But there is a deeper significance to the Ivy, even as there is a deeper and more solemn mystery and might around the primeval Bacchus. To us he is merely the wine-god, but to the ancient Initiated in the orgies and mysteries he was--as were each of the gods in their turn--the central divinity, the lord of light, and the giver of life. For, as it was concisely said in the spirit of pantheistic abstraction: 'Nothing can be imagined which is not an image of God;' so it was not possible to conceive a divinity who was not in himself all the other divinities. Thus we find that Bacchus was male, female, and at the same time an absolute ONE without regard to sex; or, in other words, he was the ancient trinity. 'Tibi enim inconsumpta juventus. Tu puer aeternus, tu formosissimus alto Conspiceris coelo, tibi, cum sine cornibus adstas Virgineum caput est.' OVID, _Met._ l. 4. For, as the great mystery of all religion, or of all being, is _life_, and as life, like blood, is most aptly typified by reviving and inspiring wine, it was not wonderful that renewed strength, generation, and birth should gather around the incarnation of the vine, and that the _cup_ should become the holiest of symbols. Like the ark, the chest or coffer, the egg, and a thousand other receptive or _containing_ objects, the cup appeared to the ancient Initiated as a womb, or as the earth, taking in and giving forth life. It was in this spirit that NONNUS, in the fifth century, wrote The Dyonisiacs, a vast poem on Bacchus, in forty-eight books; 'a magnificent assemblage of the emblematical legends of Egypt,' and in which modern criticism has discovered a creative grandeur, a beautiful wildness of fancy, and a romantic spirit, such as were combined in no other one poem of antiquity. Bacchus was thus the lord of life, and that in a vividly _real_ sense--the sense of intoxication, of keenly thrilling pleasure, of wild delight, and headlong rushing joy. He was fabled to have given men the grape and wine--but to the Initiated of the mystery and orgie there was higher and more intoxicating wine than that of the grape--the wine of wild inspiration, drawn from the keenest relish of beauty, of nature, of knowledge, and of love. Drunk with this wine of the soul, the Moenad and Bacchante rushed forth into lonely forests, amid rocks, by silent lake, and streamlet lone, and cried in frantic joy, bewildered with passion, to the Great Parent, or shouted in praise: 'Bacche, Evoe, Bacche!'