So far the formula for Greek theology has been, ‘Man makes the gods in his own image.’ Mythological development has proceeded on lines perfectly normal, natural, intelligible. In so far as we understand humanity we can predicate divinity. The gods are found to be merely magnified men, on the whole perhaps better but with frequent lapses into worse, _quot homines tot sententiae, quot sententiae tot dei_. As man grew more civilized, his image, mirrored in the gods, grew more beautiful and _pari passu_ the worship he offered to these gods advanced from ‘aversion’ (ἀποτροπή) to ‘tendance’ (θεραπεία). But all along we have been conscious that something was lacking, that even these exquisite presentations of the Nymphs and the Graces, the Mother and the Daughter, are really rather human than divine, that their ritual, whether of ignorant and cruel ‘aversion’ or of genial ‘tendance,’ was scarcely in our sense religious. These perfect Olympians and even these gracious Earth-goddesses are not really Lords over man’s life who made them, they are not even ghosts to beckon and threaten, they are lovely dreams, they are playthings of his happy childhood, and when full-grown he comes to face realities, from kindly sentiment he lets them lie unburied in the lumber-room of his life. Just when Apollo, Artemis, Athene, nay even Zeus himself, were losing touch with life and reality, fading and dying of their own luminous perfection, there came into Greece a new religious impulse, an impulse really religious, the mysticism that is embodied for us in the two names Dionysos and Orpheus. The object of the chapters that follow is to try and seize, with as much precision as may be, the gist of this mysticism. Dionysos is a difficult god to understand. In the end it is only the mystic who penetrates the secrets of mysticism. It is therefore to poets and philosophers that we must finally look for help, and even with this help each man is in the matter of mysticism peculiarly the measure of his own understanding. But this ultimate inevitable vagueness makes it the more imperative that the few certain truths that can be made out about the religion of Dionysos should be firmly established and plainly set forth. DIONYSOS AN IMMIGRANT THRACIAN. First it is certain beyond question that Dionysos was a late-comer into Greek religion, an immigrant god, and that he came from that home of spiritual impulse, the North. These three propositions are so intimately connected that they may conveniently be dealt with together.