_thyra_ being the same as our _door_. They were quite mistaken;
_Dithyrambos_, modern philology tells us, is the Divine Leaper, Dancer,
and Lifegiver. But their false etymology is important to us, because it
shows that they believed the Dithyrambos was the twice-born. Dionysos
was born, they fabled, once of his mother, like all men, once of his
father's thigh, like no man.

But if the Dithyrambos, the young Dionysos, like the Bull-God, the
Tree-God, arises from a _dromenon_, a rite, what is the rite of second
birth from which it arises?

* * * * *

We look in vain among our village customs. If ever rite of second birth
existed, it is dead and buried. We turn to anthropology for help, and
find this, the rite of the second birth, widespread, universal, over
half the savage world.

With the savage, to be twice born is the rule, not the exception. By his
first birth he comes into the world, by his second he is born into his
tribe. At his first birth he belongs to his mother and the women-folk;
at his second he becomes a full-fledged man and passes into the society
of the warriors of his tribe. This second birth is a little difficult
for us to realize. A boy with us passes very gradually from childhood to
manhood, there is no definite moment when he suddenly emerges as a man.
Little by little as his education advances he is admitted to the social
privileges of the circle in which he is born. He goes to school, enters
a workshop or a university, and finally adopts a trade or a profession.
In the case of girls, in whose upbringing primitive savagery is apt to
linger, there is still, in certain social strata a ceremony known as