On the whole, then, though I do not deny that the later Greeks envisaged Dionysus as a single supreme god of vegetation, nor that many abstract ideas were finally fathered upon the worship--especially those which identified the death and resurrection of the god with the annual winter sleep and spring revival--I maintain that in his origin the Dionysus was nothing more than the annual corn-victim, afterwards extended into the tree and vine victim, from whose grave sprang the pomegranate, that blood-red fruit, and whose life-juice was expressed as the god-giving wine. At first a yearly human victim, he was afterwards personated {308}by a goat or a bull; and was therefore represented in art as a bull, or a bull-horned man. Gradually identified with vegetation in general, he was regarded at last as the Flowery Dionysus, the Fig Dionysus, or even, like Attis, the god of the pine-tree. But all these, I believe, were later syncretic additions; and I consider that in such primitive forms as the orgiastic crop-god of the Indian corn-festival we get the prime original of the Hellenic vine-deity. I pass on to Osiris, in his secondary or acquired character as corn-god. I have already expressed the belief, in which I am backed up by Mr. Loftie, that the original Osiris was a real historical early king of This by Abydos. But in the later Egyptian religion, after mystic ideas had begun to be evolved, he came to be regarded as the god of the dead, and every mummy or every justified soul was looked upon as an Osiris. Moreover, it seems probable that in Egypt the name of Osiris was also fitted to the annual slain corn-victim or corn-god. Thus all over Egypt there were many duplicates of Osiris; notably at Busiris, where the name was attached to an early tomb like the one at Abydos. This identification of the new-made god with the historic ancestor, the dead king, or the tribal deity is quite habitual; it is parallel to the identification of the officiating Potraj with the Potraj god, of the Attis-priest with Attis, of the Dionysus-victim with the son of Zeus: and it will meet us hereafter in savage parallels. Let us look at the evidence.