blessings among men. For prophecy is a madness, and the prophetess at
Delphi and the priestesses at Dodona when out of their senses have
conferred great benefits on Hellas, both in public and private life, but
when in their senses few or none.... And in proportion as prophecy is
higher and more perfect than divination both in name and reality, in the
same proportion, as the ancients testify, is madness superior to a sane
mind, for the one is only of human, but the other of divine origin."
[Footnote: Plato, Phaedrus, 244.--Jowett's translation.]

Here then, in the oracle at Delphi, the centre of the religious life
of the Greeks, we have an explicit affirmation of that element of
mysticism which we might have supposed to be the most alien to their
genius; and the same element re-appears, in a cruder and more barbaric
form, in connection with the cult of Dionysus. He, the god of wine,
was also the god of inspiration; and the ritual with which he was
worshipped was a kind of apotheosis of intoxication. To suppress for a
time the ordinary work-a-day consciousness, with its tedium, its
checks, its balancing of pros and cons, to escape into the directness
and simplicity of mere animal life, and yet to feel in this no
degradation but rather a submission to the divine power, an actual
identification with the deity-such, it would seem, was the intention
of those extraordinary revels of which we have in the "Bacchae" of
Euripides so vivid a description. And to this end no stimulus was
omitted to excite and inspire the imagination and the sense. The
influence of night and torches in solitary woods, intoxicating drinks,
the din of flutes and cymbals on a bass of thunderous drums, dances
convulsing every limb and dazzling eyes and brain, the harking-back,
as it were, to the sympathies and forms of animal life in the dress of
fawnskin, the horns, the snakes twined about the arm, and the
impersonation of those strange half-human creatures who were supposed