To the Greeks, Dionysus represented the demonic, chaotic side of nature, which can be neither tamed nor restrained by civilization.6 In the wild cultic celebrations held in his honor, all borders were dissolved—between the sexes, between classes, between nature and culture, and between man and the gods. “The participators in these dance festivals intentionally induced in themselves a sort of mania, an extraordinary exaltation of their being,” wrote the philologist Erwin Rohde. “This excessive stimulation of the senses, going even as far as hallucination, was brought about, in those who were susceptible to their influence, by the delirious whirl of the dance, the music and the darkness, and all the other circumstances of this tumultuous worship.”7 At the climax of the event, devoted followers of Dionysus entered a kind of trance in which they lost all sense of self, becoming “empty vessels” into which the essence of the god could enter.8 Having attained a mystical union with the god, in body and spirit, they experienced a state they called eudaemonia—a joy of the divine, an indescribable feeling of grace and elevation. The “sacred insanity” of Dionysus spread among the celebrants like wildfire, turning them into a single body, swaying, turbulent, possessed by an ecstatic spirit.9