These latter, of which a few specimens survive, were exotic plants compared to the indigenous growth of the American sacred dramas. So essential, indeed had these become to the native notions of worship of any sort, that the Christian missionaries were fain to compromise the situation, and permit them to remain, merely changing the names of the heathen gods to those of Christian saints, and modifying where necessary the wording of the older text and its heathen _scenario_. The extreme of these festal rejoicings is seen in the orgiastic ceremonies so widely prevalent in early cults, the Bacchanalia, the Saturnalia, the “Witches’ Sabbath” of the Middle Ages, and the like. They are nowise peculiar to primitive religions, although in them they hold a more conspicuous place. Within a year, the “angel-dancers” of Hoboken, New Jersey, have reproduced them in their true original colours, and they are always ready to crop out under the influence of the proper stimuli to the religious emotions. In their earliest forms, they are far from deserving the odium which attached to them later. The Bacchantes of Greece were, at first, not a rout of dissolute women, but an inspired train of devout virgins and chaste matrons. No man was permitted in the ranks under pain of death. This was true also in Rome, in the Orient, and in many tribes of America. It was a later and an evil innovation which sanctioned the unrestrained mingling of the sexes in these wild processions of intoxicated fanatics. Their intoxication was, however, with the divine spirit, not the purple grape-juice. They were, as the Greeks said, “theoleptic,” possessed or infuriated with the maddening joy of the gods, drunk with the celestial ambrosia. To our cold observation, they were in hysterical mania, with minds disordered by religious excitement, worked up to a high contagious pitch through collective suggestion, following crazily the disordered fancies of their sub-conscious selves, mistaking them for the inspiration of divine emanations. _3. The Sacrifice._—In the custom of offering to the divine visitant a portion of the food and drink, we discover the origin of sacrifice. The word has acquired sad associations, seen in our common expression “to make a sacrifice,” which signifies some painful self-surrender. This was foreign to its original meaning. The sacrifice at first was a free-will offering, a pleasing and grateful recognition of the kindness of the deity. The first-fruits, the young kid, the earliest ear of corn to mature, were offered to the beneficent being who had sent them for the good of man. It was the willing acknowledgment we pay to a kind friend. The earliest species of sacrifice is in the nature of a thank-offering. They were of the class which has been termed “honorific,” and were little more than “meals offered to the deity.”[226]