Deodorus says the festivals were carried into the night, and it was then frenzy reached its height. He says, “In performing the solemnity virgins carry the thyrsus, and run about frantic, halloing ‘Evoe’ in honour of the god; then the women in a body offer the sacrifices, and roar out the praises of Bacchus in song as if he were present, in imitation of the ancient Mænades, who accompanied him.” These festivities were carried into the night, and as the celebrators became heated with wine, they degenerated into extreme licentiousness. Similar enthusiastic frenzy was exhibited at the Lupercalian Feasts instituted in honour of the god Pan (under the shape of a Goat) whose priests, according to Owen in his _Worship of Serpents_, on the morning of the Feast ran naked through the streets, striking the married women they met on the hands and belly, which was held as an omen promising fruitfulness. The nymphs performing the same ostentatious display as the Bacchants at the festival of Bacchanalia. The festival of Venus was celebrated towards the beginning of April, and the Phallus was again drawn in a car, followed by a procession of Roman women to the temple of Venus. Says a writer, “The loose women of the town and its neighbourhood, called together by the sounding of horns, mixed with the multitude in perfect nakedness, and excited their passions with obscene motions and language until the festival ended in a scene of mad revelry, in which all restraint was laid aside.” It is said that these festivals took their rise from Egypt, from whence they were brought into Greece by Metampus, where the triumph of Osiris was celebrated with secret rites, and from thence the Bacchanals drew their original; and from the feasts instituted by Isis came the orgies of Bacchus. DRUID AND HEBREW FAITHS It seems not at all improbable that the deities worshipped by the ancient Britons and the Irish, were no other then the Phallic deities of the ancient Syrians and Greeks, and also the Baal of the Hebrews. Dionysius Periegites, who lived in the time of Augustus Cæsar, states that the rites of Bacchus were celebrated in the British Isles; while Strabo, who lived in the time of Augustus and Tiberius, asserts that a much earlier writer described the worship of the Cabiri to have come originally from Phœnicia. Higgins, in his History of the Druids, says, the supreme god above the rest was called _Seodhoc_ and _Baal_. The name of Baal is found both in Wales, Gaul, and Germany, and is the same as the Hebrew Baal.