from eating seeds of pomegranates at the festival of the Thesmophoria.(52) According to some, the severed limbs of Dionysus were pieced together, at the command of Zeus, by Apollo, who buried them on Parnassus.(53) The grave of Dionysus was shewn in the Delphic temple beside a golden statue of Apollo.(54) However, according to another account, the grave of Dionysus was at Thebes, where he is said to have been torn in pieces.(55) Thus far the resurrection of the slain god is not mentioned, but in other versions of the myth it is variously related. According to one version, which represented Dionysus as a son of Zeus and Demeter, his mother pieced together his mangled limbs and made him young again.(56) In others it is simply said that shortly after his burial he rose from the dead and ascended up to heaven;(57) or that Zeus raised him up as he lay mortally wounded;(58) or that Zeus swallowed the heart of Dionysus and then begat him afresh by Semele,(59) who in the common legend figures as mother of Dionysus. Or, again, the heart was pounded up and given in a portion to Semele, who thereby conceived him.(60) Turning from the myth to the ritual, we find that the Cretans celebrated a biennial(61) festival at which the passion of Dionysus was represented in every detail. All that he had done or suffered in his last moments was enacted before the eyes of his worshippers, who tore a live bull to pieces with their teeth and roamed the woods with frantic shouts. In front of them was carried a casket supposed to contain the sacred heart of Dionysus, and to the wild music of flutes and cymbals they mimicked the rattles by which the infant god had been lured to his doom.(62) Where the resurrection formed part of the myth, it also was acted at the rites,(63) and it even appears that a general doctrine of resurrection, or at least of immortality, was inculcated on the worshippers; for Plutarch, writing to console his wife on the death of their infant daughter, comforts her with the thought of the immortality of the soul as taught by tradition and revealed in the mysteries of Dionysus.(64) A different form of the myth of the death and resurrection of Dionysus is that he descended into Hades to bring up his mother Semele from the dead.(65) The local Argive tradition was that he went down through the Alcyonian lake; and his return from the lower world, in other words his resurrection, was annually celebrated on the spot by the Argives, who summoned him from the water by trumpet blasts, while they threw a lamb into the lake as an offering to the warder of the dead.(66) Whether this was a spring festival does not appear, but the Lydians certainly celebrated the advent of Dionysus in spring; the god was supposed to bring the season with him.(67) Deities of vegetation, who are supposed to pass a certain portion of each year under ground, naturally come to be regarded as gods of the lower world or of the dead. Both Dionysus and Osiris were so conceived.(68)