Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/540

508 BOOK II. The mothers of Dionysos. Orgiastic worship of Dionysos.

Stages exhibit in him the languid and vohiptuous character which marks the early foliage and vegetation of summer. Hence the story that Persephone placed her child Dionysos in the hands of Ino and Athamas to be brought up as a girl ; and from this character of feminine gracefulness he passes to the vehement licence of his heated worshippers.

Persephone, as we have seen, is not his only mother ; nor is the myth which makes him born of his mother Semele amidst the blaze of the thunderbolts the only legend of his birth. He is spoken of sometimes as a son of 16, or of Arge, of Dione, or Amaltheia, the nurse of Zeus ; and there was a tale which related how, when Kadmos heard that Zeus had made his child Semele a mother, he placed her and her babe in a chest, and launched them, as Akrisios launched Danae and her infant, upon the sea. The chest, according to local tradition, was carried to Brasiai, where the babe was rescued by Ino ; Semele, who was found dead, being solemnly buried on the shore.^

Thus far the form of the myth, although it may not be genuinely Hellenic and Aryan, wears a sufficiently Hellenised look: but even here we have expressions implying that in the case of Dionysos new methods of worship, if not some new religious ideas, were introduced from Asia into the countries north and west of the Egean; that these changes were stoutly resisted, and that the opposition was overcome by force. They also show that the new worship was orgiastic, in- volving a tumult and even frenzy of feeling by no means congenial to the ordinary Hellenic or Aryan mind, and that this excitement was in direct relations with certain theories or notions of the forces at work in the Kosmos. The dances of his worshippers may at times have been furious ; but they were regulated so as to answer to what was supposed to be the march of the planets round the central sun, the dances of the stars across the nightly heavens. That this revolu- tion (whatever may have been its extent) was effected first in Boiotia, can scarcely be a matter for doubt. It is proved not only by the localisation of the myths which indicate the change, but by the importation of Phenician names and words into the Boiotian vocabulary; by the use of Banna, for instance, as the equivalent of Thugater, and

any are disposed on this score to exult over Professor Max Miiller, they are met by the trenchant remark of Mr. Sayce, that " the more the Babylonian mythology is examined, the more solar is its origin found to be," and that, with the exception of Anu and Ilea, "the great deities seem all to go back to the sun."

• Preller (Gr. Myth. i. 523) regards the name Dionysos as simply an epithet of Zeus as the Nysaian or ripening god: " Der Name scheint einen feuchten, saftig fruchtbaren Ort zu bedcutcn, wie jenes Leibethron am Makedonischen Olymp, wo Dionysos und Orpheus seit alter Zcit in der Unigebung dcr Musen verehrt wurden,"