May joyous Bacchus send increase of fruit,For which cause it is forbidden to such as worship Osiris, either to destroy a fruit-tree or to stop up a well.
The chaste autumnal light, to all my trees.
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And that therefore he is one and the same with
Bacchus, who should better know than yourself, Dame
Clea, who are not only president of the Delphic prophetesses, but have been also, in right of both your parents, devoted to the Osiriac rites? And if, for the sake of
others, we shall think ourselves obliged to lay down testimonies for the proof of our present assertion, we shall
notwithstanding remit those secrets that must not be revealed to their proper place. But now the things which
the priests do publicly at the interment of the Apis,
when they carry his body on a raft to be buried, do nothing differ from the procession of Bacchus. For they hang
about them the skins of hinds, and carry branches in their
hands, and use the same kind of shoutings and gesticulations that the ecstatics do at the inspired dances of Bacchus. For which reason also many of the Greeks make
statues of Dionysos Tauromorphos (or Bacchus in the form
of a bull). And the Elean women, in their ordinary form
of prayer, beseech the God to come to them with his ox's
foot. The Argives also have a Bacchus named Bougenes
(or ox-gotten); and they call him up out of the waters by
sounding of trumpets, flinging a young lamb into the
abyss for him that keeps the door there; and these trumpets
[p. 96]
they hide within their thyrsi (or green boughs), as
Socrates, in his Treatise of Rituals, relates. Likewise the
tales about the Titans, and what they call the Mystic
Night, have a strange agreement with what they tell us of
the discerptions, resurrections, and regenerations of Osiris;
as also what relates to their sepulchres. For not only the
Egyptians (as hath been already spoken) do show in many
several places the chests in which Osiris lies; but the Delphians also believe that the relics of Bacchus are laid up
with them just by the oracle-place; and the Hosii (or holy
men) perform a secret sacrifice within the temple of Apollo,
when the Thyiades rouse the God of the fan (as they call
him). Now that the Greeks do not esteem Bacchus as the
lord and president of wine only, but also of the whole
humid nature, Pindar alone is a sufficient witness, when
he saith,
Plutarch. Plutarch's Morals. Translated from the Greek by several hands. Corrected and revised by. William W. Goodwin, PH. D. Boston. Little, Brown, and Company. Cambridge. Press Of John Wilson and son. 1874. 4.
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