When incorporated into traditional ritual enactments, Entheogens can serve the purpose of confirming societal norms or group identities through communal experience of shared metaphysical expectations. The supreme gift of the deity of intoxication was his patronage of the theater. In the 6th century under the tyrant Pisistratus, what had begun as a mushroom cult celebrated in the rural mountain villages was imported into the city of Athens. It eventually developed into the theatrical festivals of comedy and tragedy, which made the city into the cultural icon that has assured its role as the fountainhead of the Classical tradition. The hallucinatory realities of the stage enactments were a prime instrument in indoctrinating the populace into the lore of their mythological heritage. Throughout the several days of day-long performances, the audience drank a specially doctored wine, facilitating the pretense of thespian impersonation and blurring the boundaries of imagined and real. Of the two types of performances, tragedies enacted the motif of the necessary demise of the primitive as fundament for the civilized, essentially the theme of the bacchant revel. The comedies, on the other hand, took a different view. They held a finger up to the world and imagined a paradise where baser instincts had their way. Reality could be molded with the fickleness of the phallus and the inexhaustible metaphors it traditionally inspires. Mediating between these two extremes was still another genre of the theater called the satyr play after the costuming of its dancers. Here the theme was the stories of tragedy, but treated as parody with comic intent. Within the context of the entire cycle of Dionysian events, the intoxication served to reinforce societal norms and cultural identity, but the aggressive rowdiness of drunken symposiasts also roused suspicion of seditious intent aimed at the established political authority.