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 { 307}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.