They are a
picturesque addition, also, to the exterior of Greek life, with [51]
their white dresses, their dirges, their fastings and ecstasies,
their outward asceticism and material purifications. And the central
object of their worship comes before us as a tortured, persecuted,
slain god--the suffering Dionysus--of whose legend they have their
own special and esoteric version. That version, embodied in a
supposed Orphic poem, The Occultation of Dionysus, is represented
only by the details that have passed from it into the almost endless
Dionysiaca of Nonnus, a writer of the fourth century; and the imagery
has to be put back into the shrine, bit by bit, and finally
incomplete. Its central point is the picture of the rending to
pieces of a divine child, of whom a tradition, scanty indeed, but
harmonious in its variations, had long maintained itself. It was in
memory of it, that those who were initiated into the Orphic mysteries
tasted of the raw flesh of the sacrifice, and thereafter ate flesh no
more; and it connected itself with that strange object in the Delphic
shrine, the grave of Dionysus.
Son, first, of Zeus, and of Persephone whom Zeus woos, in the form of
a serpent--the white, golden-haired child, the best-beloved of his
father, and destined by him to be the ruler of the world, grows up in
secret.
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