to it and were most in its thoughts, and the resulting usages and
ideas never having come to have a precisely harmonised system, after
the analogy of some other religions. The religion of Dionysus is the
religion of people who pass their lives among the vines. As the
religion of Demeter carries us back to the cornfields and farmsteads
of Greece, and places us, in fancy, among a primitive race, in the
furrow and beside the granary; so the religion of Dionysus carries us
back to its vineyards, and is a monument of the ways and thoughts of
people whose days go by beside the winepress, and [10] under the
green and purple shadows, and whose material happiness depends on the
crop of grapes. For them the thought of Dionysus and his circle, a
little Olympus outside the greater, covered the whole of life, and
was a complete religion, a sacred representation or interpretation of
the whole human experience, modified by the special limitations, the
special privileges of insight or suggestion, incident to their
peculiar mode of existence.

Now, if the reader wishes to understand what the scope of the
religion of Dionysus was to the Greeks who lived in it, all it
represented to them by way of one clearly conceived yet complex
symbol, let him reflect what the loss would be if all the effect and
expression drawn from the imagery of the vine and the cup fell out of
the whole body of existing poetry; how many fascinating trains of
reflexion, what colour and substance would therewith have been
deducted from it, filled as it is, apart from the more aweful
associations of the Christian ritual, apart from Galahad's cup, with
all the various symbolism of the fruit of the vine. That supposed
loss is but an imperfect measure of all that the name of Dionysus
recalled to the Greek mind, under a single imaginable form, an
outward body of flesh presented to the senses, and comprehending, as