In passages like this we find the truly natural religion, the religion to which man's nature tends, "groaning and travailing" till the goal is won. But it is long in the winning; the paths are rough; humanity is "led by a way that it knew not." Or, again, religion is developed out of larva-like forms which she leaves behind her, a puzzle and a trouble to those who follow and study her and her progress towards perfection.
Dionysus.
Among deities whose origin has been sought in the personification, if not of the phenomena, at least of the forces of Nature, Dionysus is prominent.[1] He is regarded by many mythologists[2] as the "spiritual form" of the new vernal life, the sap and pulse of vegetation and of the new-born year, especially as manifest in the vine and the juice of the grape. Thus Preller[3] looks on his mother, Semele, as a personification of the pregnant soil in spring.[4] The name of Semele is explained with the familiar diversity of conjecture. Whether the human intellect, at the time of the first development of myth, was capable of such abstract thought as is employed in the recognition of a deity
- ↑ It is needless to occupy space with the etymological guesses at the sense of the name "Dionysus." Greek, Sanskrit, and Assyrian have been tortured by the philologists, but refuse to give up their secret, and Curtis does not even offer a conjecture (Gr. Etym., 609).
- ↑ Preller, i. 544.
- ↑ i. 546.
- ↑ The birth of Dionysus is recorded (Iliad, xiv. 323; Hesiod, Theog., 940) without the story of the death of Semele, which occurs in Æschylus, Frg., 217–218; Eurip., Bacchæ, i, 3.
