Seneca describes the spirits of the dead as being evoked by the Psychagogus in a cave rendered gloomy and as dark as night by the cypress, laurel, and other like trees.[39] Claudian refers to the same superstition.[40] And Lucan,[41] where Erictho recalls a spirit to animate {38} the body it had left, by horrid ceremonies. So Tibullus:[42]-- "Haec cantu finditque solum, manesque sepulchris, Elicit, et tepido devocat ossa toro." The celebrated Heeren, in his "Politics of Ancient Greece" (ch. iii., p. 67, Am. ed.), remarks, in reference to the mysteries of Eleusis, that they exhibited the superiority of civilized over savage life, and gave instructions respecting a future life and its nature. For what was this more than an interpretation of the sacred traditions which were told of the goddess as the instructress in agriculture, of the forced descent of her daughter to the lower world, etc.? And we need not be more astonished if, in some of their sacred rites, we perceive an excitement carried to a degree of enthusiastic madness which belonged peculiarly to the East, but which the Hellenes were very willing to receive. For we must not neglect to bear in mind that they shared the spirit of the East; and did they not live on the very boundary-line between the East and the West? As those institutions were propagated farther to the west, they lost their original character. We know what the Bacchanalian rites became at Rome; and had they been introduced north of the Alps, what form would they have there assumed? But to those countries it was possible to {39} transplant the vine, not the service of the god to whom the vine was sacred. The orgies of Bacchus suited the cold soil and inclement forests of the North as little as the character of its inhabitants.