[25] οἱ βακχευόμενοι καὶ κορυβαντιῶντες ἐνθουσιάζουσι μέχρις ἂν τὸ ποθούμενον ἴδωσιν, Philo, Vit. Cont. 2, ii, p. 473 M.
[26] So too the wild shaking and whirling-round of the head, which acc. to innumerable literary and pictorial descriptions was a regular feature of the Bacchic dance and cult, must have contributed—and was so intended—to bring about the condition of ecstasy and frenzy (ῥιψαύχενι σὺν κλόνῳ, Pi., fr. 208; κρᾶτα σεῖσαι, E., Ba. 185, etc.).—How such fanatic shaking of the head, if kept up for along time, is by itself sufficient, in persons naturally predisposed to it, to bring on complete religious ἔκστασις, may be learnt from a remarkable account in Moreau du hachisch, p. 290 ff., derived from personal observation in the East.
[27] The object of the trieteric festival of Dionysos (repeated every second year) held in so many places in Greece (cf. Weniger, Dionysosdienst in Elis, Progr. 1883, p. 8) was to celebrate the presence of the god. This is clearly shown by D.S. 4, 3, 2, who also attributes the trieteric festival to the Thracians: τοὺς Βοιωτοὺς καὶ τοὺς ἄλλους Ἕλληνας καὶ Θρᾷκας . . . καταδεῖξαι τὰς τριετηρίδας θυσίας Διονύσῳ καὶ τὸν θεὸν νομίζειν κατὰ τὸν χρόνον τοῦτον ποιεῖσθαι τὰς παρὰ τοῖς ἀνθρώποις ἐπιφανείας. At this time women and maidens celebrated τὴν παρουσίαν τοῦ Διονύσου. (In the archaic song of the Elean women the Bull-god is thus called upon: Plu., QG. 36, 299 A; Is. et Os. 35, p. 364 F; whereupon the Eleans believed that τὸν θεόν σφισιν ἐπιφοιτᾶν ἐς τῶν Θυίων τὴν ἑορτήν: Paus. 6, 26, 1.)—For Bakchos amongst the dancers see E., Ba. 185 ff., 306 f., and often. At the trieteric festival at Delphi Διόνυσος . . . Παρνασὸν κατὰ πηδᾷ χορεύει παρθένοις σὺν Δελφίσιν, E., Hypsip. fr. 752. And so often in poetry: see Nauck on S., OT. 213; Ant. 1126 ff.—Thracian trieteric festival: tuo motae proles Semeleia thyrso Ismariae celebrant repetita triennia bacchae, Ov., M. ix, 641 f.; tempus erat, quo sacra solent trieterica Baccho Sithoniae celebrare nurus; nox conscia sacris, etc., vi, 587.
[28] 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 [271] 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.).
[29] Cf. Eur., Ba. 920 ff., 1020 f.
[30] 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 [272] 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.
[31] The women taking part in the trieteric festival of the god play the part of the μαινάδες in his train; D.S. 4, 3, 3. Imitation of the Νύμφαι τε καὶ Πᾶνες καὶ Σειληνοὶ καὶ Σάτυροι in the βακχεία: Pl., Lg. 815 C. What was afterwards merely a piece of traditional ritual was originally without doubt a real hallucination of the κάτοχοι.—The idea that a throng, θίασος, of wood-spirits Satyrs and Seilenoi danced about the God must also have been common in the Thracian cult (συγχορευεταὶ Διονύσου, Ael., VH. iii, 40; ὁ τῷ Διονύσῳ παρεπόμενος ὄχλος, Ath. 362 E). σαυάδαι (obviously related to Σαβάζιος; cf. Usener, Götternamen, 44 f.) was the name given to οἱ σειληνοί by the Macedonians, who in the practice of Dionysos-worship were entirely dependent upon the Thracians. Hsch. s.v., cf. Hdt. viii, 138 fin.
[32] The βακχεύοντες τῷ θεῷ (i.e. Sabazios, Sabos) are called σάβοι καὶ σάβαι καὶ σαβάζιοι: Phot. σαβούς; cf. Eust., β 16, p. 1431, 46. Harp. (Phot.) s. σάβοι; Phot. παρασαβάζειν (p. 383, 16 Pors.); Sch. Ar., Av. 874. This identification of the god with his ecstatic worshippers belongs to the Phrygian cult of Kybele as well. Just as the goddess is called Κυβήβη so ὁ κατεχόμενος τῇ μητρὶ τῶν θεῶν is called Κύβηβος: Phot. Κύβηβος, κύβηβον, Eust. β 16. Thus the Greeks in calling the ecstatic worshippers of Bakchos by the name of the god were only adopting the conceptions and vocabulary of the Thracian religion of inspiration into their Dionysos-worship which was modelled on the Thracian cult. Βάκχος is their name for the ὀργιαστὴς τοῦ θεοῦ (etymologically connected is βαβάκτης [κραύγασος, ὅθεν καὶ Βάκχος Hsch.] a Phrygian word for the frenzied priest of Kybele: and therefore = Κύβηβος; cf. Ribbeck, Alazon, p. 86). It appears that the βάκχοι of Dionysos were often called by the old Thracian name σάβοι: σάβους καὶ νῦν ἔτι πολλοὶ τοὺς βάκχους καλοῦσιν, Plu., Smp. 4, 6, 2, p. 671 F (Λαφύστιοι is also a name given, after Διόνυσος Λαφύστιος, to the Βάκχοι who worship him: Lyc. 1237 with Sch.).
[33] Διόνυσος ὠμάδιος (Porph., Abs. ii, 55), ὠμηστής (Plu., Them. 13), λαφύστιος, ταυροφάγος (Soph. fr. 607 N.).—At other times we catch a glimpse of the idea that the god himself is the torn and devoured bull (just as in many ancient worships the proper victim of the god is the animal most homogeneous with him): this is evidently the most primitive form of ἐν-θουσιασμός, the primeval symbolism of a mystic worship that, like all mysticism, desires to take personal possession of the God.
[34] Dionysos himself also carries the thyrsos (as often in sculpture): E., Hyps. fr. 752, etc.