I {304}have given at such length an account of this singular festival, partly because it sheds light upon much that has gone before, but partly also because it helps to explain many elements in the worship of the great corn- and wine-gods. One point of cardinal importance to be noticed here is that the officiating priest, who was at one time also both god and victim, is called Potraj like the deity whom he represents. So, too, in Phrygia the combined Attis-victim and Attis-priest bore the name of Attis; and so in Egypt the annual Osiris-offering bore the name of Osiris, whom he represented. If I am right, therefore, in the analogy of the two feasts Dionysus was in his origin a corn-god, and later a vine-god, annually slain and buried in order that his blood might fertilise the field or the vineyard. In the Homeric period, he was still a general god of cultivation: only later did he become distinctively the grape-god and wine-deity. There was originally, I believe, a Dionysus in every village; and this divine victim was annually offered, himself to himself, with orgiastic rites like those of Potraj. Mr. Laurence Gomme has already in part pointed out this equation of the Hellenic and the Indian custom. The earliest form of Dionysus-worship, on this hypothesis, would be the one which survived in Chios and Tenedos, where a living human being was orgiastically torn to pieces at the feast of Dionysus. At Orchomenus, the human victim was by custom a woman of the family of the Oleiæ (so that there were women Dionysi): at the annual festival, the priest of Dionysus pursued these women with a drawn sword, and if he caught one, he had the right to slay her. (This is the sacred-chance victim.) In other places, the ceremony had been altered in historical times; thus at Potnice, in Boeotia, it was once the custom to slay a child as Dionysus; but later on, a goat, which was identified with the god, was substituted for the original human victim. The equivalence of the animal victim with the human god is shown by the fact that at Tenedos the newborn {305}calf sacrificed to Dionysus--or _as_ Dionysus--was shod in buskins, while the mother cow was tended like a woman in childbed. Elsewhere we find other orgiastic rites still more closely resembling the Indian pattern. Among the Cretans, a Dionysus was sacrificed biennially under the form of a bull; and the worshippers tore the living animal to pieces wildly with their teeth. Indeed, says Mr. Frazer, the rending and devouring of live bulls and calves seems to have been a regular feature of the Dionysiac rites. In some cities, again, the animal that took the place of the human victim was a kid. When the followers of Dionysus tore in pieces a live goat and drank its blood, they believed they were devouring the actual body and blood of the god. _This eating and drinking the god is an important point_, which will detain us again at a later stage of our enquiry.