I do not desire to dwell too long upon any one deity, or rather class of deities; therefore I will say briefly here that when Dionysus became the annual or biennial vine-god victim, it was inevitable that his worshippers should have seen his resurrection and embodiment in the vine, and should have regarded the wine it yielded as the blood of the god. In this case, the identification was particularly natural, for could not every worshipper feel the god in the wine? and did not the divine spirit within it inspire and intoxicate him? To be “full of the god” was the natural expression for the resulting exhilaration; the cult of the wine-spirit is thus one of those which stands on the surest and most intimate personal basis. The death and resurrection of Dionysus are accordingly a physical reality. The god is annually killed in the flesh, as man, bull, or goat; and he rises again in the vine, to give his blood once more for the good of his votaries. Moreover, he may be used as a fertiliser for many other trees; and so we find Dionysus has many functions. He is variously adored as Dionysus of the tree, and more particularly {306}of the fruit-bearing fig and apple. His image, like those of other tree-gods already encountered, was often an upright post, without arms, but draped (like the _ashera_) in a mantle, and with a bearded mask to represent the head, while green boughs projecting from it marked his vegetable character. He was the patron of cultivated trees; prayers were offered to him to make trees grow; he was honoured by fruit-growers, who set up an image of him, in the shape of a natural tree-stump, in the midst of their orchards. (Compare that last degraded and utilitarian relic, the modern scarecrow.) For other equally interesting facts, I would refer the reader once more to Mr. Frazer, whose rich store I must not further rifle. It seems to me obvious from his collection of facts that there was originally everywhere a separate local Dionysus, an annual man-god or woman-god victim (for which a beast was later substituted), and that only slowly did the worship of the individual Dionysi pass into the general worship of one great idealised god Dionysus. The great gods are at first classes, not individuals.