Themis, a study of the social origins of Greek ... - Warburg Institute

n] The god a projection from the group 47
does not know it is the force of collective suggestion, he calls it a
god. As Philo' puts it, ' Bacchic and Korybantic worshippers rave
until they actually see what they desire.'
This process of projection, of deification, is much helped by what
god like his
we may perhaps call the story-telling i nstinct . The
worshipper must have a life-history. We hear much of the suffer-
ings {irddr^) of Dionysos. Tfyey are of course primarily the projected
irdOt] of his worshippers; the worshippers have passed through
the rite of Second Birth, have endured the death th at issues in"
rejmrrecTn uii ; Lherefuie the god is iwice-rjorn. But once the life-
history projected, it tends to consolidate the figure of the god and
to define his personality, to crystallize and clear it of all demonic
vagueness. Even in the time of the Christian fathers 2 it was
realized that the great festivals of the gods were commemorations
of the events of a god's life—his birth, his marriage, his exploits,
sufferings, death. They used this undoubted fact as an argument
to show that the gods were but divinized men, whose deeds
(d&Xa) were solemnly commemorated. What the Christian fathers
necessarily could not realize was that it was the social life of the
group rather than the individual that became the object of
religious representation.
"Nowhere so clearly as in the religion of Dionysos do we see
the steps of the making of the god, and nowhere is this religion
so vividly presented to the imagination as in the Bacchae of
Euripides. The very vividness, the oneness of the perception,
seen with the single intention of the poet, makes it to us hard of
apprehension and has rendered necessary the cold psychological
analysis just attempted.
The question is often raised— is the Bacchos the god Dionysos
himself or merely a human leader, an adept, an impostor, as
Pentheus held ? He is one and both, human and divine, because, as
we have seen, divinity at its very source is human. In the Bacchae
1 de vit. contemplat. 2, p. 473 M. oi ^aKxevd/nevoi Kai KopvfiavTQivTes evdovaid^oviri
(J.€XP LS &" T0 Trodov/xevou 'idwcriv. See Eobde, Psyche, p. 304.
2 See S. August, de civitat. del, vn. 18 Unicuique eorum...ex ejus ingenio,
moribus, actibus, casibus, sacra et solennia constituta. Lactantius, Divin. instit.
v. 20 Ipsos ritus...vel ex rebus gestis bominuru, vel ex casibus, vel etiam ex
mortibus natos. Ludorum celebrationes deorum i'esta sunt, siquidem ob natales
eorum vel temple-rum novorum dedicationes sunt constituti, and see vi. 20. The
question of the life-history of the god, that is the orderly sequence of his festivals,
will be discussed when we come to the iviavros, p. 331.