I do not desire to dwell too long upon any one deity, or rather class of deities; therefore I will say briefly here that when Dionysus became the annual or biennial vine-god victim, it was inevitable that his worshippers should have seen his resurrection and embodiment in the vine, and should have regarded the wine it yielded as the blood of the god. In this case, the identification was particularly natural, for could not every worshipper feel the god in the wine? and did not the divine spirit within it inspire and intoxicate him? To be “full of the god” was the natural expression for the resulting exhilaration; the cult of the wine-spirit is thus one of those which stands on the surest and most intimate personal basis.
The death and resurrection of Dionysus are accordingly a physical reality. The god is annually killed in the flesh, as man, bull, or goat; and he rises again in the vine, to give his blood once more for the good of his votaries. Moreover, he may be used as a fertiliser for many other trees; and so we find Dionysus has many functions. He is variously adored as Dionysus of the tree, and more particularly of the fruit-bearing fig and apple. His image, like those of other tree-gods already encountered, was often an upright post, without arms, but draped (like the ashera) in a mantle, and with a bearded mask to represent the head, while green boughs projecting from it marked his vegetable character. He was the patron of cultivated trees; prayers were offered to him to make trees grow; he was honoured by fruit-growers, who set up an image of him, in the shape of a natural tree-stump, in the midst of their orchards. (Compare that last degraded and utilitarian relic, the modern scarecrow.) For other equally interesting facts, I would refer the reader once more to Mr. Frazer, whose rich store I must not further rifle. It seems to me obvious from his collection of facts that there was originally everywhere a separate local Dionysus, an annual man-god or woman-god victim (for which a beast was later substituted), and that only slowly did the worship of the individual Dionysi pass into the general worship of one great idealised god Dionysus. The great gods are at first classes, not individuals.
Mr. Gomme has further pointed out three interesting points of resemblance between the Dionysiac rites and the Indian Potraj festival. In the first place, Dionysus is sometimes represented to his worshippers by his head only—no doubt a preserved oracular head; and in any case a parallel to the importance of the head in the Indian ceremony. In the second place, the sacrificer of the calf at Tenedos was driven out and stoned after the fulfilment of the rite—a counterpart of the Potraj fleeing from the place after the slaughter of the lamb. And in the third place, the women worshippers of Dionysus attended the rites nude, crowned with garlands, and daubed over with dirt—a counterpart of the naked female votaries surrounded with branches of trees in the Indian festival. All three of these points recur abundantly in similar ceremonies elsewhere.
As a rule, I severely disregard mere myths, as darkeners of counsel, confining my attention to the purely religious and practical elements of custom and worship. But it is worth while noting here for its illustrative value the Cretan Dionysus-myth, preserved for us in a Romanised form by Firmicus Maternus. Dionysus is there represented as the son of Zeus, a Cretan king; and this legend, dismissed cavalierly by Mr. Frazer as “Euhemeristic,” at least encloses the old idea that the Dionysus-victim was at first himself a divine god-king, connected by blood with the supreme god or founder of the community. Hera, the wife of Zeus, was jealous of the child, and lured him into an ambush, where he was set upon by her satellites the Titans, who cut him limb from limb, boiled his body with various herbs, and ate it. Other forms of the myth tell us how his mother Demeter pieced together his mangled remains, and made him young again. More often, however, Dionysus is the son of Semele, and various other versions are given of the mode of his resurrection. It is enough for our purpose that in all of them the wine-god, after having been slain and torn limb from limb, rises again from the dead, and often ascends to his father Zeus in heaven. The resurrection, visibly enacted, formed in many places a part of the rite; though I cannot agree with Mr. Frazer’s apparent and (for him) unusual suggestion that the rite grew out of the myth; I hold the exact opposite to have been the order of evolution.
On the whole, then, though I do not deny that the later Greeks envisaged Dionysus as a single supreme god of vegetation, nor that many abstract ideas were finally fathered upon the worship—especially those which identified the death and resurrection of the god with the annual winter sleep and spring revival—I maintain that in his origin the Dionysus was nothing more than the annual corn-victim, afterwards extended into the tree and vine victim, from whose grave sprang the pomegranate, that blood-red fruit, and whose life-juice was expressed as the god-giving wine. At first a yearly human victim, he was afterwards personated by a goat or a bull; and was therefore represented in art as a bull, or a bull-horned man. Gradually identified with vegetation in general, he was regarded at last as the Flowery Dionysus, the Fig Dionysus, or even, like Attis, the god of the pine-tree. But all these, I believe, were later syncretic additions; and I consider that in such primitive forms as the orgiastic crop-god of the Indian corn-festival we get the prime original of the Hellenic vine-deity.
I pass on to Osiris, in his secondary or acquired character as corn-god.
I have already expressed the belief, in which I am backed up by Mr. Loftie, that the original Osiris was a real historical early king of This by Abydos. But in the later Egyptian religion, after mystic ideas had begun to be evolved, he came to be regarded as the god of the dead, and every mummy or every justified soul was looked upon as an Osiris. Moreover, it seems probable that in Egypt the name of Osiris was also fitted to the annual slain corn-victim or corn-god. Thus all over Egypt there were many duplicates of Osiris; notably at Busiris, where the name was attached to an early tomb like the one at Abydos. This identification of the new-made god with the historic ancestor, the dead king, or the tribal deity is quite habitual; it is parallel to the identification of the officiating Potraj with the Potraj god, of the Attis-priest with Attis, of the Dionysus-victim with the son of Zeus: and it will meet us hereafter in savage parallels. Let us look at the evidence.
As in India, the Osiris festival lasted for five days. (The period is worth noting.) The ceremonies began with ploughing the earth. We do not know for certain that a human victim was immolated; but many side-analogies would lead us to that conclusion, and suggest that as elsewhere the sacred victim was torn to pieces in the eagerness of the cultivators and worshippers to obtain a fragment of his fertilising body. For in the myth, Typhon cuts up the corpse of the god into fourteen pieces, which he scatters abroad (as the naked leather-dresser scatters the sacred buffalo): and we know that in the Egyptian ceremonies one chief element was the search for the mangled portions of Osiris, the rejoicings at their discovery, and their solemn burial. On one of the days of the feast, a procession of priests went the round of the temples—or beat the bounds: and the festival closed with the erection of a pillar or stone monument to the Osiris, which, in a bas-relief, the king himself is represented as assisting in raising. I think it is impossible to overlook the general resemblance of these rites to the rites of Potraj.
I ought to add, though I cannot go into that matter fully here, that the many allusions to the flinging of the coffer containing the Osiris into the Nile are clear indications of the rain-charm obtained by throwing the human victim into a spring or river. In this case, however, it must of course be regarded locally as a charm to make the Nile rise in due season.
The character of the later Osiris, or the god-victim identified with him, as a corn and vegetable god, is amply borne out by several other pieces of evidence. Osiris, it is said, was the first to teach men the use of corn. He also introduced the cultivation of the vine. Mr. Frazer notes that in one of the chambers dedicated to Osiris in the great temple of Isis at Philæ, the dead body of Osiris is represented with stalks of corn springing from it, and a priest is watering the stalks from a pitcher which he holds in his hand. That human corn-victims were at least not unknown in Egypt we have on the direct authority of Manetho, who tells us that red-haired men used to be burned, and their ashes scattered with winnowing fans. (Similar cases elsewhere have been previously mentioned.) So, too, the legend tells us that Isis placed the severed limbs of Osiris on a corn-sieve. Red-haired oxen were also sacrificed in Egypt, apparently in order to produce red wheat. This is the analogue of the bull sacrificed as Dionysus.