torn asunder by the Maenads of his insensate impulses ; he hath 
no safety save he himself be Bacchus! Bacchus, divine and human! 
Bacchus, begotten on Semelé of Zeus, the adulterous Lord of 
1 hunder ravishing, brutally, his virginal victim ! Bacchus, babe 
hidden from hâte in the most holy of holies, the secret of thy sire, 
in the Channel of the Star-Spate, Whereof one Serpent is thy 
Soûl! Bacchus, twy-formed, man-woman, Bacchus, whose inno¬ 
cence tames the Figer, while yet thy horns drip blood upon thy 
mouth, and sharpen the merriment of wine to the madness of 
murder! Bacchus, Thy thyrsus oozes sap; thine ivy clings to it; 
thY Lion-skin slips from thy sleek shoulders, slips from thy 
lissome ioins; drunk on delight of the godly grape, thou knowest 
no more the burden o£ the body and the vexation of the spirit. 
Corne, Bacchus, corne thou hither, corne out of the East; corne 
out of the East, astride the Ass of Priapus! Corne with thy revel 
of dancers and singers! Who followeth thee, forbearing to laugh 
and to leap? Corne, in thy name Dionysus, that maidens be mated 
to God-head! Corne, in thy name Iacchus, with thy mystical fan 
to winnow the air, each gust of thy Spirit inspiring our Soûl, that 
we bear to thee Sons in Thine Image! 
Verily and Amen! Let not the Magician forget for a single 
second what is his one sole business. His uninitiated “self” (as he 
absurdly thinks it) is a mob of wild women, hysterical from 
uncomprehended and unsated animal instinct ; they will tear 
Pentheus, the merely human king who présumés to repress them, 
into mere shreds of flesh; his own mother, Nature, the first to 
claw at his windpipe! None but Bacchus, the Holy Guardian 
Angel, hath grâce to be God to this riot of maniacs; he alone can 
transform the disorderly rabble into a pageant of harmonious 
movements, tune their hyaena howls to the symphony of a paean, 
and their reasonless rage to self-controlled rapture. It is this 
Angel whose nature is doubly double, that He may partake of 
every sacrament. He is at once a God who is drunken with the 
wine of earth, and the mammal who quaffs the Blood of God 
to purge him of mortality. He is a woman as he accepts ail 
impulses, are they not His? He is a man to stamp Himself upon 
whatever would hallow itself to Him. He wieJds the Wand, 
— 263 —-