No modern scholar has fairly faced and
accepted either side of this alternative. To accept the former would
be to affirm that we know the rites of these deities better than the
men who practised, or at least who witnessed them. To accept the
latter would involve a wrenching, clipping, mangling, and distorting
of myth and ritual from which even Macrobius shrank. On the other
hand, the view that the essence of all these rites was the mimic
death and revival of vegetation, explains them separately and
collectively in an easy and natural way, and harmonises with the
general testimony borne by the ancients to their substantial
similarity.
XLIII. Dionysus
IN THE PRECEDING chapters we saw that in antiquity the civilised
nations of Western Asia and Egypt pictured to themselves the changes
of the seasons, and particularly the annual growth and decay of
vegetation, as episodes in the life of gods, whose mournful death
and happy resurrection they celebrated with dramatic rites of
alternate lamentation and rejoicing. But if the celebration was in
form dramatic, it was in substance magical; that is to say, it was
intended, on the principles of sympathetic magic, to ensure the
vernal regeneration of plants and the multiplication of animals,
which had seemed to be menaced by the inroads of winter.
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