belief, which he is at pains to emend, was that corporeal gods demanded human sacrifice because they lusted after the person who, by death, would be sent, body and soul, to be wed with them.
There is good reason then to suppose that in old time death may have been even inflicted as the means of effecting wedlock between men and gods; and that the mystic rite of union between Dionysus and the wife of the Athenian magistrate was based on the same fundamental idea as the mysteries of Demeter and Persephone or of Aphrodite. Though in this instance, when once human sacrifice had been given up, all suggestion of death was, so far as we know, removed from the solemnity, yet the repetition year by year of a ceremony of marriage between the god and a mortal woman representing his worshippers might still keep bright in their minds those 'happier hopes' of the like bliss laid up for themselves hereafter.
This particular rite escaped the notice, or at any rate the malice, of Clement; but Dionysus does not for all that go unscathed. Clement fastens upon a legend concerning him, which, however widely ancient Greek feeling in the matter of sex differed from modern, cannot but have seemed to some of the ancients[1] themselves to be a reproach and stain upon the honour of their god. The story of Dionysus and Prosymnus, as told by Clement[2], must be taken as read. But those who will investigate it for themselves will see that the same idea of death being followed by close intercourse with the gods is present there also. That this was the inner meaning of the peculiarly offensive story is shown by a curious comment of Heraclitus upon it, which Clement quotes—[Greek: ôutos de Aidês kai Dionysos][3], 'Hades and Dionysus are one'; whence it follows that union with Dionysus is a synonym for that 'marriage with Hades' which elsewhere, in both ancient and modern times, is a common presentment of death.
Again in the Sabazian mysteries, which some connect with Dionysus and others with Zeus, the little that is known of the ritual favours the view that here also the motif was the marriage of the deity with his worshippers. According to Clement[4], the subject-matter of these mysteries was a story that Zeus, having become by Demeter the father of Persephone, seduced in turn his own daughter,
