In the Greek festival called Thargelia, celebrated in May, the rites were dedicated to Apollo, the sun god, and to Diana, the moon goddess. At the ceremonial there was a procession of youths who carried olive branches hung with food, fruit, and images of phalli. * * * * * The genesiac theme, in its most lustful implication, was so prevalent in early history that there was a sect, known as the Baptae, dedicated to Cotytto, an obscene and lewd goddess. They celebrated their nocturnal abominations at Athens, Corinth, in Thrace, and on the island of Chios. One of the peculiar features of the Baptae was their custom of drinking from glass vessels shaped like a phallus. Juvenal, the Roman satirist, in describing the Baptae and their mystic and symbolic rites, refers to one participant who drinks from a glass Priapus: vitreo bibit ille Priapo. * * * * * According to the testimony of the Greek historian Herodotus, a certain Melampus brought the cult of Bacchus, the worship of the generative capacity, to Greece, approximately in the thirteenth century B.C. He expounded the features of the Egyptian cult and established processional rites and ceremonies adapted from Egyptian usage. * * * * * In ancient Greece Bacchus, the phallic divinity, was equated with Dionysus. In the cities the Greater Dionysia, or the Urban Dionysia, were celebrated in his honor for three days. The locale was at Limnae in Attica, and the season was the middle of the month of March. In very early times, the Greek biographer and philosopher Plutarch declares, the rites were of a simple but joyous nature. But in his own time the celebration had reached a lavish, extravagant splendor. Women, devotees of the Bacchic symbol and known as Bacchantes, introduced the ritualistic procession. Chaste maidens, impeccable in morality and of distinguished birth, followed. These were the Canephoroi, the Basket-bearers who bore on their heads baskets containing the sacred utensils used at the celebration: together with mystic objects, flowers, salt, sesame, and a flower-bedecked phallus. A detachment came next to the Canephoroi: these were the Phallophoroi. The Phallophoroi were the Phallus-bearers, carrying, attached to long staffs, the phallic emblem. Musicians were also in the march, chanting and accompanying the choral odes with twanging strings, and at brief intervals emitting loud exclamations in glorification of the god. There were other strange participants. The Ithyphalli, men dressed in women’s garments, who chanted salacious phallic songs. Scandalous satyrs led goats for sacrifice, while Bacchantes performed obscene dance movements. There was, over the entire celebration, an atmosphere of debauchery and libidinous license consonant with the phallic context of the cult. * * * * *