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According to the myth, it was in the shape of a bull that he was torn to pieces by the Titans; and the Cretans, when they acted the sufferings and death of Dionysus, tore a live bull to pieces with their teeth. Indeed, the rending and devouring of live bulls and calves appear to have been a regular feature of the Dionysiac rites.
Musical amateurs, too, are a folk strangely out of place among philosophers, for they are the last persons in the world who would come to anything like a philosophical discussion, if they could help, while they run about at the Dionysiac festivals as if they had let out their ears to hear every chorus; whether the performance is in town or country that makes no difference they are there.
DIONYSIAC MYSTERIES. In addition to what is said in the text, I add the following, slightly condensed, from the pen of that accomplished writer, Albert Pike: "The initiates in these Mysteries had preserved the ritual and ceremonies that accorded with the simplicity of the earliest ages, and the manners of the first men. The rules of Pythagoras were followed there.
The candidate was here called an epopt, or eye-witness, because nothing was now hidden from him; and hence he may be compared to the Master Mason, of whom Hutchinson says that "he has discovered the knowledge of God and his salvation, and been redeemed from the death of sin and the sepulchre of pollution and unrighteousness." The Dionysiac Artificers.
Emerson's Journal in the eighteen-thirties glows with a Dionysiac rapture over what he calls "delicious days"; but did the seven generations of clergymen from whom Emerson descended have no delicious and haughty and tender days that passed unrecorded?
"Armed with the scourge of its syllogisms, an optimist dialectic drives the music out of tragedy: that is to say, destroys the very essence of tragedy, an essence which can be interpreted only as a manifestation and objectivation of Dionysiac states, as a visible symbol of music, as the dream-world of a Dionysiac intoxication."
We may, indeed, regard Adonis, and Zeus Bagaeus, and Melicertes, as importations from Phoenicia. In later times, too, the Greeks, and still more the Romans, extended a free hospitality to alien gods and legends, to Serapis, Isis, the wilder Dionysiac revels, and so forth.
They were intimately connected with the Dionysiac Mysteries, and are supposed to have furnished the builders for the construction of the temple of Solomon.
During the tumult of the Dionysiac festival you are reported to have carried on as grave a discussion as any two gray-bearded philosophers walking in the Stoa among attentive students." "With intelligent men, no doubt, we talk with intelligence!" "Aye, and with stupid ones gayly. How much reason have I to be thankful that I am one of the stupid ones.
The theatre, indeed, tends at the present time to assume a larger importance and to approximate to the more serious dramatic performances of classic days by being transferred to the day-time and the open-air. France has especially taken the initiative in these performances, analogous to the Dionysiac festivals of antiquity and the Mysteries and Moralities of the Middle Ages.
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