκστασις of the spirit, a waking dream-state, an ὀλιγοχρόνιος μανία. It only requires the special tone and character given to the hallucinations and illusions by deep-rooted religious or fanciful conceptions—and the external machinery for cultivating such illusions—to make them an exact equivalent of the delirious condition of the real βάκχοι at the nightly festival of Dionysos. (The helpless state of impressionability to outward—e.g. musical—and inward influences is a marked feature of the intoxication and fantasia of hashish.) Other narcotics also have similar effects (Moreau, p. 184 ff.).