crowds of women carrying torches in the mountain forests, who in connection with the use of intoxicating drinks are thrown into convulsions in which they believe themselves united with the god. (See also Stoll, II. ed., p. 317.) Their souls seem to leave their bodies and to mix with the spirit hosts of the god, or they think, that the god himself enters into their bodies so that they are full of the god.
To the god Dionysius as to the soul itself is ascribed a serpent form. In order to be able to take him into themselves, his worshippers therefore tore and devoured snakes or, according to the old belief, other young animals consecrated to him and representing him as bull calves and rams, and in the earliest times probably also children, and drank the blood as being the bearer of life, and clothed themselves in the fresh pelts. In this way they called upon God with loud voices that he would grant them fruitfulness in the new year.
The small Dionysia held in the country and in Athens itself, the Anthesterins (fiower feasts), have the same meaning; they represent the symbolic marriage of the god with the queen representing the country, who, at the time of the republic, was represented by the wife of the Archon of Basilea.
The serpent is also the attribute of heroes. In the Roman mythology there are related to the spiritual beings (manes, lemures, larvæ), spirit-like creatures, the genii, the representatives of the life and procreative powers of man, and the corresponding junones for women. At birth they enter into men, at death they leave, and like the souls of the dead the spirits are represented in the form of a serpent.
It may be that serpents and also dragons (both ideas often overlap in mythology and fairy tales) have a broader significance in these territories than at first sight would appear, certain it is, that they very often have a sexual meaning or a meaning closely associated with the sexual, and that that is the original meaning. That is shown by the above mythological digression. In fairy tales the ideas of dragon, serpent, giant, devil, monster are often used promiscuously. They commonly play the same rôle.[1]
- ↑ In Bernhard Schmidt ("Das Volksleben der Neugriechen und das hellenische Altertum," 1 Teil, Leipzig, B. G. Teubner, 1871, pp. 186–7, note 1) there is an intimation as to the masculine sexual root of the serpent
