The Greek type of religion, perhaps from its very origin, certainly at the earliest period of its development in which it becomes accessible to our observation--the period to which the Homeric poems belong--had no leaning to anything resembling an excited emotional worship like that practised by the Thracians in their orgiastic cult of Dionysos. The whole movement wherever it came to their notice must have struck the Greeks of Homer as something strange and barbaric, attractive only through the interest ever attached to the unknown. And yet--the fact is certain--the thrilling tones {261} of this "enthusiastic" worship awoke an answering chord deep in the hearts of many Greeks; in spite of all that was strange they must have recognized a familiar accent in it--something that, however outlandishly expressed, could appeal to the common nature of mankind. This enthusiastic Thracian cult was in fact only a special expression, conforming to their peculiar national characteristics, of a religious impulse that is to be found all over the earth, and which breaks out in every stage of civilization. It must, indeed, answer to an instinctive need of human nature, and be rooted in the physical and psychical constitution of man. In moments of supreme exaltation man felt the presence above him and around him of mighty powers that seemed to express themselves even in his own personal life. These he was no longer to confront in pious and fearful awe, passively confined within the limits of his own separate personality: he was to break down every barrier and clasp them to his heart, making them his own in unconditional surrender. Mankind needed not to wait for that strange product of poetry and thought, Pantheism, before it could experience this instinctive need to lose its own private existence, for a moment, in the divine. There are whole races of men, not otherwise among the most distinguished members of the human family, who have a special tendency and gift for such expansion of the human consciousness into the supra-personal. They have an urgent impulse to such rapt and visionary states, and they regard the enticing or horrifying visions that visit them in those states as actual experiences of another world into which their "souls" have for a brief while been transported. In every part of the world there are peoples who regard such ecstatic exaltation as the only true religious act, the only way of intercourse with the spirit-world available to man, and base their religious performances principally upon such ceremonial as experience has shown to be most capable of inducing the ecstasies and visions. The means most commonly adopted by such peoples to produce the desired intensity and stimulation of feeling is a violently excited dance prolonged to the point of exhaustion, in the darkness of night, to the accompaniment of tumultuous music. Sometimes whole companies of the people induce in themselves a state