True to his forty years of scholarship on the subject, Ruck suggests that both Pythagoras and Euripides entered into “deified states of ecstasy” in their respective chambers through the “Dionysian pathway” of sacred drugs. He speculates that “the mystic rites celebrated in the cave” of Euripides, in particular, “probably involved the tragedian and his troupe of actors in a subterranean frenzy in which they communed with the god [Dionysus], who imbued their tragedian leader with his divine persona in a Eucharistic liturgy attended by an elite assemblage of his female bacchanalian devotees.”
