Chapter X: The Orphics (1)

The earliest authority who mentions Orphic sects and their practices is Herodotos (ii, 81), who calls attention to the correspondence between certain sacerdotal and ascetic ordinances of the Egyptian priesthood, and the "Orphic and Bacchic" mysteries. The latter, he says, are really Egyptian and Pythagorean, or in other words they were founded by Pythagoras or Pythagoreans upon Egyptian models; and thus, in the opinion of the historian, they cannot have come into existence before the last decade of the sixth century. Herodotos then, either in Athens or elsewhere, had heard during his journeys of certain private societies who by calling themselves after the name of Orpheus, the prototype of Thracian song so well known to legend, recognized the origin of their peculiar cult and creed in the mountains of Thrace, and did honour to Bakchos the Thracian god. The fact that the Greek Orphics did indeed worship Dionysos, the lord of life and death, before all other gods, is clearly shown by the remains of the theological poems that originated in their midst. Orpheus himself, as founder of the Orphic sect, is actually said to have been the founder also of the Dionysiac initiation-mysteries.[1\10]

This gathering-together in the name of Orpheus for the purpose of offering a special worship to Dionysos was, then, the work of _sects_ who, in private association, practised a cult which the public and official worship of the state either did not know of or disdained. There were many such associations, and of very varied character, which kept themselves aloof from the organized religion of the community, and were tolerated by the state.[2\10] As a rule, they were "foreign gods"[3\10] who were thus worshipped; and generally by foreigners who thus kept up the special worship of their own homes, though they did not always exclude natives of their adopted country. Now, Dionysos, the god of the Orphic sects, had for a long time ceased to be a foreigner in Greek countries; since his arrival from Thrace he had been refined and matured under the humanizing sun of Greece, until he had become a Greek god, and a worthy associate of the Greek Olympos. It is possible, however, that in this process, the old Thracian god may have seemed to his original worshippers to have lost his real {336} character, and they may on that account have joined together to offer, in separation from the official worship, a special cult in which all the old ideas of the national religion should be preserved unaltered. A secondary wave of influence thus broke upon the long-since-Hellenized god, the Thracian Dionysos in Greece, and _this_ wave the official worship either had not the power or lacked the will to assimilate. It was therefore left to special sects who honoured the god after their own private laws. Whether indeed they were _Thracians_ who, as in the similar case of the unmodified worship of Bendis,[4\10] or Kotytto, thus reinstituted their ancient and national worship of Dionysos in Greek countries, we cannot with certainty tell; but this special cult would certainly not have achieved the importance it did in _Greek_ life if it had not been joined by Greek adherents brought up in the native conceptions of Greek piety, who under the name of "Orphics" once more adapted the Thracian god to Greek modes of thought--though this new adaptation differed from the previous assimilation of the god by the official worship of the state. We have no reason for believing that Orphic sects were formed in Greek states before the second half of the sixth century,[5\10] that critical age of transition when in so many places primitive and mythological modes of thought were developing into a _theosophy_, which in its turn was making an effort to become a philosophy. The Orphic religious poetry is itself clearly marked by this effort--for in Orphism it never became more than an effort and never succeeded in reaching its goal.

The exact point of origin of this combined movement of religion and theosophy, the various steps and manner of its development remain hidden from us. Athens was a centre of Orphism; it does not therefore follow that Orphism had its origin there, any more than had the multifarious tendencies and activities in art, poetry, and science that at about the same period flowed together, and as though driven by an unseen intellectual current, found their meeting place at Athens. Onomakritos, we are told, the giver of oracles in the court of Peisistratos "founded the secret worship of Dionysos".[6\10] This appears to refer to the first founding of an Orphic sect at Athens; and we meet with the name of Onomakritos among the authors of Orphic poems. But the real authorship of these poems is far more often ascribed to certain men of Southern Italy and Sicily, who can be more or less clearly connected[7\10] with the Pythagorean societies which were flourishing in those districts about the last decades of the sixth and the first of the fifth centuries. {337}

It seems certain that in Southern Italy at that time, Orphic societies were already in existence--for whom else can these writers have intended their "Orphic" poems? In any case we must take it as certain that the correspondence of Orphic and Pythagorean doctrine on the subject of the soul is not purely accidental. Did Pythagoras when he came to Italy (about 532) find Orphic societies already settled in Kroton and Metapontum, and did he associate himself with their ideas? Or did the "Orphic" sectaries (as Herodotos imagined[8\10]) owe their inspiration to Pythagoras and his disciples? The various cross-currents of reciprocal influence can no longer be disentangled by us, but if the Pythagoreans were the sole creditors in the bargain we should undoubtedly find the whole body of Orphic doctrine thoroughly permeated with conceptions that belong exclusively to the Pythagorean school. In the wreckage of the Orphic poems, however, except for a few negligible traces of the Pythagorean mystic theory of numbers,[9\10] we find nothing that must necessarily have been derived by the Orphics from Pythagorean sources.[10\10] Least of all did they need to derive the doctrine of the migration of souls and its application from this source. It is possible, therefore, that it was the independently developed Orphic doctrine which exerted an influence upon Pythogoras and his adherents in Southern Italy; just as it was a ready-made Orphic teaching (and that, too, perhaps, brought from Southern Italy) with which Onomakritos, the founder of the Orphic sects at Athens, associated himself--about the same time as Pythagoras' similar action in Kroton. It is hardly possible to interpret in any other way the various relations of the Orphics with each other when we learn that at the court of the Peisistratids, in addition to Onomakritos, two other men who had arrived from Southern Italy were active and were counted among the earliest writers of Orphic poems.[11\10]

§ 2

The Orphics wherever we meet with them in Greek countries always appear as members of a private cult-society who are held together by a specially organized and individual mode of worship. The old Thracian worship of Dionysos in its straining after the infinite conducted its revels under the open sky of night, seeking out deserted mountain-sides and forests where it was farthest from civilization and closest to unspoiled and untrammelled nature. How this cult may have accommodated itself to the narrow limitations of ordinary {338} city-life, it is hard to imagine;[12\10] though it is natural to suppose that much of the extravagance that was literal and actual enough in the old northern festival of night was represented in the milder worship of Greece by mere symbol. We have less difficulty in discovering the side of their religious activity which the Orphics, apart from the private worship of the conventicle, revealed to the outer world of the profane. Orpheus himself in the tradition had been not merely the inspired singer but the seer, the magically endowed physician and purification-priest as well,[13\10] and the Orphics, as his followers, were active, too, in all these directions.[14\10] In the composition of Greek Orphism the kathartic ideas which had been evolved on Greek soil were combined in a not unnatural alliance with the old Thracian worship of Dionysos. The Orphic priests of purification were preferred to others of their kind by many religious people.[15\10] But among the inner circles of Orphism the sacerdotal activities of purification and the removal of daimonic hindrances, which were by no means given up, tended rather to produce deeper and broader ideas of purity and of release from the earthly and the transitory. In some such way was evolved that asceticism which in close combination with the Thracian worship of Dionysos gave the peculiar tone to the faith and temperament of the sectaries and gave to their lives their special direction.

The Orphic sect had a fixed and definite set of doctrines; this alone sufficed to distinguish it both from the official worships of the state, and from all other cult-associations of the time. The reduction of belief to distinct doctrinal formulæ may have done more than anything else to make Orphism a _society_ of believers--none of the other _theologi_ of the time, Epimenides, Pherekydes, etc., accomplished as much. Without its fundamental religious doctrine Orphism in Greece is inconceivable; according to Aristotle the "doctrines" of Orpheus were put into poetical form by the founder of the Orphic sect in Athens, Onomakritos.[16\10] The uncertain accounts given us by the later authorities do not allow us to make out quite clearly[17\10] what was the extent of Onomakritos' work in the formation or collection of Orphic doctrinal poetry. What is important is the fact that he is distinctly named as the author of the poem called "Initiations".[18\10] This poem must have been one of the basic, and in the strictest sense "religious", writings of the sect; a poem of this character may very well have had for its central incident the dismemberment of the god at the hands of the Titans--a story which Onomakritos is said to have put into verse.[19\10] {339}

The religious beliefs and worship of the sect were founded upon the detailed instructions of certain very numerous writings dealing with matters of ritual and theology. These claimed the authority of religious inspiration,[20\10] and were as a whole supposed to be the work of the primitive Thracian bard, Orpheus, himself. The anonymity which concealed the identity of the real authors of these poems was not, however, very thoroughly preserved; even towards the end of the fourth century there were those who claimed to be able to give with certainty the names of the original authors of the various poems. Strictly canonical authority, such as would at once have reduced to silence every conflicting view or statement, never seems to have belonged to any of these writings. In particular, there were several "Theogonies"[21\10]--poems which attempted to give expression to the fundamental ideas of Orphic speculation on religious subjects--and in spite of much harmony in general effect they differed considerably from each other in particular mode of expression. They represented ever-renewed and increasingly elaborate attempts to construct a connected doctrinal system for Orphism. With unmistakable allusion to the oldest Greek theological system--that which had been committed to writing in the Hesiodic poem--these Orphic Theogonies described the origin and development of the world from obscure primordial impulses to the clear and distinct variety-in-unity of the organized kosmos, and it described it as the history of a long series of divine powers and figures which issue from each other (each new one overcoming the last) and succeed each other in the task of building and organizing the world until they have absorbed the whole universe into themselves in order to bring it forth anew, animated with one spirit and, with all its infinite variety, a unity. These gods are certainly no longer deities of the familiar Greek type. Not merely the new gods evolved by the creative fancy of Orphism--creatures which had almost entirely lost all distinct and sensible outline under the accumulation of symbolical meaning--but even the figures actually borrowed from the Greek world of divinities are turned into little more than mere personified abstractions. Who would recognize the Zeus of Homer in the Orphic Zeus who after he has devoured the World-God and "taken unto himself the power of Erikapaios",[22\10] has become himself the Universe and the Whole? "Zeus the Beginning, Zeus the Middle, in Zeus all things are completed."[23\10] The concept here so stretches the personality that it threatens to break it down altogether; the outlines of the individual figures are {340} lost and are merged into an intentional "confusion of deities".[24\10]

Still, the mythical envelope was never quite given up; these poets could not do without it altogether. Their gods did indeed strive to become pure abstractions but they were never quite successful in throwing off all traces of individuality and the limitations of form and matter: the concept never quite broke through the veil of mythology. The poets of the Orphic Theogonies vied with one another in their attempts to make the half-seen and half-conceived accessible alike to the imagination and the reason; and in succession gave varying expression to the same fundamental conceptions until finality was reached as it seems in a poem whose contents are better known to us than the others from quotations made from it by Neoplatonic writers--the Theogonical poem of the four-and-twenty Rhapsodies. Into this poem was poured all the traditional material of mythological and symbolical doctrine, and in it such doctrine achieved its final expression.[25\10]

§ 3

This combination of religion and quasi-philosophical speculation was a distinguishing feature of the Orphics and of Orphic literature. Religion only entered into their Theogonical poetry in so far as the ethical personalities of the divinities therein described had not entirely faded away into transparent allegories.[26\10] It was abstract speculation alone which really prevailed there, little respect being paid to religion; and as a result a much greater licence was given to speculative construction.

This abstract speculation, however, reached its climax in a religious narrative of the first importance for the beliefs and cult of the sect. At the end of the series of genealogically connected deities came the son of Zeus and Persephone, Dionysos, who was also given the name of the underworld deity Zagreus.[27\10] To him, even in infancy, was entrusted the rule of the world by Zeus. But the wicked Titans, urged on by Hera, approached him by a stratagem. They were the enemies of Zeus, and had already been overthrown by Ouranos,[28\10] but had, it seems, been let loose again by Zeus from Tartaros. They made Dionysos trust them by giving him presents, and while he was looking at his own image in a mirror[29\10] that they had given him, they fell upon him. He tried to escape them by repeated transformations of shape; finally, in the form of a bull,[30\10] he was at last overcome and his body torn to pieces which his savage foes thereupon devoured. The heart alone {341} was rescued by Athene, and she brought it to Zeus who swallowed it. From Zeus there sprang the "new Dionysos", the son of Zeus and Semele, in whom Zagreus came to life again.

The myth of the dismemberment of Zagreus by the Titans was already put into verse by Onomakritos;[31\10] it continued to be the culminating point of the doctrinal poetry of the Orphics. It occurred not only in the Rhapsodies,[32\10] but in other versions of the Orphic legend composed in complete independence of these.[33\10] It is a religious myth in the stricter sense; its _ætioloqical_ character is most marked;[34\10] its purpose is to explain the religious implication of the ritual dismemberment of the bull-god at the Bacchic nocturnal festivals, and to derive that feature from the legendary sufferings of Dionysos-Zagreus.

But though the legend thus has its roots in the primitive sacrificial ritual of ancient Thrace,[35\10] in its extended form it belongs entirely to the region of Hellenic thought; and in this combination of the two elements it becomes truly Orphic. The wicked Titans belong entirely to strictly Greek mythology.[36\10] In this case, as the murderers of the god, they represent the primeval power of evil.[37\10] They dismember the One into Many parts; by their impiety the One divine being is dispersed into the multiplicity of the things of this world.[38\10] It is reborn as One in the new Dionysos sprung from Zeus. The Titans--so the legend goes on to relate--who had devoured the limbs of the god were destroyed by Zeus with his lightning flash. From their ashes sprang the race of men in whom, in conformity with their origin, the good derived from Dionysos-Zagreus is mixed with a wicked Titanic element.[39\10]

With the rule of the new-born Dionysos and the origin of mankind, the series of mythological events in the Orphic poetry came to an end.[40\10] With the entry of mankind into Creation[41\10] the existing period of the world begins; the period of world-revolutions is over. The poems now turn to the subject of man and the revelation of his fate, his duty and his purpose in the world.

§ 4

The mixture of the elements that make up the totality of his being in itself prescribes for man the direction that his effort shall take. He must free himself from the Titanic element and, thus purified, return to the god, a fragment of whom is living in him.[42\10] The distinction between the Titanic and Dionysiac elements in man is an allegorical expression of the popular {342} distinction between body and soul; it also corresponds to a profoundly felt estimate of the relative value of these two sides of man's being. According to Orphic doctrine man's duty is to free himself from the chains of the body in which the soul lies fast bound like the prisoner in his cell.[43\10] The soul has a long way, however, to go before it can find its freedom; it may not by an act of violence tear its bonds asunder for itself.[44\10] The death of the body only frees it for a short while; for the soul must once more suffer imprisonment in a body. After leaving its old body, it flutters free in the wind, but a breath of air sends it into a new body again.[45\10] So it continues its journey, perpetually alternating between an unfettered separate existence, and an ever-renewed incarnation--traversing the great "Circle of Necessity" in which it becomes the life-companion of many bodies both of men and beasts. Thus, the "Wheel of Birth"[46\10] seems to return ever upon itself in hopeless repetition: in Orphic poetry (and there perhaps for the first time occurs the despairing thought of the exact repetition of the past; events which have already been lived through once returning again with the convergence of the same attendant circumstances.[47\10] Thus, Nature, ever reverting to its own beginnings, draws men with it in its senseless revolution round itself.

But the soul has a way open for escape from this perpetual recurrence of all things that threatens to close in upon it; it may hope "to escape from the circle and have a respite from misery".[48\10] It is formed for blessed freedom, and can at last detach itself from the condition of being it has to endure upon earth--a condition unworthy of it. A "release" is possible; but man in his blindness and thoughtlessness cannot help himself, cannot even, when salvation is at hand, turn himself towards it.[49\10]

Salvation comes from Orpheus and his Bacchic mysteries; Dionysos himself will loose his worshipper from Evil and the unending way of misery. Not his own power, but the grace of the "releasing gods" is to be the cause of man's liberation.[50\10] The self-reliance of the older Greece is breaking down; in humility of heart the pious man looks elsewhere for help; he needs the revelation and mediation of "Orpheus the Ruler"[51\10] in order to find the way of salvation; he must follow his ordinances of salvation with perfect obedience if he is to continue in that way.

It is not only the sacred mysteries themselves, in the form in which Orpheus has ordained them, which prepare for the release; a complete "Orphic life"[52\10] must be developed out {343} of them. Asceticism is the prime condition of the pious life. This does not mean the practice of the respectable bourgeois virtues, nor the discipline and moral reformation of a man's character; the height of morality is in this case the turning again towards god,[53\10] and the turning away not merely from the weaknesses and errors of earthly being but from the whole of earthly life itself; renunciation of all that ties man to mortality and the life of the body. The fierce determination with which the Indian penitent tears away his will from life, to which every organ in his body clings desperately--for this, indeed, there was no place among the Greeks, the lovers of life--not even among the world-denying ascetics. Abstention from the eating of flesh was the strongest and most striking species of self-denial practised by the Orphic ascetics.[54\10] Apart from this, they kept themselves in all essentials uncontaminated by certain things and situations which rather suggested to a religious symbolism than actually indicated in themselves attachment to the world of death and transitoriness. The long-standing ordinances of the priestly ritual of purification were taken up and added to;[55\10] but they were also raised to a higher plane. They are no longer intended to free men from the effects of daimonic contacts; the soul itself is made pure by them[56\10]--pure from the body and its polluting association, pure from death and its loathsome mastery. In expiation of "guilt" the soul is confined within the body,[57\10] the wages of sin is in this case that life upon earth which for the soul is death. The whole multiplicity of the universe, emptied of its innocent and natural sequence of cause and effect, appears to these zealots under the uniform aspect of a correlation between crime and punishment, between pollution and purification. Thus, mysticism enters into the closest alliance with kathartic practices. The soul which comes from the divine and strives to return thither, has no other purpose to fulfil upon earth (and therefore no other moral law to obey); it must be free from life itself and be pure from all that is earthly.

The Orphics, moreover, were the only people who could venture among themselves or before strangers to greet each other with the special name of the "Pure".[58\10] The first reward of his piety was received by the initiate of the Orphic mysteries in that intermediate region whither men must go after their earthly death. When a man dies, Hermes leads the "deathless soul" into the underworld.[59\10] Special poems of the Orphic community announced the terrors and delights of the underworld kingdom.[60\10] What the Orphic {344}mystery-priests vouchsafed to their public upon these hidden matters--outdoing the promises made in the Eleusinian mysteries in coarse appeal to the senses--may have been the most popular, but was certainly not the most original feature of Orphic teaching.[61\10] In Hades a judgment awaited the soul--it was no instinctive fancy of the people, but the "sacred doctrine"[62\10] of these sectaries which first introduced and elaborated the idea of compensatory justice in the world of the dead. The impious suffer punishment and purgation in the depths of Tartaros;[63\10] those who have not been made pure by the Orphic mysteries lie in the miry Pool;[64\10] "dreadful things[65\10] await" the disdainer of the sacred worship. By a conception that is quite unique in ancient religion, participation in the Orphic ceremonial enables the descendant to obtain from the gods "pardon and purification" for his departed ancestors who may be paying the penalty in the next world for the misdeeds of the past.[66\10] But for the initiate of the Orphic mysteries himself who has not merely borne the _narthex_ but has been a true Bakchos,[67\10] his reward is that he shall obtain a "milder fate" in the kingdom of the underworld deities whom he has revered on earth, and dwell "in the fair meadows of deep-running Acheron".[68\10] The blessed home of refuge no longer lies like the Homeric Elysium upon earth, but below in the world of the Souls, for only the released soul reaches there. There, the initiated and purified will live in communion with the gods of the nether world[69\10]--we feel that we are listening to Thracian and not Greek conceptions of the ideal when we hear of the "Banquet of the Pure" and the uninterrupted intoxication which they enjoy there.[70\10]

But the depths restore the soul at last to the light, for its lasting habitation is not below; it stays there only for the interval which separates death from its next rebirth. For the reprobate this is a time of punishment and purgation--the Orphics could not distress their hearers with the awful and intolerable idea of the _perpetual_ punishment of the damned in Hell; many times over the soul rises again to the light and in continually renewed bodies fulfils the cycle of births. For the deeds of its past life it is recompensed in the next life that it lives, and each man must now suffer exactly what he has done to another.[71\10] So he pays the penalty for ancient guilt: the "thrice-ancient law"--what thou hast done thou shalt suffer--is thus fulfilled for him in far livelier fashion than it could be in any torments of the shadow-world. So surely also shall the pure be rewarded in future lives by ever-increasing happiness. How exactly the Orphic fancy filled out the {345} individual gradations in the scale of happiness is beyond our knowledge.[72\10]

But the soul is immortal, and even sinners and the unredeemed cannot perish entirely. Hades and the life on earth holds them in their perpetual round, and this is their punishment. For the soul of the blessed, however, neither Hades nor earthly life can offer the highest crown of happiness. If it has been made pure and spotless in the Orphic mysteries and the Orphic manner of life, it is freed from the necessity of rebirth and withdrawn from the cycle of becoming and perishing. The "purification" ends in a final redemption. The soul mounts upwards from the base level of earthly life, not to become nothing in a final death, for it is now that it first truly begins to live; hitherto it has lain imprisoned in the body like the corpse in the grave.[73\10] It was death for the soul when it entered into life--now it is free and will no more suffer death; it lives for ever like God, for it comes from God and is itself divine. We do not know whether these theosophists went so far as to lose themselves in detailed picturing and contemplation of the blissful heights of the divine life.[74\10] In the remains of their poems we read of stars and the moon as other worlds,[75\10] perhaps as the dwelling-place of illuminated spirits.[76\10] But perhaps also the poet allowed the soul to flee from its last contact with mortality without himself desiring to follow it into the unbroken radiance of divinity that no earthly eye can abide.

§ 5

This, then, is the keystone that completes the arch of Orphic religion--the belief in the divine, immortal, and abiding life of the soul for whom union with the body and its desires is a thwarting hindrance and repression--a punishment from which its one desire, as soon as it is awakened to a full knowledge of itself is to escape in order that it may belong entirely to itself in full enjoyment of its powers. The contrast between these ideas and those of the Homeric world is complete; _there_, the soul released from the body was credited only with a poor, shadowy, half-conscious existence, so that an eternity of godlike being in the full enjoyment of life and its powers was only thinkable if the body and the soul, the twofold self of man, were translated in undissolved communion out of the world of mortality. The Orphic legends about the origin of the human race do not tell us the real source and derivation of the very different beliefs about the soul held by the Orphics; those legends only give expression to the {346} way--and only one of many ways[77\10]--in which the already established confidence in the divinity of the soul was deducible from what might be considered the oldest historical story of mankind, and how it might be brought into connexion with the Orphic legend of the gods. This persuasion, the belief that a god was living in man and a god that could not be free until he had broken through the prison of the body, was deeply rooted in the worship of Dionysos and the ecstasies belonging to that worship; we cannot be in much doubt that it was taken over ready-made, together with the "enthusiastic" cult of the divinity, and further developed by the Orphic believers. We have already met with traces of this belief even in the Thracian home of the Dionysiac cult; and in what we know of the Thracian form of the religion, traces are not absolutely wanting of an ascetic tendency of living that would easily and naturally arise from such a belief.[78\10] Even in those Northern countries we found the belief in the transmigration of souls bound up with the religion of Dionysos, and that belief, when it is naively held, has as its essential presupposition the idea that the soul, in order to have a complete life, and one that can survive bodily death, must of necessity be united to another body. Even this idea is, however, quite foreign to Orphism. The Orphics retained, in spite of everything, the doctrine of transmigration, and combined it in a strange alliance with their own belief in the divinity of the soul and its vocation to a life of perfect liberty. It is evidently improbable that they invented that doctrine entirely on their own account; the first principles of their creed by no means led necessarily to it. Herodotos[79\10] asserts distinctly that the doctrine of transmigration came to the Greeks from Egypt; and as a consequence, that it was from Egyptian tradition that the Orphics received it. This assertion has no more to recommend it than any other of Herodotos' many pronouncements as to the Egyptian origin of Greek opinions and legends, and it is even less likely to mislead us in view of the fact that it is by no means certain and not even probable that a belief in transmigration ever really existed in Egypt.[80\10] This belief has arisen independently in many places on the surface of the earth, without the need of transmission from one place to another;[81\10] it might easily arise in a country where the belief prevailed that there existed only a limited number of souls of which each one--in order that no earthly body might be without its spiritual guest--must inhabit many perishable life-tenements, and not be bound to any one of them by a real inner necessity. This, {347} however, is a conception common to popular psychology all over the world.[82\10] If it is still considered more probable that the idea of a migration of the soul through many temporary bodies was not spontaneously evolved by the Orphics, but was received by them from the hands of others, there is yet no reason to reject the most natural assumption--namely, that this also was one of the beliefs that the Orphics took over with the cult of Dionysos from Thrace. Like other mystics,[83\10] the Orphics took over the belief in transmigration from popular tradition and turned it into a serviceable member of their own body of doctrine.[84\10] It served them by giving a striking and physical expression to their own conception of the inevitable connexion between guilt and penance, pollution and the refining power of punishment, piety and future blessedness upon which all their religious ethic depended. It was with an exactly similar purpose that they also retained and developed the old Greek idea of a place of the souls in the depths below the earth.

But if they believed in the transmigration of souls, that belief did not with them hold the highest place. There is a realm where the ever free and divine souls have their being, a realm to which the series of lives in earthly bodies is only transitional, and the way to it was pointed out by the saving doctrine of the Orphic mysteries, by the purification and salvation afforded by Orphic asceticism.

NOTES TO CHAPTER X

[1\10: ~. . . ho/s pote kai\ teleta\s mustêri/das heu/reto Ba/kchou~, _AP._ vii, 9, 5 (Damagetos). ~dio\ kai\ ta\s hupo\ tou= Dionu/sou genome/nas teleta\s Orphika\s prosagoreuthê=nai~, D.S. 3, 65, 6. ~heu=re de\ Orpheu\s ta\ Dionu/son mustê/ria~ [Apollod.] 1, 3, 2, 3. (Dionysum) Iove et Luna (natum), cui sacra Orphica putantur confici: Cic., _ND._ iii, 58; cf. Lyd., _Mens._ 4, 51, p. 107 W. ~Bakchika/~ an Orphic poem: Suid. ~Orpheu/s~ (cf. Hiller, _Hermes_, 21, 364 f.), whence _fr._ 3 (Abel); and perhaps _frr._ 152, 167, 169, 168. ~ta\ Orphika\ kalou/mena kai\ ta\ Bakchika/~ are already reckoned as a single class by Hdt. ii, 81.]

[2\10: This is seen in the decree of the Council and people of Athens dealing with the ~e/mporoi Kitiei=s~ and their temple of "Aphrodite"--_CIA._ ii, 168 (333/2 B.C.).--That on the other hand such foreign mystery-cults were not always so tolerated (or not without resistance is shown by the case of Ninos: Dem., _FL._ (19) 281 with Sch.; cf. D.H., _Dinarch._ 11.]

[3\10: ~theoi\ xenikoi/~, Hsch., see Lob., _Agl._ 627 ff. A nameless ~theo\s xeniko/s~ occurs in _CIA._ i, 273 f., 18.--The foundation of such ~thi/asoi~ for foreign deities (or deities at least not officially worshipped by the city in question) is almost invariably the work of foreigners (many exx. from Rhodos in _BCH._ 1889, p. 364). They are all foreigners, e.g. whose names occur in the decree of the ~thiasô=tai~ of the Karian Zeus Labraundos, _CIA._ ii, 613 (298/7 B.C.); cf. ib. 614; _SIG._ 726. Merchants from Kition found a cult of their Aphrodite (Astarte) in Athens, just as some Egyptians had a little while before put up ~to\ tê=s I/sidos hiero/n~ there: _CIA._ ii, 168. The names of foreigners (in addition to Athenians) are very numerous among the ~o/nomata tô=n eranistô=n~ of a _**collegium_ of ~Sabaziastai/~ in the Peiraeus (second century B.C.): ~Eph. Arch.~ 1883, p. 245 f. The foreign worship would then begin to receive the support of natives of the host-city (most of them being at first of the poorer classes), and in this way the new religion would gain a footing in its adopted home. (Pure Athenian citizens compose the society of the Dionysiastai in the Peiraeus, second century B.C., _Ath. Mitt._ ix, 288 = _CIA._ iv, 2, 623 d.)]

[4\10: The Bendideia early became a state festival in Athens (even fifth century, _CIA._ i, 210, _fr._ K, p. 93). An allusion in Plato (_Rp._ 327 A), however, shows that the Thracians (who must have introduced the cult of Bendis into Athens, or at least into the Peiraeus, the home of most ~thi/asoi~) still kept up a special worship of their goddess in their own manner, side by side with the Hellenized cult. It appears at least as if the worship in its remodelled Greek form seemed to them no longer the right one. (Bendis, too, like Dionysos, is a divinity of both this world and the next: see Hsch. ~di/logchon~.)]

[5\10: Alleged traces of Orphic influence on special sections of the Iliad (~Dio\s apa/tê~) or the Odyssey are entirely illusory, nor did the Orphic doctrines exert any influence on the Hesiodic _Theogony_. On the other hand, Orphism was itself strongly affected by the primitive Greek theology the fragments of which were put together in the Hesiodic poem.]

[6\10: ~Onoma/kritos . . . Dionu/sô| sune/thêken o/rgia~, Paus. 8, 37, 5.] {349}

[7\10: Among the writers of Orphic poems mentioned by (1) Clem. Al., _Str._ 1, 21, p. 397 P. (from Epigenes) and (2) Suidas (from Epigenes and another authority: both Su. and Clem. probably got their information through the mediation of D.H.)--two certain Pythagoreans are named, Brotinos (of Kroton or Metapontum) and Kerkops (not the Milesian). [Abel, _Orphica_, p. 139.] From lower Italy or Sicily come: Zopyros of Herakleia (the same person is probably meant by Iamb., _VP._ 190, 5 N., when he counts Zopyros among the Pythagoreans coming from Tarentum), Orpheus of Kroton, Orpheus of Kamarina (Suid.), Timokles of Syracuse. Pythagoras himself is mentioned among the writers of Orphic poems in the ~Triagmoi/~ of [Ion] (at least as early as the beginning of the fourth century). Apart from these the only names of conjectured composers of Orphic poems are: Theognetos ~ho Thettalo/s~, Prodikos of Samos, Herodikos of Perinthos, Persinos of Miletos; all of whom are unknown to us except Persinos, whom Obrecht not improbably identifies with the court poet of Euboulos of Atarneus mentioned by Poll. ix, 93 (cf. Lob. 359 f. Bgk., _PLG._ iii, 655). In this case he is an Orphic of a much later period.]

[8\10: ~homologe/ousi de\~ (sc. ~Aigu/ptioi) tau=ta~ (prohibition to bury the dead in woollen clothing) ~toi=si Orphikoi=si kaleome/noisi, kai\ Bakchikoi=si, eou=si de\ Aigupti/oisi kai\ Puthagorei/oisi~, Hdt. ii, 81. There can be no doubt that Hdt. in these words meant to derive the ~Orphika\ kai\ Bakchika/~ (the four datives are all neuters, not masc.) from the ~Aigu/ptia kai\ Puthago/reia~, i.e. the Pythagorean ordinances which were themselves derived from Egypt (cf. Gomperz, _Sitzb. Wien. Ak._ 1886, p. 1032). If he had regarded the ~Puthago/reia~ as entirely independent of the ~Aigu/ptia~ (and the ~Orphika/~ as independent of the Pythag.) he certainly could not have brought them in here. (This answers Zeller, _Ber. Berlin. Ak._ 1889, p. 994, who introduces a comma before ~kai\ Puth.~)--It is equally impossible (with Maass, _Orpheus_, p. 165, 1895), to connect the ~eou=si de\ Aigupti/oisi~ with ~Bakchikoi=si~ _only_; it must of necessity go with ~toi=si Orphikoi=si~ as well; for it is the whole point of Hdt.'s note to show that the religious usage which he mentions has, like so much else of the kind in Greece wherever it may be found, been borrowed from Egypt, and "is Egyptian". In this he would fail completely if he did not regard the ~Orphika/~ (and hence also the ~Puthago/reia~) as ~Aigu/ptia eo/nta~ and clearly say so. Hdt. certainly has no idea, as Maass would have us believe, of making a generic distinction between ~Orphika/~ and ~Bakchika/~: ~Bakch.~ is the name of the genus of which ~Orph.~ is the species.--"the ~Orphika/~, and the ~Bakchika/~ in general." Not _all_ ~Bakchika/~ are ~Orphika/~. This use of ~kai\~ whereby the whole is added subsequently to the part is perfectly regular and legitimate (it may also add the part to the whole as in the cases adduced by Maass, 166 n.: ~ta\s Dionusiaka\s kai\ ta\s Orphika/s~, etc.). Hdt. mentions the ~Puthago/reia~ last in order to indicate by what intermediate step the Egyptian element in the first-mentioned ~Orphika/~ was specially assisted--he has further in ii, 123, shown clearly enough that he regarded Pythagoras as one of the pupils of the Egyptians (P. in any case is one of the teachers of immortality there referred to). This is also obvious from his whole attitude.--Hdt.'s opinion does not in any case oblige us to believe in it. He was forced to regard Pythagoras as the earliest author of Orphic doctrine because _his_ connexion with Egypt seemed certain (cf. Hdt. ii, 123) while that of the ~Orphikoi/~ themselves was not so: in this way only could Hdt. seem to prove the Egyptian origin of that doctrine.--The priority of the Orphics is often supposed to be proved by the witness of Philolaos (_fr._ 14 D.) ap. Clem. Al., _Str._ {350} 3, 3, p. 518 P. (and cf. Cic., _Hortens. fr._ 85 Or.); it must be admitted, however, that the passage does not prove what it is supposed to do.]

[9\10: _Frr._ 143-51 (cf. Lob. 715 ff.). Here, indeed, Orphic and Pythagorean doctrine are mixed up inextricably. _Fr._ 143 (~Puthagorei/ôs te kai\ Orphikô=s~ Syrian.) belongs to the ~eis to\n arithmo\n _Puthago/reios_ hu/mnos~ which is several times distinctly so called by Proclus. (The _frr._ are in Nauck, Iamb., _VP._, p. 228. _fr._ iii). _Fr._ 147 (Lyd. _Mens._) obviously comes from the same (Nauck, p. 234, _fr._ ix). The same is at least highly probable of the _frr._ 144-6, 148-51. Probably what Orpheus says of the number 12 comes from the same ~hu/mnos~ (ap. Procl. _in _Rp.__ ii, 131, 10 Kroll). Proclus, however (_in _Rp.__ 169, 25 K.), also cites ll. 2-5 from the ~hu/mnos~ (Nauck, _fr._ iii) but this time attributes them to an ~eis to\n arithmo\n _Horphiko\s_ hu/mnos~. This Orphico-Pythagorean ~hu/mnos~ had at any rate nothing to do with the (Rhaps.) Theogony of Orpheus. On the other hand, the words ~tetra/da tetrake/raton~, which acc. to Procl. _in _Rp.__ 169, 29 K., occurred ~muria/kis~ in the ~Orphikê\ theologi/a~, come from the Theogony. They were possibly used as a title of Zagreus the ~kero/en bre/phos~ (Nonn., _D._ vi, 165): though what is here said by Proclus about the ~Dionusiakê\~ (i.e. of Zagreus) ~theo/tês~, viz. that it ~tetra/s estin~, was applied rather to the four-eyed Orphic _Phanes_ by Hermias (_fr._ 64 Ab.).]

[10\10: On the other hand, there is much in Orphic theology and poetry that is taken immediately from the primitive Thracian worship of Dionysos and absent from Pythagorean teaching. This makes it very probable that even such _theologoumena_ as are common to Orphism and Pythagoreanism really go back to the fanatical cult of Dionysos, or at least were easily thence derived by religious speculation: in this case the Orphics may well have got them from this original source of mystic lore that was common to both parties and not by the circuitous route of Pythagorean teaching. Orphism remained more closely attached to the common source than did Pythagoreanism, and may for that reason be regarded as somewhat older than its rival and be supposed to have originated independently of it.]

[11\10: Zopyros of Herakleia, Orpheus of Kroton: Tz., _Prol. in Aristoph._ ([p. 20, 28 Kaibel, _Com. Fr._] Ritschl, _Opusc._ i, 207); Suid. ~Orph. Krotônia/tês~ (from Asklepiades of Myrlea).]

[12\10: We may not simply take it for granted that the account given in Dem. 18, 259-60, of the nocturnal initiations and the processions by day through the city held by a mystical sect, is intended to describe the secret mysteries of an _Orphic_ conventicle (as Lob. does 646 ff., 652 ff., 695 f.). The explanation of the ~apoma/ttein tô=| pêlô=|~ of that passage by reference to the specially Orphic myth of Zagreus and the Titans is arbitrary in itself and hard to reconcile with the language of Demosth. (Harp. and Phot. are responsible for this expl.) Hardly more successful is the derivation of the call ~a/ttês hu/ês~ from the ~a/tê~ of Dionysos (Zagreus) on being torn to pieces by the Titans: _EM._ 163, 63. A definite connexion undoubtedly does exist between the ~Orphika\ o/rgia~ and the ~Saba/zia kai\ Mêtrô=|a~ (Str. 471) described by Dem.; but the Orphics were never called worshippers of Sabazios nor their god ~Saba/zios~, and it seems likely that their secret worship was different from the ceremonies of the ~Sabaziastai/~ that Dem. had in view (the latter may have retained more of the primitive barbaric ritual: cf. the ins. given in ~Eph. Arch.~ 1883, p. 245 f. = _CIA._ iv, _Supp._ ii, n. 626 b; from the end of second century B.C.).]

[13\10: See Lob., _Agl._ 235 f., 237, 242 f.]

[14\10: To attribute the practical side of Orphism to a late degeneration {351} of the once purely speculative character of the sect (as many have done) is a very arbitrary proceeding and quite unjustifiable on historical grounds. The fact that a clear description of this activity does not occur before the fourth century (in Plato) does not prove that it did not exist earlier. Apart from this an ~orpheotelestê/s~ named Philippos is mentioned by Plu., _Apoph. Lac._ 224 E as a contemporary of King Leotychidas II of Sparta (reigned 491-469). This evidence is not to be so easily set aside, as K. O. Müller, _Introd. Scient. Myth._ 311 ff., would like to do. The Orphic sect from the very beginning derived its strength from its _telestic_ and _kathartic_ practices.]

[15\10: Thphr., _Ch._ 28 (16).]

[16\10: ~autou= (Orphe/ôs) me\n ei=nai ta\ do/gmata, tau=ta de/ phêsin~ (Aristot.) ~Onoma/kriton en e/pesi katatei=nai~ Arist. ~p. philosophi/as~ _fr._ 10 [7] Rose, _Arist. Pseudepig._]

[17\10: Tatian, _Gr._ 41 (p. 42 Schw.), seems to speak only of _redaction_ (~sunteta/chthai~) of the ~eis Orphe/a anaphero/mena~ among already existing Orphic poems as the work of Onomakritos (in the same way Onomakr. is only the ~diathe/tês~--the arranger not the author--of the ~chrêsmoi/~ of "Mousaios", Hdt. vii, 6). Traces of an external linking-together of the individual poems of Orpheus in a "redaction" are not wanting (cf. the linking-together of the poems of the Epic Cycle or of the corpus Hesiodeum): first of all coming in all probability the greater ~kratê/r~ (as in the enumeration of Clem. Al., _Str._ i, 21, p. 397 P.); see Lob. 376, 417, 469.--Clem. Al., _Str._ i, p. 397 P. (and Eus., _PE._ 10, 11, p. 495 D) is only derived from Tatian, though Onomakr. is here definitely called the _author_ of the ~eis Orphe/a phero/mena poiê/mata~. Onomakr. seems also to have been simply regarded as the author of the ~Orphika/~ in the doxographical excerpt ap. S.E. _P._ iii, 30 = _M._ 9, 361, p. 287 Mutschm.; cf. Gal., _H. Philos._ (_Dox._, p. 610, 15): ~Onoma/kritos en toi=s Orphikoi=s~.--On the other hand, in the--admittedly incomplete--enumeration of Orphic poems in Clem. Al., _Str._ i, 21, p. 397 P., not _one_ is attributed to Onomakr., and in Suid. ~Orpheu\s~ he is only given the ~chrêsmoi/~ (no confusion with the ~chrêsmoi/~ of Mousaios is to be suspected here) and the _~teletai/~_. Paus. (8, 37, 5) mentions (without naming them) ~e/pê~ of Onomakr. (cf. Ritschl, _Opusc._ i, 241). Some at least of the poetry going under the name of Orpheus must have been ascribed to Onomakr. by Arist. (_fr._ 10 [7 Teubn.]).]

[18\10: Suid. ~Orpheu/s~, 2721 A Gaisf.]

[19\10: Onomakr. ~ei=nai tou\s Tita=nas tô=| Dionu/sô| tô=n pathêma/tôn epoi/êsen autourgou/s~, Paus. 8, 37, 5. Lob., p. 335, thinks this refers to the "Theogony": but no authority attributes a single one of the several Orphic Theogonies to Onomakr. as its real author. We should rather be inclined to think of the ~teletai/~ which is distinctly ascribed to Onomakr. and which at least dealt with the practical side of worship: cf. Pl., _Rp._ 364 E-365 A, ~lu/seis, katharmoi/ adikêma/tôn ktl. ha\s dê\ teleta\s kalou=sin~ (but it was not that the mystical ~bi/bloi~ were _called_ ~teletai/~ as Gruppe, _Gr. Culte u. Mythen_, i, 640, mistakenly supposes: he is otherwise quite right in his protest against Abel's treatment of the ~teletai/~). They must almost necessarily have dealt with the reproduction of the ~pa/thê tou= Dionu/sou~ (as providing the ~hiero\s lo/gos~ to the ~drô/mena~), and, as the central idea of the orgiastic cult, must have included the most important circumstance of the Orphic ~teletai/~ (see D.S. 5, 75, 4; Clem. Al., _Protr._ ii, 17, p. 15 P.).]

[20\10: One of the poems (perhaps indeed the poem of the ~rhapsô|di/ai~, and in that case the ~hiero\s lo/gos~ as well) made Orpheus distinctly appeal to a revelation made to him by Apollo: _fr._ 49 (see Lob. 469).] {352}

[21\10: Besides the three Theogonies distinguished by Damascius there were (apart from other more doubtful traces) at least two other variations of the same theme: see _fr._ 85 (Alex. Aphrod.) and _frr._ 37; 38 (Clem. Rom.); cf. Gruppe, i, 640 f.--The series of divine rulers given by "Orpheus" acc. to Nigid. Fig. ap. Serv. _Ecl._ iv, 10 (_fr._ 248 Ab.), conflicts with all the other Theogonies but agrees in some particulars with Lact. i, 13 (_fr._ 243). Still, this remark need not necessarily have been taken from any Orphic "Theogony".]

[22\10: (Zeus) ~. . . prôtogo/noio chano\n me/nos Êrikapai/ou, tô=n pa/ntôn de/mas ei=chen heê=| eni\ gaste/ri koi/lê|~, _fr._ 120 (from the Rhapsodiai. We are accustomed to read here ~chanô/n~ with Zoëga (_Abh._ 262 f.): but ~chanô/n~ does not mean "catching up or devouring" [Zo.]; at most it might mean, in bad late-Greek, just the opposite of this--"abandoning" (transitive). Lobeck's explanation (p. 519 n.) is also unsatisfactory. The word may have been originally ~_chadô/n_~.]

[23\10: The line occurred in various forms in the Theogonic poem; _frr._ 33 (Plato?); 46 [Arist.] _de Mundo_); 123 (Rhapsod).; see Lob. 520-32. It seems certain then (Gruppe's doubts go too far: _Rhaps. Theog._ 704 ff.) that the line appeared in the oldest form of Orphic Theogony and was merely borrowed thence, like so much else that was ancient, by the Rhapsod. Theogony (i.e. the words, ~Zeu\s kephalê\ ktl.~ which would be the oldest form, as Gruppe rightly remarks: ~kephalê\ = teleutê/~; cf. Pl., _Ti._ 69 B). Even the writer of the speech _against Aristogeiton A_ ([Dem.] 25), an Orphic adherent, appears, as Lob. remarks, to allude to the words in § 8.]

[24\10: _Theokrasia_ must have belonged to Orphic theology from the outset: Lob. 614; though the most extreme examples of this may perhaps come from later poems: _frr._ 167; 169 (Macr.); 168 (D.S.); 201 (Rhaps.), etc., being probably derived from the "Little Krater" (_fr._ 160), in which Chrysippos seems to be imitated (Lob. 735 and _fr._ 164), and from the ~Diathê=kai~, _fr._ 7 (J.M.) a forgery in Judaeo-Christian interests which nevertheless made use of many ancient pieces of Orphic literature (the ~hiero\s lo/gos~: Lob. 450 ff., 454).--Theokrasia is met with even in the orthodox poets of the fifth century, though they did not invent it; the "theologoi" of the sixth century Epimenides and Pherekydes were as familiar with it as were the Orphics; cf. Kern, _de Theogon._ 92.]

[25\10: See Append. ix.]

[26\10: It must have been chiefly the religious significance of the gods which caused the retention of their personalities and prevented them from fading into mere personifications of abstract ideas or elementary powers with which _religion_ could have had nothing further to do.]

[27\10: In the statements of the Neoplatonic writers this first Orphic Dionysos is regularly called ~Dio/nusos~ simply (perhaps also ~Ba/kchos~: _fr._ 192). Nonnus in recounting the Orphic legend calls him Zagreus: _D._ vi, 165; cf. ~Zagre/a geiname/nê~ (of Perseph.) with clear allusion to Callim. _fr._ 171, ~hui=a Diô/nuson Zagre/a geiname/nê~. Callim. here, as elsewhere, seems to have in mind the _Orphic_ story. Tz. on Lyc. 355 calls the god of the Orphic legend ~Dio/nuson to\n kai\ Zagre/a kalou/menon. Zagreu/s~ the great Hunter is a name of the all-absorbing Hades: thus also the _Alkmaionis fr._ 3 Kink. Zagreus is identified with the Dionysos of nocturnal revelry in E., _Kret. fr._ 472, 10 (a reference in _Ba._ 1181 Kirchh.); and see above, chap. viii, n. 28. This Dionysos is regarded as a ~chtho/nios~ (see Hsch. ~Zagreu/s~) and this must indubitably have been quite familiar to the poets who made him the son of Persephone: ~chtho/nios ho tê=s Persepho/nês Dio/nusos~ (Harp. ~leu/kê~). {353} They were as clearly conscious as was Herakleitos of the fact that ~hôuto\s Ha/idês kai\ Dio/nusos~, whereas this consciousness was undoubtedly obscured in the public ceremonial of Dionysos-worship (to which, however, Hcl.'s saying refers). Zagreus-Dionysos was never identified with the ~I/akchos~ of the Eleusinia (to which Orph. _fr._ 215, l. 2 refers); though Dionysos alone was often so identified.]

[28\10: Ouranos casts the Titans into Tartaros: _frr._ 97, 100. Acc. to Procl. (_fr._ 205) and Arn. (196: prob. not from the Rhaps.) we should be led to suppose that the Titans after they had torn Zagreus in pieces were cast down to Tartaros by _Zeus_. In Arn. this is set down side by side with the statement that the Titans were destroyed by the lightning of Zeus (~hê Tita/nôn kerau/nôsis~, Plu., _Es. Carn._ 1, 7, p. 996 C), though obviously incompatible with the latter statement, as it is also (even more so) with the origin of mankind from the ashes of the Titans which is known not only to Olympiodoros (_ad _Phd.__, p. 68 Finckh: Lob. 566), but also to Proclus who got it from the "Rhapsodiai" (as also did Olymp.): Procl., _in _Rp.__ ii, 74, 29; i, 93 Kroll. It seems from this that Proclus (and perhaps Arn.) in error ascribed the ~katatarta/rôsis~ of the Titans to Zeus instead of to Ouranos.]

[29\10: Nonn. vi, 173; O., _fr._ 195. Perhaps Proclus is right in explaining this doubling of the god's figure in the mirror as meaning his entrance upon the ~meristê\ dêmiourgi/a~. A reference to a similar explanation of this ~Dionu/sou ka/topton~ occurs even in Plot. 4, 3, 12 (Lob. 555)--? also in the strange statement made by Marsilius Ficinus as to the crudelissimum apud Orpheum Narcissi fatum (was Zagreus another Narcissus?) _fr._ 315; cf. Plot. 1, 6, 8. The entry of the one origin of the universe into the multiplicity of phenomena is first clearly referred to in the dismemberment of Zagreus, but it would be quite like this symbol-loving poetry to introduce the same motif in a different form with a passing reference earlier in the poem.]

[30\10: Nonn., _D._ vi, 197 ff.]

[31\10: Paus. 8, 37, 5.]

[32\10: Procl., O., _frr._ 195, 198, 199. In any case Nonn. vi, 169 ff. is following the Rhapsodiai.]