purpose of it all is vividly expressed by the {263} most fearless of all the mystics, Jelaleddin Rumi, in the words: "He that knows the power of the dance dwells in God; for he has learnt that Love can slay.[61\8] Allah hu! . . ." § 4 Wherever a cultus of this kind, making its aim and object the evocation of ecstatic raptures, has taken root--whether in whole races of men or in religious communities--there we find in close alliance with it, whether as cause or effect or both, a peculiarly vital belief in the life and power of the soul of man after its separation from the body. Our comparative glance over the analogous phenomena of other lands has shown us that the exalted worship offered to "Dionysos" among the Thracians was only a single variety of a method, familiar to more than half the human race, of getting into touch with the divine by a religious "enthousiasmos". We therefore expect to find among the Thracians a specially strong and well-developed belief in the life of the "soul". And in fact we find Herodotos telling us of a Thracian tribe, the Getai, whose belief "made men immortal".[62\8] They had only one god, Zalmoxis by name.[63\8] To this god, who dwelt in a cavernous mountain, all the dead of their race, they believed, would one day be gathered and have immortal life.[64\8] The same belief was held by other Thracian tribes, too.[65\8] This creed seems to have had in view the "transplantation"[66\8] of the dead to a blessed life in the hereafter. But, it would seem, this transplantation was not perhaps for ever. We hear of the belief that the dead would "return"[67\8] from the other world; and that this idea existed among the Getai is implied (though the narrator does not clearly understand this) by the absurd pragmatizing fable which Herodotos got from the Greek settlers on the Hellespont and the Pontos.[68\8] In this story (as often in later accounts too Zalmoxis is actually a slave and pupil of Pythagoras of Samos. Whoever invented this fairy-tale was led to it by observing the close relationship between the Pythagorean doctrine of the soul and the Thracian belief. In the same way later observers of the same fact reversed the positions and made Pythagoras the pupil of the Thracian.[69\8] In any case the fact cannot to be doubted that in Thrace people thought they had found again the special doctrine of Pythagoras as to the _transmigration_ of souls. The belief in the "return" of the soul must be interpreted as meaning that the souls of the dead return to life in new bodies and resume their life on earth, to this extent being {264} "immortal". Only so interpreted could it have been held for a moment without coming into conflict with obvious appearances. An allusion in Euripides seems to regard as Thracian such a belief in a recurrent incarnation of the soul.[70\8]