Among all the phenomena of ritual, none are more interesting or in their effects more momentous than the rites that are associated with the dogma of the death of the divinity. That the high gods are naturally mortal and liable to death is an idea that is certainly rare, though it may be found in Egyptian and old Teutonic mythology; but the dogma of the annual or periodic death and resurrection of the divinity has been, and is, enacted in much peasant ritual, and worked for the purposes of agrarian magic in Europe and elsewhere. More rarely we find the belief attached to the mystic forms and faith of some advanced religion, and it is specially in the Mediterranean area where it appears in a high stage of development. It is a salient feature of the Egyptian worship of Isis; of the Sumerian-Babylonian ritual, in which the dead Thammuz was bewailed, and which penetrated Syria and other parts of Asia Minor; of the worship of Attis and Adonis in Phrygia and the Lebanon; and of certain shrines of the Oriental Aphrodite. It is associated often with orgiastic sorrow and ecstatic joy, and with the belief in human immortality of which the resurrection of the deity is the symbol and the efficacious means. This idea and this ritual appears to have been alien to the native Hellenic religion. The Hellenic gods and goddesses do not die and rise again. Only in one Aryan nation of antiquity, so far as I am aware, was the idea clear and operative--the Thraco-Phrygian, in the religion of Dionysos-Sabazios. This alien cult, when transplanted into Greece, retained still some savagery in the rite that enacted the death of the {28} god; but in the Orphic sects the ritual idea was developed into a doctrine of posthumous salvation, from which the later pre-Christian world drew spiritual comfort and some fertile moral conceptions. This Thracian-Dionysiac influence in Hellas, though chastened and sobered by the sanity of the national temperament, initiated the Hellene into a certain spiritual mood that was not naturally evoked by the native religion; for it brought into his polytheism a higher measure of enthusiasm, a more ecstatic spirit of self-abandonment, than it possessed by its own traditional bent. Many civilised religions appear to have passed beyond the phase of orgiastic fervour. It emerges in the old Egyptian ritual, and most powerfully in the religion of Phrygia and of certain districts of Syria; but it seems to have been alien to the higher Semitic and the Iranian religions, as it was to the native Hellenic.