Singing and Rhetoric), Terpsichore (Dancing), Thalia (Comedy), and
Urania (Astronomy). Mount Parnassus, Mount Helicon, and the fountains of
Castalia and Aganippe were the sacred places of the Muses.

The Eleusinian Mysteries are of a period that may be likened to the 7th
century B.C., and at these Mysteries as many as 30,000 persons, in the
time of Herodotus, assembled to witness them. The attributes of these
Grecian Mysteries, like those of the Egyptians, consisted of
processions, sacrificial offerings, purifications, dances, and all that
the Mimetic and the other Arts could convey; add to this the various
coloured lights, and the fairy-like grandeur of the whole, we have
something that may be likened to the Transformation, and other
fairy-like scenes of English Pantomimes and Extravaganzas.

At the Orgia, or sacred rites of Bacchus, the customary sacrifice to be
offered, because it fed on vines, was the goat. The vine, ivy, laurel,
asphodel, the dolphin, lynx, tiger, and ass were all sacred to Bacchus.
The acceptable sacrifice to Venus was a dove; Jupiter, a bull; an ox of
five years old, ram or boar pig to Neptune; and Diana, a stag. At the
inception of the Bacchanalian festivals in Greece, the tragic song of
the Goat, a sacred hymn was sung, and from which rude beginning sprang
the Tragedy and Comedy of Greece. The Greeks place every event as
happening in their country, and it is not surprising that they claim for
themselves the inception of Tragedy and Comedy, which they undoubtedly
were the originators of in Greece, but the religious festivals of
Dionysus, Osiris, and Bacchus, to which we are supposed to owe the
inception of Tragedy and Comedy, were known long before the Greeks knew
them. (Dionysus was the patron and protector of theatres.) "The purport
of the song was that Bacchus imparted his secret of the cultivation of
vines to a petty prince in Attica, named Icarius, who happened one day