came to the worshipers, a sense of oneness with the God, who was imitated in extraordinary acts; the lines which divide human beings from one another p and from the animal world were for the moment obliterated, the feeling of separate individuality vanished, and a sense of universal kinship took its place. It was a state of semi-intoxication, often literal intoxication—Dionysus was secondarily, if not primarily, a God of the vine, and ancient peoples, it must be remembered, often regarded drunkenness as a divinely inspired condition. q This was the joyous side of the Dionysian festival. But the joy was of a peculiar sort. It was over against a background that of itself would have bred melancholy and dejection. Dionysus was a God of change, a God of the destruction involved in change as well as of production and fertility, a hunter (Zagreus) bent on slaying, a devourer, a flesh-eater (sarcophagus or ὠμοστἠς); yes, he was himself a suffering God and the dithyramb, or hymn in his honor, sang his mystical woes. r The joy of the festival was a joy following gloom—and this is the explanation of the excesses that marked it, its orgiastic traits. The winter revealed the God destroying, the spring came as a revelation of his creative power—and the spring was the time of his festival. The worshipers shared both in his pain and his pleasure, identified themselves with the whole round of his life—on the one hand, fasting, hunting, devouring the flesh of wild animals; on the other, dancing, reveling, and re-enacting his creative fertility. It is evident that Dionysus, so taken, was a sort of epitome of life itself, a symbol of the world of change in general, and Nietzsche thinks that his worship had hence the highest significance, since it amounted to a reaffirmation of life in all its range, and a mystical identification of the worshiper with the very spirit of it. In a striking passage he sums up the Dionysiac experience, substantially as follows: We know that everything that arises must await a painful end, we face the terrors of individual existence and yet are not benumbed, for a metaphysical consolation lifts us above the wheel of change; for a brief moment we become the Primal Being (Urwesen) himself and feel his uncontrollable desire for and joy in existence; the struggle, the pain, the destruction attending all phenomena, seem even necessary in view of the innumerable forms
