Chapter IV: Appendix: I (bibliographies) 361 (2)

In the Iliad and Odyssey evil, like the good, comes from the gods. The simple fact is unquestionably recognized. But Hesiod searches more deeply for the origin of evil which he pessimistically regards as omnipresent. The story of Prometheus and Pandora contains in part the poet’s answer to this eternal riddle. The myth was already ancient and familiar to all. Once men lived without effort and free from evils, but when led by crafty Prometheus they had endeavored to cheat Zeus of the better part of the sacrificed bullock, the god withheld fire from them. Yet the cunning Titan stole a spark of this divine fire and delivered it to mortals. This Zeus allowed men to keep; by its aid they created all industries, but only at the cost of constant toil and struggle. Prometheus he punished harshly. To work his vengeance on mortals he caused Hephaestus to create a woman on whom the gods bestowed all gifts so that she was named Pandora. She opened a jar containing every kind of evil, which straightway flew out among mankind. Only Ἐλπίς remained therein—a word hardly equivalent to our Hope, but rather meaning “anticipation of misfortune.” It then is the only plague to which man is not subjected.[67] He is obliged to suffer, having been involved in the original sin of Prometheus, who wished to cheat Zeus of the sacrifice due him. Such is the sacred tale offered as an explanation of the presence of evils on earth. To us it seems childish, and indeed it did not completely satisfy Hesiod.

A second explanation of a very different sort was given, one which was in reality a profound attempt to trace man’s origin as well as to explain his actual condition.[68] This is the story of the five ages of man, beginning with the age of gold in which gods and men dwelt together. Then mortals lived like the gods with hearts untroubled, far from toil and suffering, and the earth yielded them of its own accord abundant food. Over them Cronos reigned. But the men of this Utopian age died in painless sleep; and the silver age under Zeus followed. Compared with the former it was an age of degeneracy in which men showed insolence toward one another and failed to sacrifice to the gods. Zeus in his anger destroyed these mortals. The three remaining ages—the bronze, the heroic, and the iron, show both decay and advance. The men of the bronze age were fierce, wild creatures, unapproachable in their savagery. To these succeeded a better and juster race, that of the heroes, who however met their fate in war beneath seven-gated Thebes or at Troy for fair-haired Helen’s sake. And now they dwell care-free in the Islands of the Blest. Finally Hesiod pictures his own age, that of iron. Now no longer do men spend their effort in war and battle, but they have come to a selfish individualism, “when father and children will not agree together, nor guest with host, nor friend with friend, nor brother longer be dear as aforetime.”[69] But this unlimited egoism, which Hesiod pictures, presupposes an intellectual evolution beyond the stage where men fought in masses as in the heroic time. Thus faithfully and relentlessly he describes his own day. Yet the poet is not without confidence that there are good as well as evil elements in the age of iron; but on the whole he is despondent and exclaims: “Would that I were not living in the fifth age of men, but that I had either died before them or been born later.”[70]

Thus Hesiod takes ancient myths and by his genius makes them epitomize the stages of man’s evolution downward morally, but forward intellectually. The faint hope expressed at the end of the exclamation just quoted shows that the poet saw the possibility of a better age to come, and therein he showed himself a prophet. He apparently did not regard the present age of iron as eternal, but perhaps, in accordance with the cyclical theory of the world, thought that the ages might revolve and the Golden Age return again. Furthermore, although he regards man’s course as largely one of degeneration, he sees that it has also been one in which intellectual progress has been made and law developed.

When we come to the question of life beyond the grave we must acknowledge that herein Hesiod shows no advance over Homer. For ordinary mortals oblivion in the dank halls of Hades seems to be the relentless doom. Only a few, the heroes of that earlier age are allowed by divine favor to dwell with hearts free from trouble in the Islands of the Blest.

Yet if we consider the Hesiodic poetry as a whole it does bear witness to a great change from the world of Homer. It shows clearly that by the seventh century B.C. man was coming to self-consciousness, that he was endeavoring by reflection to solve some of the deepest problems of life, and that he had already developed a moral code that demanded righteousness in the individual. Hesiod depicts for us a more thoughtful and a more reflective time than that shown us by Homer. How significant this change was I shall try to show in my next lecture.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Herod. 2, 53.

[2] _Il._ 5, 335 ff.; 855 ff.

[3] _Il._ 21, 400-426.

[4] _Il._ 1, 531-570.

[5] _Il._ 13, 1 ff.

[6] _Od._ 5, 1-298.

[7] _Il._ 18, 394-405.

[8] _Il._ 10, 515 ff.

[9] _Il._ 5, 385-391.

[10] Cf. _Il._ 23, 382 ff.; _Il._ 5, 335; 855 ff.

[11] _Il._ 16, 433 ff.

[12] _Od._ 3, 236 ff.

[13] _Il._ 24, 209 ff.

[14] _Od._ 7, 196 ff.

[15] _Od._ 10, 174 ff.

[16] _Il._ 6, 486 ff.

[17] _Il._ 8.

[18] _Il._ 4, 51 f.

[19] _Od._ 8, 360-366.

[20] _Il._ 1, 544; _Od._ 1, 45; _Il._ 3, 276.

[21] _Il._ 20, 1 ff.

[22] _Il._ 1, 517 ff.

[23] _Il._ 15, 18-22.

[24] _Il._ I, 592 ff.

[25] _Od._ 13, 296-299; 331 ff.

[26] _Il._ 6, 297-310.

[27] _Il._ 2, 549; _Od._ 7, 81.

[28] _Il._ 2, 371 and often.

[29] _Od._ 4, 615 ff.; 15, 115 ff.

[30] _Il._ 18, 369 ff.

[31] _Od._ 7, 91 ff.

[32] _Il._ 18, 417 ff.

[33] _Il._ 18, 478 ff.

[34] _Il._ 21, 442 ff.

[35] _Od._ 13, 162 ff.

[36] _Il._ 24, 334 ff.

[37] _Od._ 5, 28 ff.

[38] _Il._ 2, 5 ff.

[39] _Il._ 4, 1 ff.

[40] _Il._ 1, 258; cf. 2, 202, 273.

[41] _Il._ 3, 179.

[42] _Il._ 1, 37-41.

[43] _Il._ 8, 236 ff.

[44] _Od._ 4, 351 ff.

[45] _Il._ 9, 533 ff.

[46] _Il._ 1, 65.

[47] _Euth._ 14 E; _Alc._ 11, 149 D ff.

[48] _Od._ 4, 502 ff.

[49] _Il._ 22, 365 f.

[50] _Od._ 11, 488 ff.

[51] _Il._ 17, 446 f.; 24, 525 f.

[52] _Il._ 1, 528 ff.

[53] _Or._ 12, 51.

[54] _Th._ 220 ff.

[55] _W. and D._ 311.

[56] _Ibid._ 303 ff.

[57] _W. and D._ 286 ff.

[58] _Ibid._ 213 ff.

[59] _W. and D._ 265 f.

[60] _Ibid._ 333 f.

[61] _Ibid._ 225 ff.

[62] _W. and D._ 274 ff.

[63] _Ibid._ 709 ff.

[64] _W. and D._ 256 ff.

[65] _Ibid._ 252 ff.

[66] _W. and D._ 336 ff.

[67] _W. and D._ 47-104.

[68] _Ibid._ 109-201.

[69] _W. and D._ 182 ff.

[70] _Ibid._ 174 f.

II

ORPHISM, PYTHAGOREANISM, AND THE MYSTERIES

The seventh and sixth centuries before Christ were marked by important social, philosophic, and religious movements. Of the many causes which brought about these changes, the most easily traced are those of a political and economic nature.

The form of government which is pictured in the Homeric poems is one in which the king and nobles alone have an effective voice. The humbler folk meet to hear the decision of the few, which they are expected to accept without a murmur. On only one occasion does a common man, Thersites, venture to raise his voice against his betters, and then he is made the laughing-stock of his fellows and is beaten into a sad silence by Odysseus. But the Homeric organization of society was gradually superseded by aristocracies in which the power of wealth ultimately claimed a position beside nobility of birth. The development of industry and trade in Ionia and on the mainland of Greece proper created a new wealthy class which was a rival of the old nobility whose riches had been in herds and lands. The political struggles which accompanied these changes were highly educative to considerable bodies of citizens, who were expending their efforts in improving the condition of their own class or of themselves rather than in maintaining the advantage of some prince or noble. In this way there was developed a political and social self-consciousness. When kings were superseded by aristocracies, magistracies, limited in scope and duration, had necessarily been employed. Thus political machinery and organization developed. These political changes and the failure of ancient customs to fit new social and economic conditions naturally led to a demand for written law, which alone can be the basis of even justice and protection. So we hear of many “law-givers” in Greece during the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., of whom the most famous were Zaleucus among the western Locrians, Charondas of Catane, and Draco of Athens, followed about thirty years later by Solon. Now written law usually tends to become ultimately the embodiment of rules for all, not simply for one class alone, so that the written codes marked a long step in the advance of the common man toward equality with the noble. It is true that the aristocracies in many parts of Greece were later followed by the rule of tyrants, but the tyrannies themselves fostered the development of the lower classes on whose well-being and support the existence of the tyrannies depended.

Of the law-givers I have just mentioned one belonged to Catane, a Greek city in Sicily. This fact suggests another important movement which demands our notice. I mean the planting of colonies. The great era of Hellenic colonization fell between the eighth and sixth centuries, and was in a sense but a continuation of that earlier wave of expansion which had carried the Greeks to Cyprus and to the nearer shores of Asia Minor. Among the causes which led to the establishment of colonies the chief seem to have been defects in the land system, whereby many were deprived of a share in their ancestral estates, political conditions often oppressive, and trade, which was now coming largely into the hands of Greeks because of the disasters which were inflicted on their former rivals, the Phoenicians, by their eastern neighbors. From Megara and Miletus, from Chalcis and Eretria, began an outpouring of eager traders, of the landless, the needy, the discontented, and the adventurous, who eventually planted colonies entirely around the Mediterranean and Euxine Seas. Between these colonies and the mother cities a rich stream of traffic flowed; the growth of trade stimulated manufactures and increased wealth. In the colonies there existed from the beginning greater equality than in the older communities, the land system was more equitable, and many men of humble birth came to wealth and power. Furthermore, with travel and success in new communities there was an expansion of mind, a sense of power acquired by prosperity, such as can always be observed under similar conditions. These developments had their reflex influence on the society of the mother cities, and both at home and in the colonies there came to pass those political and social changes to which I have referred above. But the most important result of these things for our present consideration was the fact that by these developments large numbers of men were awakened to self-consciousness, and that the first period of individualism in Greece was begun.

Whenever individuals come to self-consciousness, and have the leisure and security which were enjoyed in many Greek cities of this time as the result of improved social and economic conditions, men find not only the opportunity but also the occasion for reflection. This was the case in our period. Men began to think and question about themselves and the world around them, to reflect not only concerning the political and social world in which they lived, to ask what their place in it was, but also to inquire still deeper into the meaning of things. They debated with themselves questions relating to the gods, the nature and justice of their rule; and most significant for our present interest they began to ask whence men came and whither they were going. One great monument of this period is Hesiod’s “Works and Days,” of which I spoke in my last lecture. It is also important to remember that the seventh and sixth centuries were the age of the so-called Seven Wise Men, to whom were assigned many moral precepts which became revered proverbs in Greece. These sayings, no less than the works of Hesiod and the Gnomic Poets, bear witness to an age of increasing reflection.

In the seventh century Ionia controlled the trade between Asia and Europe. Its chief center was Miletus. Here in the first half of the sixth century before our era began Greek philosophy, with Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes as the leaders. The modest task which they set themselves was nothing less than the solution of the universe. Their philosophic views are of no special interest to us now; but it is a fact of supreme importance that here for the first time in Greece appeared men whose reflection had made them bold enough to wrestle with the whole problem of nature including man, and to propose solutions entirely at variance with the traditional views. This philosophic development was one result of the factors which we have been considering—factors which produced also new ethical and religious movements that do concern us directly.

With the emergence of Greece in the seventh century from the dark ages that followed the Mycenaean civilization, we find that certain beliefs, expressed or only hinted at in the Homeric poems, come to the surface, and that religious ideas imported from without make themselves manifest. The cult of the dead for example is almost passed over in silence by the Homeric poems. At the funeral pyre of Patroclus Achilles offered jars of oil and honey, and slew horses, dogs, and twelve Trojan youths[71]; but nowhere else is such a sacrifice mentioned in the Iliad. Likewise in the Odyssey the only instance of any similar offering is in the description of Odysseus’ visit to the borders of the realm of Hades to consult the shade of the seer Teiresias, where it is said that he dug a square pit, poured into it a triple chrism, and then after prayer and vows let the blood of a ram and a black ewe flow into it to attract the shades.[72] Yet we know from archeological and other evidence that the worship of the dead was common in Greece from the Minoan and Mycenaean times throughout antiquity. Ceremonial purification also, of which there are but few instances in Homer—and none of these is magical—now appears common, as a notion of impurity attaches to many conditions and acts which require expiation. The change in sentiment with regard to murder will serve as an illustration. In the Homeric poems killing brought no pollution either to the murderer or to his land; but in the Cyclic epics, which date from the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., bloodguilt required expiation just as in the later tragedies. So in the Aethiopis Achilles went to Lesbos to be cleansed from the stain of having slain Thersites. In fostering and directing rites of purification the oracle of Apollo at Delphi played an important part. There was developing, indeed there had been developing from an unknown period, a sense of defilement and of the necessity of cleansing. At this point, however, I must again speak a word of caution. We need to remember that morality develops slowly. It is undoubtedly a far cry from the morality of the seventh century to Plato’s definition of the impure man as the one whose soul is base, or to that motto which in a later century was written over the entrance of the shrine of Aesculapius at Epidaurus, “Piety consisteth in holy thoughts.” We must bear in mind that to the man of the seventh and sixth century sin and purification were primarily if not wholly ceremonial matters, and that his concept of future happiness was largely material. But the consequence of his feeling was great in future centuries.

Other phenomena of the seventh and sixth centuries require our notice at this point. We saw in the preceding lecture that the gaze of the Homeric man was fixed on this world with its victories and its defeats, that he viewed splendid action on the field and wise counsel in the assembly of the princes as the individual’s highest province and his supreme happiness. The world beyond this had no rewards comparable with those of this life; the greatest boon man could hope from the future was that his exploits here might become the subject of song for coming generations. Suffering he regarded as necessary that a higher purpose might be attained. “The will of Zeus was accomplished” was the explanation beyond which man might not go; he must find his comfort in such unity as that thought gave to the world. Hence arises that pathos and sadness which strike us again and again in Homer. But the new age sought relief by shifting its gaze from this world to the next and by expecting there the recompenses and balances which make life just and complete; for it the future life furnished an escape from the sufferings of this present existence. Moreover under the manifold influences which I have tried to sketch above, men began to be impressed with the unity which apparently underlay the variety of the phenomenal world. This is the problem of philosophy. It is true that the early Greek philosophers devoted themselves chiefly to the material world, of which they regarded man as a part; but in religion there resulted a tendency to pantheism, which saw behind the multitude of divinities one all-embracing god. Moreover there were not lacking thinkers to struggle with the question as to the way in which man could bring himself into accord with the unity of the world. So in spite of the individualism of this age we find it also an age of mysticism—which is the very opposite of individualism. The mystic always holds in greater or less degree the belief that by destroying that which sets off the individual from his fellows, that is, by uprooting personality through the destruction of the passions, or by some ecstatic state which takes one out of himself, man may attain to union with god and therefore to salvation. This belief may lead even to a religion without gods, or it may be bound to a belief in divinity. In Greece these tendencies were not fully developed for a considerable time, but we can see that in the seventh and sixth centuries the longing for future happiness, the desire for salvation, and the mystic means thereto were already potent elements in Greek thought. They showed themselves in various ways; one outlet for the religious longing was found in the religion of Dionysus, especially as it was incorporated in the beliefs of the Orphic sect.

Dionysus came late into Greek religion. As we have seen, in Homer he was not a member of the Olympic circle. Mythology has preserved many stories which bear witness to the opposition which his worship received as it spread over Greece. The newcomer, like Ares and the Muses, was a Thracian. His worship was introduced by immigrants and spread gradually to the south. Apparently the cult of the god was brought into Greece by more than one wave of immigration, and by more than one route. Thebes and Orchomenos in Boeotia were early centers of his worship, from which Delphi was later influenced. In the Peloponnesus probably Argolis received the new comer first. Even before the god was established in southern Greece he may have been carried to Crete directly from his northern home. The islands of the Aegean, the cities of Asia Minor, and ultimately the remote colonies knew the divinity. In Attica tradition said that his first home was in the country demes, notably at Icaria, where Americans excavated his shrine over twenty-five years ago. Probably the early rulers at Athens received the god into the city, but it was the Pisistratidae who especially favored his worship and gave him a home on the south side of the Acropolis, where the fifth century saw presented all the glories of the Attic stage.

The new god came as the god of all living things, of plants, trees, the lower animals, as well as of man. In short he was a nature divinity whose death was seen in the dead vegetation of winter and whose rebirth appeared with the revival of spring. His orgiastic rites no doubt were originally, in part at least, intended to recall the dead god to life. But in all such religions there is the tendency to see in the rebirth of the dead god the warrant of man’s future life. The hope is easily awakened that as the vegetation, whose life disappears in the ground, is revivified in the spring, so man, whose body also is laid in the earth, may be recalled to new life. The Dionysiac myth set forth the story of the god’s death and rebirth. It was natural then that men should feel that if they could secure union with the god, lose themselves in the divine, they too might attain immortality. Herodotus tells us that among the Thracian peoples the Getae believed that men at death went to dwell with their chief divinity beneath the earth.[73] Such hope of immortality Dionysus brought with him from his Thracian home.

The worship of this god was wholly unlike that of the Olympian gods. Under his influence his devotees, mostly women, in divine madness left their homes and daily tasks to roam the wild mountainside, clad no longer in their ordinary dress but wearing the skins of wild beasts, their flowing hair bound with ivy and wild bryony. In their excitement they were unconscious of time and place, unfettered by the normal limitations of human powers and sensibilities. Wild music stimulated their orgiastic dance; in frenzy they tore living creatures limb from limb, and devoured the raw dripping flesh, calling meantime on the god by name. This mad revel was continued until the participants fell exhausted to the ground.

We can well understand how these things shocked the earliest Hellenic spectators and why it was that in becoming a Greek god, Dionysus lost much of his wilder Thracian nature and the more savage elements of his cult. To this amelioration the Delphic oracle doubtless contributed. Yet it is certain that the ecstatic rites were known on Mt. Cithaeron and on the heights of Parnassos down to a late date. Elsewhere for the most part the excesses of the cult were checked and ordered by law. The Greeks had come to see that there was something more than extravagant madness in the wild Dionysiac revel. The possessed devotee was set free for the moment from the tangled net of daily life, gained for a brief time new and superhuman powers, a very foretaste of immortality. Not least of all he was made one with all nature that united to worship the one god. Now this escape from the daily round of human affairs, this desire for union with divinity, has constantly made its appearance in various times and under varied conditions; as we all know, it has led to extraordinary religious outbursts in both pagan and Christian ages.

Dionysus came also as god of wine. In the revival and elevation of the man, which the moderate use of wine gives, the Greek saw a divine mystery. Of course this use of wine is exactly parallel to the use of hashish and other narcotics for religious ends, and the ecstasy produced by music and the dance is familiar in the history of religion as a means to put individuals or whole companies into direct communication with the spirits or into union with a god.

Now it will readily be seen that this idea that the soul can be separated from the body and united with the god implies two things: first, a belief in a difference between soul and body which sets them off against each other, and secondly, a belief in the divine nature of the human soul. The former clearly established for the first time in Greek thought the concept of the dual ego, the double self, the significance of which we can hardly overestimate. We shall be concerned with it throughout the entire course of our considerations. The second made it easy for men to explain the source and destiny of the soul and to point out the means by which the soul must be set free to seek its natural destiny. The possibility that the soul, escaping from the body during the Dionysiac frenzy, might unite itself with god, might indeed become a god, so that the orgiastic devotee was given the divine name βάκχος—this showed the way by which man could secure immortality. He must loose his divine soul from the body that it might ultimately enjoy its divine life unhampered by earthly bonds and be forever with god.

According to the Dionysiac myth, which naturally varies much in details, the god was pursued by the Titans, the warring powers opposed to Zeus; in his distress Dionysus changed himself into various forms, finally into that of a bull which was torn to pieces and devoured by the Titans. But Athena saved the heart and gave it to Zeus who swallowed it. Hence sprang the new Dionysus. The Titans were ultimately destroyed by the thunderbolt of Zeus and their ashes scattered to the winds. You will at once notice the parallelism between this myth of Dionysus and those of Osiris, Attis, and Adonis. These are all gods who die and live again, and so become gods of life and death, divinities through whom man gains assurance of his own immortality. You will also notice in this myth of Dionysus how most ancient and crudest elements are united with a rather advanced attempt to wrestle with the problems of the world, and particularly with the problem of evil. Over against the beneficent divinity, or divinities, are set the Titans, powers of ill.

The myth became the basis of the spiritual belief and of the mystic ceremonial, and was made the center of that movement which we call Orphism. Who the founder, Orpheus, was, we cannot say. The ancients knew him as a Thracian, a magical musician, and also as a priest of Dionysus. In the popular tradition the musician overshadowed the priest. Yet he was regarded as the founder of the Bacchic or Dionysiac rites. The truth we can never know; but thus much is certain, that in the sixth century, possibly because of a second wave of Dionysiac religion, a movement appeared in which the religion of Dionysus was spiritualized and ennobled, and in which consecration, ceremonial holiness in this life, became the chief concern as the means of securing that immortality which would follow. The movement, however, which may have been stimulated by a feeling of dissatisfaction with the traditional religion, was only one prominent manifestation of the general mysticism which showed itself in many forms during the sixth century. Pythagoreanism was closely allied to it. Indeed some think Orphism only a collective name for the mysticism of the time.

Our information as to the beginning and earliest forms of Orphism is scanty and mostly late. But considering the influence which Orphic ideas had in the fifth century, for example on Pindar, Empedocles, and Plato, not to speak of the latter Neoplatonists, we are justified in regarding the sect as of great significance. And we have a warrant for attributing to the sixth century doctrines which are consistently set forth by our witnesses, especially by Empedocles and Plato, so that with due caution we may use also the fragmentary Orphic literature with some confidence.

We do not know where Orphism started. In Greece proper, Delphi, Thebes, and Athens were prominent centers; in greater Greece, Croton in southern Italy, Camarina and Syracuse in Sicily. Some would regard southern Italy, and specifically the city of Croton, as the home of the movement; possibly they are correct, for tradition told of three great Orphics at the court of Pisistratus. They were Zopyrus of Heraclea, Orpheus of Croton, and Onomacritus, who formed part of the commission which is said to have arranged the Homeric poems at the orders of the Athenian tyrant. Whatever the truth of the tradition in detail is, it is significant that two of the three came from southern Italy; and the name of one of the commission, Orpheus, marks him as a devotee. Yet Athens became the literary center, if I may use the term, for the diffusion of Orphism.

The Orphic religion was distinguished from the popular religions by having a body of belief and a method of life. Undoubtedly the beliefs of the sect were enlarged and modified from age to age; but the Orphics had a unity which is remotely comparable to that of Christian churches. Of the organization of the brotherhoods we know little, but probably they were loosely bound together in a manner similar to those of the religious associations known to us from later times. Nor can we tell whether the Orphics were numerous. Probably they were not; but in any case their mysteries and teachings were important and influential; they introduced new ideas which were destined to produce profound changes in Greek religious thought.

With the varied details of the grotesque Orphic theogonies we are not now concerned. They were similar to those of Hesiod and others in their main lines, but they owe their importance for us now to the fact that they exhibit a pantheism which is opposed to the common polytheistic theology of the time; they endeavor to show that deity is one and universal under whatever form or appearance. To this universal divinity they give the name now of Zeus, now of Dionysus, the greatest of the children of Zeus; at times he is called also Zagreus. Certain Orphic verses clearly express this pantheistic thought: “One Zeus, one Hades, one Sun, one Dionysus, one god in all.”[74] And again: “Zeus was the first, Zeus of the flashing lightning bolt the last; Zeus the head, Zeus the middle; from Zeus have all things been made. Zeus was the foundation of the earth and of the starry heaven; Zeus was male, Zeus was the bride immortal; Zeus the breath of all things, Zeus the rush of the flame unwearied; Zeus the source of the sea, Zeus the sun and the moon; Zeus the king, Zeus of the flashing lightning the beginning of all things. For he concealed all and again brought them forth from his sacred heart to the glad light, working wondrous things.”[75]

You will remember that in the myth of the rending of Dionysus by the Titans, these powers of evil were burned to ashes by the thunderbolt of Zeus. According to one version of the story man is formed from these ashes, which contain the element of the divine, taken in by the Titans when they devoured the god. Thus man is of a two-fold nature, his soul divine, Dionysiac, his body evil, Titanic. On an Orphic tablet found in a grave in southern Italy the soul declares: “I am a child of earth and the starry heaven, but my race is from heaven. This ye know yourselves.” Here we have a complete expression of man’s duality: his body is of the earth, but his soul is of celestial origin. The descent of the soul was due to sin; wind-borne—as Empedocles says of himself, “an exile from god and a wanderer,”[76] it entered into the body, in which prison it was condemned to live until such time as it might be delivered. Clement of Alexandria, quoting the Pythagorean Philolaus of the fifth century B.C., reports: “The ancient theologians and seers bear witness that for a punishment the soul is yoked with the body and buried in it as in a tomb.”[77] This figure of the body as the prison-house or the tomb of the soul was used by Plato, as we shall have occasion to see in a later lecture.

Man’s hope, therefore, according to the Orphic, lies in deliverance from his body, the Titan element of his nature, that the Dionysiac part, his soul, may be free and untrammelled. Yet one might not of his own motion cast off his body by a physical act, for a round is prescribed by necessity.

After death the soul was fated to pass to Hades and then from its sojourn there into another body, and so on. This doom was the result of sin. To hasten the process and escape from evil, “to end the cycle and have respite from sin,” a course of life was necessary, which was defined by the Orphic teaching. The requirements of the Orphic life seem to us trivial and absurd for the most part. Apparently abstinence from flesh was required, except perhaps at certain sacramental festivals; this prohibition was of course due to the doctrine of metempsychosis. No bloody sacrifices were allowed for the same reason. The use of eggs and beans was forbidden, for these articles were associated with the worship of the dead; and burial in woolen garments was likewise wrong. Besides these taboos certain rites existed of which we get only hints. There were liturgies, initiations, magic incantations which seem to show that in time at least an elaborate ritual was developed. All these things were the means by which the soul might be purified from its sin which condemned it to the prison of the body, and which pursued it through incarnation after incarnation.

After death, as I have said, the soul awaited in Hades its rebirth, but its stay in Hades, like its life on earth, was a period of reward or punishment: “They who are righteous beneath the rays of the sun, when they die have a gentler lot in a fair meadow by deep-flowing Acheron.... But they who have worked wrong and insolence beneath the rays of the sun are led down beneath Cocytus’s watery plain into chill Tartarus.”[78] So this stay in Hades was a period of punishment and of purification, as life itself was a period of penance. The duration of this intermediate stay in Hades was conceived perhaps as a thousand years. In any case, after due season the soul entered upon a new incarnation, which apparently was determined by the innocence or guilt of its former life. Rebirth was not always into human form, as the Orphic verses show: “Wherefore the changing soul of man, in the cycles of time, passes into various creatures: sometimes it enters a horse, ... again it is a sheep, then a bird dread to see; again it has the form of a dog with heavy voice, or as a chill snake creeps along the ground.”[79] The poet-philosopher Empedocles declared that before his present existence he had been “a youth, a maiden, a bush, a bird, and a fish of the sea.”[80] So the soul was buffeted from birth to death and back to birth again. Of those who had been guilty of most grievous sins Empedocles says: “There is an oracle of Necessity, an ancient, eternal decree of the gods sealed with strong oaths: when one in sin stains his hands with murder, or when another joining in strife swears falsely, they become the spirits who have long life as their portion, who are doomed to wander thrice ten thousand seasons far from the blessed, being born in the course of time into all forms of mortal creatures, shifting along life’s hard paths. For the might of the air drives them to the sea and the sea spews them on the ground, and the land bares them to the rays of the bright sun, and the sun throws them in whirls of ether. One receives them from another, but all hate them. Of this number am even I now, an exile from god and a wanderer, for I put my trust in mad strife.”[81] The number of reincarnations was not fixed so far as we know, though apparently ten thousand years was thought to be the limit of the process for the ordinary soul. Probably it was believed that there was no end of rebirths for the wicked, but that they were condemned to their repeated fate forever; or that they were doomed to endless punishment without rebirths.

But you may ask, what was the ultimate fate of the purified soul? To this, too, we can give no complete answer. Apparently the soul, stripped at last of all that was earthly and defiling, was then thought to be first truly free and alive. On Orphic tablets of the fourth century before our era found in southern Italy we read these words of the triumphant soul: “I have escaped from the sorrowful, weary round, I have entered with eager feet the ring desired. I have passed to the bosom of the mistress queen of the lower world.” And it is greeted in answer: “O happy and blessed one, thou shalt be god instead of mortal.”[82] Apparently the purified soul left earth and Hades behind. There is no hint of absorption into god; no idea of Nirvana. The spirit of Greek thought required that the individuality of the soul should be retained. No doubt the Orphics conceived of every kind of heaven that was possible, many of them of most materialistic nature. Indeed, Plato reproaches some of them for believing future happiness to be a perpetual drunken round.

For the sinful, torments of a most fearful sort were reserved: not only did they lie in mud and filth, but they were exposed to most terrible creatures who rent their vitals. In short, the Orphic hell was not less awful physically than that of the medieval and later Christian, which in no small part was inherited from the Orphics.

Before we go on to consider other movements of the sixth century, let us summarize briefly the contributions of the Orphics to Greek religious thought. In the first place they definitely shifted man’s look from this world to the world beyond. In Homer, as we have seen, this world offered all for which man could hope; but to the Orphic, as to the devoted sectaries of all redemptive religions, this world was unimportant compared with the next in which he was to realize his fondest desires. Again the Orphics emphasized the duality of man, regarding him as a divine soul imprisoned in a sinful body. They made the divinity of the soul a motive for the religious life, the aim of which was to free the spirit of man from the sin which visits him in the prison-house of the flesh. Thereby they started the tendency to religious asceticism which was to be sharply emphasized by Christianity when a thousand years had past. Their doctrine of the divine nature of the soul they also made the basis of their belief in the soul’s immortality; for if the soul is divine, it must be eternally so. Furthermore, so far as we can know, they introduced the idea of pre-natal sin for which the individual soul must pay the penalty. It needs no argument to show the intrinsic importance of these ideas; as we go on, we shall have occasion to observe their significance in Greek religious thought.

Less valuable in itself, but not less persistent, as we can still see in our own Christian church, was the notion that only the initiates, who by purificatory rites had been received into the sacred association, could hope for salvation. Union with the divine nature and future blessedness were thus made to depend on sacraments rather than on virtue. Indeed, we need not suppose that here any more than in the mysteries at Eleusis there was originally any requirement of a virtuous life. But reason and an awakened ethical sense among the Greeks began early to demand of the initiates compliance with the recognized standards of morality, as the passages already quoted show; and there can be no doubt that in due time most of the various mysteries contributed to the ethical life. Yet the inevitable tendency in the opposite direction made itself felt and there were many Orphic charlatans and quacks who promised salvation to all who would undergo the cheap rites of their initiations.

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We must now glance at a contemporaneous and related movement—I mean Pythagoreanism, which will have sprung into the thoughts of many of you already.

Whether Orphism learned from Pythagoras or Pythagoras from Orphism cannot be determined; but it seems probable that Croton was already an Orphic center when about 530 B.C. Pythagoras of Samos after long travels established there an association which combined in a way hitherto unknown religious and philosophic aims. Pythagoras may have attached himself to some group of Orphics already in existence and have inspired it with his political and philosophic interests. In any case his society, which was opposed to the democratic temper of Croton, became in time important enough to be regarded with suspicion and forced to move to Metapontum; ultimately the members were dispersed carrying their doctrines with them throughout the Greek world.

Our knowledge of the philosophic ideas of Pythagoras himself amounts to little. It is clear that in contrast to the emotional Orphics he was interested in intellectual pursuits, especially in mathematics; more than that we cannot say; our present concern lies rather in the ethical and religious views and practices of the society which he established. This set high store on ethical discipline, following a strict course of life, for the ultimate aim was identical with that of the Orphics—salvation and release from sin. Like them the Pythagoreans also held to the doctrine of the transmigration of souls. Their rules enjoined simplicity of food, rare use of meat, and abstention from the eating of beans and eggs. But more important was the discipline which was prescribed for the mind and soul. The applicant for admission to the brotherhood was first tested to determine his fitness. The neophyte was bound to silence and obedience. “The master said it” was argument enough for him. The members devoted themselves to reflection, to self-examination, to the pursuit of the truth. Their highest aim was “to follow god.” Although the Pythagoreans fixed their gaze more on this world than the Orphics did, they also were of great religious significance. They emphasized the duality of man, the moral obligation of the individual, and especially the possibility of training and purifying the soul, and so helped to establish a spiritual heritage for later centuries.

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Now I shall invite your attention to a third manifestation of the mystic tendency of this age. Fourteen miles northwest of Athens, between a fertile plain and the sea, lies the ancient town of Eleusis, the center of the most important mysteries in Greece. The story of Demeter is familiar to us all—the goddess whose daughter, Persephone or Kore, was carried off by the god of the lower world. According to the Homeric hymn to Demeter, the mother wandered fasting in search of her daughter over the earth. She came to Eleusis in the guise of an old woman, where she was found by the daughters of the king, Keleos, who took her to their home. There she was kindly received, and was installed as nurse to the infant son of the king. Under her care the child prospered and grew marvellously, for quite secretly Demeter anointed him with ambrosia, breathed upon him, and cherished him in her bosom. By night she hid him “like a brand in the fire ..., for she would have made him free from age and death forever.”

But the queen saw her and cried out in dismay. The goddess was angry, yet none the less promised glory imperishable; she declared herself: “I am the honored Demeter, who am the greatest good and joy to immortals and mortals alike. Come, let all the people build me a mighty temple and hard by it an altar beneath your town and its steep wall, above Callichoros on the jutting spur. But the rites I will myself prescribe, that here ever after you may duly perform them and appease my will.” So the temple and altar to the goddess were built, but she still mourned for her lost daughter. In her sorrow she held back the seedgrain in the ground and all man’s plowing was vain, so that the race of men had nearly perished from the earth if it had not been for Zeus, who interposed and finally restored Persephone to her mother—but not forever. Before she left the house of the dead, Pluto had made her eat a pomegranate seed by which she was bound to return beneath the earth. So she spent two-thirds of each year with her mother on the earth, coming “when the ground blossomed with fragrant flowers,” but returning to the lord of the dead when the flowers faded and the grass withered before the coming of winter. Zeus then summoned Demeter to join the immortal gods on Olympus; but before she went, “she quickly sent up the grain from the fertile ground, and all the broad earth was heavy with leaves and with flowers. And the goddess went and taught the kings who deal out justice, Triptolemus and Diocles the charioteer, mighty Eumolpus, and Keleos, leader of the people. To them she showed the manner of her rites and to them all her mysteries, holy, which none may transgress or enquire into or make known. For a great curse of the gods restrains men’s speech. Happy is he whoever of men dwelling on this earth has seen these things! But he who is uninitiate in these holy rites, who has no share in them, never hath equal lot in death in the shadowy gloom.” So says the Homeric hymn to Demeter, which was composed, according to the general opinion of scholars, in the seventh century before our era.

Thus we see that before this hymn was written the myth was fully developed at Eleusis. There Demeter, Kore, and Pluto had their place, and with them were associated certain heroic personages. A temple and altar to the two goddesses already existed, and mysteries were celebrated which gave to those who might see them and share in them the warrant of a better lot in death than that for which the uninitiate might hope. The date at which the mysteries were established cannot be determined. This is no place for the speculations of the learned in detail, but they seem to have existed as early as the eighth century, and indeed they probably go back to a much remoter antiquity; yet there is no mention of them in Homer or Hesiod. In their earliest form they evidently consisted of certain religious ceremonies connected with agriculture by which the dead grain was called to life in the spring. The grain and the earth from which it sprang were worshipped as the corn-mother, Demeter, and then by a development natural in such religions the goddess was doubled and Kore, the maiden, came into existence beside Demeter. In the cult of these goddesses various rites had developed—fasting, purifications, and night vigils; a myth grew up to explain the ritual and the relation of the two goddesses, with whom a god of the dead was early associated; so something like the story in the Homeric hymn came into being. The agricultural festival was gradually transformed into one of profound meaning, by partaking in which one gained an assurance of future happiness. The wonderful miracle of reviving vegetation, of the grain which dies in the ground and springs anew to life, has often served as the warrant of man’s longing for a revival of his own life, as an assurance of his hope of immortality. So gods and goddesses of agriculture or of vegetation, which grows and dies and grows again, have become for men the lords of life and death, as we have already seen in the case of Dionysus.

The English word mystery is somewhat misleading in such a connection. A mystery in the Greek sense is a secret ritual to which only those may be admitted who have first been prepared by some rites of purification or probation. Such, for example, is the Christian Eucharist to which the Greek word μυστήριον was freely applied. After the proper ritual of initiation, through which the neophyte is guided by one previously initiate and expert, he may take part in the secret performances, which are thought to confer some special power or to bring him into close and privileged relation to divinity.

Originally the festival at Eleusis belonged to a noble Eleusinian family, or possibly to two families. In the seventh century Eleusis was incorporated with Attica; an Eleusinion, a shrine to Demeter of Eleusis, was built near the city; and the privilege of sharing in the festival was apparently given to all Athenians. The mysteries were especially fostered in the sixth century by the tyrant Pisistratus, who built a new hall of initiation which was destroyed by the Persians during their great invasion. Under Pisistratus the mysteries may have been opened to the whole Hellenic world. In the fifth century the broad formula of admission was: “Whoever has pure hands and speaks our tongue.” Eleusis shared in the glory of Athens’ greatest period, and even in the time of Athenian weakness and decay the mysteries retained much of their ancient prestige. Many Romans, including some of the imperial house, were initiated, and the popularity of Eleusis continued as late as the third and fourth centuries. Julian the Apostate in his youth was here initiated. In 364 A.D. the Emperor Valentinian I forbade all nocturnal festivals, including that at Eleusis, but when the pro-consul of Achaea declared that the people could not live without the mysteries, he relaxed his prohibition so far as they were concerned. Thirty-two years later Alaric destroyed the sanctuary, and its long history, which began before history, seemed closed. Yet Eleusis was true to Demeter, for in spite of the iconoclastic tendencies of the Greek Church, the inhabitants continued to worship as St. Demetra a mutilated ancient statue of the goddess, until in 1801 the Englishmen Clarke and Cripps carried it off to its present resting-place in the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge.

The mysteries were under the general charge of the King Archon and his assistants at Athens, but the officials proper continued to be drawn from the two sacred families of the Eumolpidae and Ceryces. From the former was selected the highest official, the hierophant, who held office for life. He alone had the right to show or to explain the secret objects and ceremonies. The next three priests were taken from the Ceryces, and like the hierophant were chosen for life; they were the torch-bearer, dadouchos, who carried the sacred torch at sacrifices and purifications, the altar-priest, and the sacred herald, hieroceryx. Besides these four high officials we know of a considerable number of lesser priests and priestesses, heralds, and secular officers who do not concern us now.

The would-be initiate applied to someone belonging to either of the sacred Eleusinian families to act as mystagogue and lead him through the preliminary purification, which seems to have been essentially identical with that employed to purify any unclean person; this done, the mystagogue duly presented the novice to the officials and recommended him as a proper person to be initiated. There were two degrees of the secret rites: in the first the novices were initiated and became mystae; in the second they advanced to be epoptae, those to whom were made special revelations not vouchsafed to the mystae.