To make this transformation of their nature outwardly manifest, the participants in the dance-festival wear strange dress: they resemble in their appearance the members of the wild _thiasos_ of the god;[34\8] the horns they set on their heads recall the horned, bull-shaped god himself, etc.[35\8] The whole might be called a religious drama, since {259} everything is carefully arranged so as to suggest to the imagination the actual presence of the mysterious figures from the spirit world. At the same time, it is something more than mere drama, for it can hardly be doubted that the players themselves were possessed by the illusion of living the life of a strange person. The awe-inspiring darkness of night, the music, especially that of the Phrygian flute, to which the Greeks attributed the power of making its hearers "full of the god",[36\8] the vertiginous whirl of the dance--all these may very well, in suitably disposed natures,[37\8] have really led to a state of visionary exaltation in which the inspired person saw all external objects in accordance with his fancy and imagination. Intoxicating drinks, to which the Thracians were addicted, may have increased the excitement;[38\8] perhaps they even used the fumes derived from certain seeds, with which the Scythians and Massagetai knew how to intoxicate themselves.[39\8] We all know how even to day in the East the smoke of hashish may make men visionaries and excite religious raptures[40\8] in which the whole of nature is transformed for the enthralled dreamer. "Only when thus possessed did the Bakchai drink milk and honey out of the rivers; their power ceased when they came to themselves again," says Plato.[41\8] For them the earth flowed with milk and honey, and the air was filled with the sweet odours of Syria.[42\8] Hallucination was accompanied by a state of feeling in which pain itself was only an added stimulus to sensation or in which the visionary became completely insensible to pain, as is not unusual in such states of exaltation.[43\8]