That the sacred women of Dionysus
ate, in mystical ceremony, raw flesh, and drank blood, is a fact
often mentioned, and commemorates, as it seems, the actual sacrifice
of a fair boy deliberately torn to pieces, fading at last into a
symbolical offering. At Delphi, the wolf was preserved for him, on
the principle by which Venus loves the dove, and Hera peacocks; and
there were places in which, after the sacrifice of a kid to him, a
curious mimic pursuit of the priest who had offered it represented
the still surviving horror of one who had thrown a child to the
wolves. The three daughters of Minyas devote themselves to his
worship; they cast lots, and one of them offers her own tender infant
to be torn by the three, like a roe; then the other women pursue
them, and they are turned into bats, or moths, or other creatures of
the night. And fable is endorsed by history; Plutarch telling us
how, before the battle of Salamis, with the assent of Themistocles,
three Persian captive youths were offered to Dionysus the Devourer.
As, then, some embodied their fears of winter in Persephone, others
embodied them in Dionysus, a devouring god, whose sinister side (as
the best wine itself has its treacheries) is illustrated in the dark
and shameful secret society described by Livy, in which his worship
ended at Rome, afterwards abolished by solemn act of the senate.
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