We should be justified in expecting to find an inner connexion between this Thracian belief in immortality, which seems to have made such an impression on our Greek informants, and the religion and "enthousiastic" worship of the same people. Nor are traces lacking of a close association of the Thracian worship of Dionysos and Thracian cult of the Souls.[71\8] But if we ask why the religion of the Thracian Dionysos was attended by a belief in the independent, indestructible life of the soul, a life not confined to the period of its sojourn in the body which at present envelopes it, the answer must be sought not in the nature of the god to whom the cult was offered (that nature being, in fact, insufficiently known to us) but in the nature of the cult itself. The object of that cult--we might almost say its special task--was to exalt its worshippers to a state of "ekstasis" in which their "souls" should be forcibly delivered from the normal circle of their human and circumscribed being, and raised as pure spirits to communion with the god and his company of spirits. The true "Bakchai"[72\8]--those who were really cast into a state of religious madness--found in the rapture of these orgies a new province of experience open before them: they experience things of which they could give no account in the fully conscious light of ordinary day. There can be no doubt that the experiences and visions that their "ekstasis" gave them were regarded by them as the plainest and most literally real of facts.[73\8] The belief in the existence and life of a second self distinct from the body and separable from it was already encouraged by the "experiences" of the separate existence and independent behaviour of that self in dreams and fainting fits.[74\8] How much more strongly and vividly must this belief have been confirmed for those who in the intoxication of those delirious dances had "experienced" for themselves how the soul, freed from the body, could participate in the joys and terrors of the divine existence; not indeed the whole man, body and soul together, but the soul by itself and in separation from the body--the spiritual being invisibly living within the man. The sense of its own divinity, its eternity, which had been blindingly revealed to it in "ekstasis", might be developed by the soul into a lasting persuasion that it was indeed of a divine nature, and called to a divine life which it would enjoy for ever as soon as it was freed from the body, {265} just as it had then enjoyed it for a moment. No mere intellectual arguments could give such powerful support to a spiritualism of this kind as the personal experience itself which, even in this life supplied a foretaste of what the individual was one day to enjoy as his own for ever.