But it is equally clear and certain that the Dionysos of Greek worship and of the drama was not a babe in the cradle.  He was a goodly youth in the first bloom of manhood, with the down upon his cheek, the time when, Homer says, “youth is most gracious.”  This is the Dionysos that we know in statuary, the fair, dreamy youth sunk in reverie; this is the Dionysos whom Pentheus despised and insulted because of his young beauty like a woman’s.  But how could such a Dionysos arise out of a rite of birth?  He could not, and he did not.  The Dithyramb is also the song of the second or new birth, the Dithyrambos is the twice-born.

This the Greeks themselves knew.  By a false etymology they explained the word Dithyrambos as meaning “He of the double door,” their word thyra being the same as our door.  They were quite mistaken; Dithyrambos, modern philology tells us, is the Divine Leaper, Dancer, and Lifegiver.  But their false etymology is important to us, because it shows that they believed the Dithyrambos was the twice-born.  Dionysos was born, they fabled, once of his mother, like all men, once of his father’s thigh, like no man.

But if the Dithyrambos, the young Dionysos, like the Bull-God, the Tree-God, arises from a dromenon, a rite, what is the rite of second birth from which it arises?

* * * * *

We look in vain among our village customs.  If ever rite of second birth existed, it is dead and buried.  We turn to anthropology for help, and find this, the rite of the second birth, widespread, universal, over half the savage world.

With the savage, to be twice born is the rule, not the exception.  By his first birth he comes into the world, by his second he is born into his tribe.  At his first birth he belongs to his mother and the women-folk; at his second he becomes a full-fledged man and passes into the society of the warriors of his tribe.  This second birth is a little difficult for us to realize.  A boy with us passes very gradually from childhood to manhood, there is no definite moment when he suddenly emerges as a man.  Little by little as his education advances he is admitted to the social privileges of the circle in which he is born.  He goes to school, enters a workshop or a university, and finally adopts a trade or a profession.  In the case of girls, in whose upbringing primitive savagery is apt to linger, there is still, in certain social strata a ceremony known as Coming Out.  A girl’s dress is suddenly lengthened, her hair is put up, she is allowed to wear jewels, she kisses her sovereign’s hand, a dance is given in her honour; abruptly, from her seclusion in the cocoon state of the schoolroom, she emerges full-blown into society.  But the custom, with its half-realized savagery, is already dying, and with boys it does not obtain at all.  Both sexes share, of course, the religious rite of Confirmation.