Chapter IV · PRE-CHRISTIAN GNOSTICS: THE ORPHICI

All scholars seem now agreed that the legendary Orpheus never really existed^[368], and that the many verses and poems attributed to him were the work of various hands, one of the earliest of their authors being Onomacritos of Athens, who fled with the Pisistratids to the court of Darius at Susa in the first decade of the Vth century B.C.^[369] Yet there is little doubt that the peculiar myths alluded to in these poems were known at an early date in Crete, whence they probably found their way into Athens with Epimenides, the Cretan wizard or wise man who was sent for to purify the city from the guilt incurred by the murder of Cylon^[370]. This event evidently marks a turning on the part of the Greeks towards purifications and other magical rites unknown in Homer’s time^[371]; but the tendency, 122to whomever due in the first instance, undoubtedly received a great impulse from the break-up of the Pythagorean school in Italy about 500 B.C.^[372] This event, which in its effects may be compared to the dispersion of the priestly corporations of Babylon and Egypt which followed Alexander’s conquests, sent wandering a great number of speculative philosophers trained in the formation of associations for political and other purposes, and they probably joined forces with a previously existing Orphic sect, nearly all the early Orphic poems being ascribed, with more or less likelihood, to Pythagoreans^[373]. There are certain features in these poems which, if we met with them after the reform of the Zoroastrian religion by the Sassanian kings, we should certainly attribute to Persian influence; but this can hardly be done so long as we remain ignorant of what the Persian religion was in the time of the Achaemenides. The most probable account of the matter is that the religious teaching attributed to Orpheus was of Asiatic and particularly of Phrygian provenance, that it had long been current in Crete and the other islands of the Mediterranean, that a part of it came into Greece through Thrace in the time of the Pisistratids, and that it was finally put into an organized and consistent shape by those Pythagorean philosophers who made their way back to Greece after the overthrow of their political power in Magna Graecia^[374]. It found in Pindar a warm adherent, and was well known to and spoken of with reverence by the three great 123tragic poets Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides^[375]. Its greatest influence, however, was probably exerted through the Eleusinian and other mysteries which it captured and transformed. It continued to dominate them from before the time of Herodotus down to the prohibition of these secret rites by the Christian emperors, and Orpheus was thus said by everyone to be their founder^[376].

The whole of this teaching centred round the legend of Dionysos who is described by Herodotus as the youngest—that is to say the last-adopted—of the great gods of Greece^[377]. This Orphic Dionysos was the Cretan form of the god worshipped all round the Mediterranean, who was always represented in human form, and as suffering a violent death and then rising again from the dead. But to this nucleus, the Orphic poets added at different times and by degrees a great quantity of other myths which together formed a complete body of doctrine setting forth the origin of the world, and of man, and his life after death. First, they said, existed Chronos or Time “who grows not old,” from whom sprang Aether and the formless Chaos. From these was formed a silver egg which, bursting in due time, disclosed Eros, or Phanes the first born, a shining god, with wings upon his shoulders, at once male and female, and having within himself the seeds of all creatures. Phanes creates the Sun and Moon and also Night, and from Night begets Uranos and Gaea (Heaven and Earth). These two give birth to the Titans, among whom is Kronos, who emasculates his father Uranos and succeeds to his throne. He is in turn deposed by Zeus, who swallows Phanes, and thus becomes the father of gods and men^[378].

124This part of the Orphic story comes to us almost entirely from Neo-Platonic sources, and possesses several variants. It is so manifestly an attempt to reconcile the popular theology of Greece found in Homer and Hesiod with different Oriental ideas of the origin of the world that we might consider it to have been concocted in post-Christian times, were it not that Aristophanes had evidently heard about Chaos and the mundane egg, and its production of Eros and Night, which confused genealogy he burlesques in The Birds^[379]. It is probable also, as Alfred Maury pointed out, that this legend was first taken by the Orphics from the philosophers of Ionia, and especially from that Pherecydes of Syros who is said to have been Pythagoras’ master^[380]. Attempts have been made to derive it from Indian, Egyptian, Chaldaean, and even Jewish sources; but its resemblances to parallel beliefs among some or all of these nations are too few and sparse for any useful conclusion to be drawn from them. One of its most marked features is its succession of divine rulers of the universe, which the Orphics made use of to exalt their own god Dionysos to the highest rank. The story they told of this Dionysos was that he was originally the Phanes whom Zeus swallowed, but that at his second birth he became the offspring of Zeus by Persephone, the daughter whom Zeus had himself begotten on one of the earth-goddesses who is sometimes called Rhea, sometimes Cybele, and sometimes Demeter. Persephone, described by the Orphics as the “especial” or “single” daughter of Zeus^[381], was seduced by her father in 125the form of a serpent, and in due course brought to light Dionysos, sometimes called Zagreus or “the Hunter.” This god, who had the horns of a bull^[382], became the darling of his father, who destined him for his successor and allowed him, while yet a child, to sit on his throne and to wield the thunder-bolts^[383]. But the Titans, the monstrous sons of Earth, either spurred on by jealousy at the child being given the sovereignty of the world, or incited thereto by Hera, laid a plot for his destruction. Beguiling him with childish toys such as a top, a hoop, and a mirror, they stole upon him unawares with blackened faces, and, in spite of his struggles and his transformation into many shapes, tore him limb from limb, cooked his several members in a cauldron, and ate them. The heart, however, was saved from them by Pallas Athene, who bore it to Zeus, who swallowed it, and it thus passed into the Theban Dionysos, son of Zeus and Semele, who was in turn Zagreus re-born. Zeus also blasted the Titans with his lightning, while he ordered Apollo to collect the uneaten members of the little god and to bury them at Delphi. A variant or perhaps a continuation of the story makes Demeter, having, as the earth goddess, received the members of the little god, put them together and revivify them, and join herself in marriage with the resuscitated corpse, whence the infant Iacchos is born^[384].

126In this part of the story, also, the desire of the authors to fit it in with the existing mythology is manifest. At Eleusis from very early times there had been worshipped with mysterious rites a divine couple who were known only as “the God” and “the Goddess^[385].” This pair were, as we may guess from an allusion in Hesiod, otherwise called Zeus Chthonios or the infernal Zeus, god of the underworld, and Demeter^[386], the ancient earth-goddess, who was worshipped with her lover under the various names of Ma, Cybele, Astarte, Rhea and Isis throughout Asia Minor, Syria, Phoenicia and Egypt. As the lover of the earth-goddess in all these cases suffered death and resurrection, the Orphics had to work these episodes into the history of their Dionysos Zagreus. But they carried the idea further than any of their predecessors by connecting this death and re-birth with the origin of man and his survival after death^[387]. Man, 127they said, was made out of the ashes of the Titans, and was therefore born to sorrow, his soul being buried in his body as in a charnel-house^[388]. But he also had within him a spark of the life of Zagreus, the infant ruler of the universe^[389], and this enables him to purify himself from the guilt of the earthborn Titans, and so to leave the circle of existence and cease from wickedness. For that the soul of man after leaving his body went, unless purified, to inhabit the bodies of other men and even animals, passing from one to the other as in a wheel or endless chain, was a dogma which the Orphics had taken over from the Pythagoreans^[390]. How now was this purification to be obtained?

The answer that the earlier Orphics gave to this question must have astonished the pleasure-loving and artistic Greeks. The true Orphic, they were told, must make his whole earthly 128life a preparation for the next. He must partake at least once of a mystic sacrifice, in which a living animal was, in memory of the fate of Zagreus, torn in pieces and eaten raw; but thereafter he must never again eat any food that has had life nor even eggs, and he must observe perfect chastity^[391], and wear only linen garments even at his burial, nor must he go near a sepulchre.

“We aim at a holy life, whence I am become a mystes of Idaean [i.e. Cretan] Zeus,” says the Orphic in a surviving fragment of Euripides’ Cretenses, “and having completed the life of night-wandering Zagreus and the raw flesh-devouring feasts, I uplifted the torches of the mountain mother, and having been purified by expiatory offerings, I was hailed as Bacchus by the Curetes.... But now clothed in white garments, I fly the generation of mortals, and to a corpse I draw not nigh, and I shun the eating of things which have had life^[392].”

The meaning of this is fairly plain and is in everything a great deal more magical than religious. By a well-known rule common to nearly all people in a low state of culture, the victim sacrificed to a god becomes a god himself^[393]; and, as the eating of the victim makes him part of the eater, it has the same effect on the votary as the swallowing of Phanes by Zeus had upon this last, the Dionysiac soul in the participant of the sacrifice is thereby strengthened, and he becomes so far identified with the god as to bear his name. Henceforth, however, he must have no further dealings with Titanic matter, and in particular must shun the corpse which represents the Titanic part of man without the Dionysiac, and must do nothing which can start 129another being on “the ceaseless round of changing existences^[394].” If he were successful in observing these austerities to the end, he might hope that, when his soul was released from its prison house, it would be reunited to Dionysos, and rest for ever free from the stains of matter. This was in effect the formal teaching of Pythagoras with regard to the transmigration of souls, and depended on the view that the soul, or incorporeal part of man, had once formed part of the soul of the universe diffused throughout Nature. “I have heard,” says Cicero, “that Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans ... never doubted but that we possess minds plucked from the universal divine mind”; a phrase that he explains in discussing the nature of the gods by saying that Pythagoras “thought there was a mind spread through and pervading the whole nature of things whence our minds are plucked^[395].” A similar doctrine of transmigration appears clearly in Pindar^[396], who was one of the first to give voice to the Orphic teaching, which his lays did much to diffuse. The addition that the Orphic poets made to the doctrine was doubtless the attribution to Dionysos and the Eleusinian goddess of the task of presiding over and arranging these rebirths.

Yet the austerities prescribed by the Orphic life, however fitted to a philosophic school, could hardly be practised by people engaged in the business of the world. It was impossible, as the Pythagoreans had probably found, for people to devote themselves entirely to the welfare of their souls, and yet to live among their fellows. Hence some other means by which man could be assured a happy lot after death had to be devised, and there seems 130no doubt that the post-Pythagorean Orphics taught that this was to be found in participation in the mysteries or secret rites already in existence in Greece before the commencement of their teaching. Whether the Eleusinian Mysteries were in their inception anything more than the worship of the Chthonian or infernal deities, as the gods presiding over agriculture and vegetation considered as a symbol of generation and death, is still undecided^[397]; but there can be no doubt that under Orphic influence they underwent a complete change. Dionysos, identified with Hades or Zeus Chthonios, begins, after the break-up of the Pythagorean school, to take part in them by the side of Demeter and Persephone, and the story of his mysterious birth from the goddess, and his identification as Zagreus with Iacchos, the child-god leading the procession, seems from this period onwards to have been told in them^[398]. But the mode in which the Mysteries were regarded by the Greeks in general materially altered after the introduction of the Orphic teaching, and this also can hardly be attributed to anything else than the direct influence of its professors. We are told on all sides that no religious teaching formed part of the Mysteries of Eleusis, and that on the contrary the initiates were simply shown certain scenes and objects, and heard certain mysterious words on which they were left to put their own 131interpretation^[399]. But the Orphics discovered in them a sacramental or purifying grace which was thought to have a kind of magical effect on the lot alike in this life and after death of those who took part in them. It was enough to have seen these mysteries, as the poets aver^[400], for man’s place in the next world to be changed for the better, and thus it is the knowledge thus obtained, and not conduct or favour, which is thought to influence his destiny. The doctrine thus baldly stated moved to indignation Diogenes the Cynic, who pointed out that Patecion the brigand, who had been initiated, had earned for himself by this one act happiness after death, while Epaminondas, best of patriots, by the fact that he had not been initiated, was condemned to be plunged in mud and to undergo other tortures^[401].

The very important part in Orphic practice played by this belief in the magical power of initiation has lately been put beyond doubt by the discovery of certain inscriptions in the tombs of worshippers of the Orphic deities at places so far apart as Petelia in Magna Graecia, Calabria, Eleutherna in Crete, Naples, and Rome. On palaeographic grounds their dates are said to range over at least three centuries, the earliest having apparently been made in the IVth or IIIrd century B.C., and the latest in the Ist or IInd century of our era. They are all engraved on thin gold plates, are in Greek hexameter verse, and in the opinion of scholars are all taken from the same ritual, and therefore afford evidence of the permanence and fixity as well as of the wide spread of the Orphic teaching^[402]. They contain instructions 132to the dead as to the things to be done and avoided by him or her in the next world and also the formulas to be repeated to the powers there met with, which will have the effect of magically procuring for the deceased an exalted rank among its inhabitants. One of the earliest in date, found at Petelia and now in the British Museum, runs thus:

“Thou shalt find to the left of the House of Hades a well-spring

And by the side thereof standing a white cypress.

To the well-spring approach not near;

But thou shalt find another by the Lake of Memory.

Cold water flowing forth, and there are guardians before it.

Say: I am a child of Earth and of Starry Heaven^[403]

But my race is of Heaven (above). This you know yourselves.

And lo! I am parched with thirst and I perish, Give me quickly

The cold water flowing forth from the Lake of Memory^[404].

And of themselves they will give me to drink from the Holy Well-Spring.”

Another set of plates from tombs at Eleutherna, now in the National Museum at Athens, is to this effect:

“I am parched with thirst and I perish.—Nay, drink of Me

The well-spring flowing for ever on the right where the cypress is

Who art thou?...

Whence art thou? I am the son of Earth and of Starry Heaven.”

The magical and gnostical purport of this is plain. As in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, to which these plates bear a great resemblance, their aim was to give the deceased person in whose tomb the inscription was buried^[405], the knowledge of the infernal or subterranean regions which was to make his entry into them safe and profitable. That his soul or immaterial 133part was a part of Dionysos, the descendant of Uranos and Gê^[406], and more directly the offspring of Demeter the earth-goddess by Zeus, the god of the sky, had already been shown to the dead on his initiation. But it was necessary that he should prove to the gods of death and generation that he knew this, when they would have no alternative but to admit him to all the privileges attached to his high descent and the rank he had attained in the scale of being by initiation. This is made plainer still by the statements put into the mouth of the dead by the gold plates from Naples, now in the Naples Museum, which read thus:

“Out of the Pure I come, Pure Queen of those Below,

And Eukles and Eubouleus^[407] and other Gods and Demons;

For I also avow that I am of blessed race.

And I have paid the penalty for deeds unrighteous

Whether it is that Fate laid me low, or the Gods Immortal,

Or [that Zeus has struck me?] with star-flung thunderbolt

I have flown out of the sorrowful weary Wheel;

I have passed with eager feet to the Circle desired;

I have sunk beneath the bosom of Despoena^[408], Queen of the Underworld

I have passed with eager feet to [or from] the Circle desired;

And now I come a suppliant to Holy Persephone

That of her grace she receive me to the seats of the Hallowed.”

Then comes Persephone’s answer

“Happy and Blessed One, Thou shalt be God instead of Mortal,”

134while a prose formula “A kid I have fallen into milk” which seems to have been a password among the Orphics is written in the midst of the verses and appears upon this and several of the other plates^[409].

In the Naples plate, we have the teaching, more or less dimly indicated in the quotations from the Orphic poems which occur in classical and patristic writers, brought to a focus. The dead has during his earthly life taken part in the mystic rites which have told him whence life comes and whither it is tending. He now has the right to demand from the deities who preside over the death and rebirth of mortals that he be relieved from the endless round of incarnations; and he backs up this request by proof of the knowledge he possesses of their nature and his own origin, at the same time uttering passwords which he has received on his initiation. The effect of this, although out of reverence represented as an act of grace on the part of the divinities addressed, is in fact magical or automatic. The powers addressed perforce grant the request of the dead and he becomes like them a god^[410], freed from the necessity for any further deaths and rebirths. The same idea is traceable throughout the whole of the Egyptian Book of the Dead from which it may have been directly derived^[411], and also in other 135religions with which it would seem the Orphic teaching can have had no connection^[412]. But the point to remember at present is that it appears henceforward in all the cults or sects to which we have given the generic name of Gnostic^[413].

How this idea was propagated in Greece and her colonies is a question over which still hangs a great deal of obscurity. There exist a great number of quotations from poems attributed to Orpheus, which were clearly the composition of the Orphic school, and all these are, like the gold plates, in hexameter verse. These, as Damascius implies, were recited by professional declaimers called Rhapsodists^[414] at the different games and festivals held in honour of the gods, as were once the so-called Homeric Hymns and the poems of Pindar, which they perhaps succeeded and displaced. In this way they doubtless became familiar to many thousands who would otherwise never have heard of the Orphic teaching, and our conviction on this point is strengthened when we see how very numerous the festivals in which the Chthonian gods were celebrated really were. Besides Eleusis, we hear of the worship of Dionysos, Demeter and Persephone as infernal deities in Achaea, in the Argolid, in Arcadia, in Messenia, in Sparta, and in other parts of the Peloponnesus^[415]. It also spread through Boeotia, where the national cult of Dionysos no doubt ensured it a good reception, and thence early passed into the islands of the Aegean. Crete had, as we have seen, practised it even before it came to Athens; and Demeter and Persephone were not only worshipped in Sicily, but were taken to be the tutelary gods of the island. The Ionian colonists also took the worship of the Eleusinian triad with them into Asia and they were adored in parts of 136Asia Minor as far distant from Greece as Cyzicus^[416]. At all, or nearly all, these places, mysteries were celebrated having more or less likeness to those of Eleusis, and were followed by games and festivals like the Eleusinia, at which the songs of the Rhapsodists would be heard^[417]. The frequent Dionysia, or festivals of Dionysos, scattered all over the Greek-speaking world, but especially in its Northern or Balkan provinces, no doubt offered an even better opportunity for making known these poems.

The Orphic poets, also, by no means confined their songs to the worship of the deities adored at Eleusis. The Thracians, including in that name the inhabitants of Macedonia and Thessaly, always had extraordinary ideas about the future life, and Herodotus describes how they used to gather weeping round the new-born child, bewailing his entry into this miserable world, while they rejoiced over the death of any of their fellows, declaring that he had thus obtained a happy deliverance from his troubles^[418]. These, however, were the very doctrines of the Orphics, who declared that the body was the grave of the soul, and that the life of the world to come was the only one worth living. Hence the mythical Orpheus was said to have been a Thracian, and the worship of Bacchus or the Theban Dionysos as the god of wine to have come into Attica from Thrace by way of Boeotia, a theory which derives some colour from the orgiastic dances and ravings of the Maenads and Bacchanals, who seem therein to have reproduced the rites of the savage Thracians^[419]. When the Phrygian divinities—Cybele the Mother of the Gods, and her consort Attis—were brought into Greece, the Orphics seized hold of their legends also, and so transformed them that it is now impossible for us to tell how much of them is Asiatic, 137and how much is the result of Orphic interpolation^[420]. The same thing may be said of the worship of the Syrian Adonis, whose mystic death turned him into the spouse of Persephone, and enabled the Orphics to identify him with Eubuleus or the infernal Zeus or Dionysos, and of that of the Thracian moon-goddess Bendis, early worshipped in Athens, whom an Orphic verse preserved by Proclus declares to be Persephone herself^[421].

The foreign god, however, in whose worship the Orphic doctrine is most plainly visible was Sabazius, who also seems originally to have come from Phrygia. He is described in an early Greek inscription as “Lord of all^[422]” and said later to be the son of Cybele. The Greeks, however, quickly identified him with Dionysos Zagreus^[423], and an orgiastic worship of him penetrated into Athens some time before Alexander’s conquests. This seems to have been well known to Aristophanes, who declaims in the Lysistrata against the “wantonness” of the Athenian women, who gave themselves up to the pursuit of this god and the Syrian Adonis^[424]. But the associations formed for the worship of these divinities seem to have been recruited almost entirely from among the courtezans of the Piraeus and the trades dependent on them, and more than one of its priestesses were put to death for “impiety” or interference with the religion of the State. The low estimation in which it was generally held may be judged from the invective of Demosthenes against 138his rival Aeschines, whose mother Glaucothea was a priestess of Sabazius, and who had himself in his youth assisted her in her duties^[425]:

“When you became a man, you knew by heart the books of your mother and helped her to make up others; and you nightly gave the initiated the nebride (fawn-skin) and baptized them and purified them, wiping off the clay and bran, and raising them after the purifications, teaching them to say ‘I have shunned evil. I have found good.’... By day you led fine thiasi (confraternities) through the streets crowned with leaves of fennel and poplar, you heading the procession and squeezing the broad-jawed serpents, waving them above your head while you shouted Evoe Saboï and danced Hyes Attis, Attis Hyes; and the old women hailed you as leader of the dance, and chief, and chest-bearer, and sieve-bearer, and with such like titles; while you received from them as your pay sops and twisted loaves and cakes. Who would not think himself lucky with such a life!”

The whole of this tirade may be explained by reference to the Orphic teaching about Dionysos Zagreus. The fawn-skin or nebride was worn, as appears on thousands of vases, in the Dionysiac rites as in those relating to the burial of Osiris. The clay and bran are thought to refer to the disguise which the Titans assumed when stealing upon the infant god, and the speech about shunning evil apparently denotes the putting away of the Titanic nature and the resolution in future to cultivate the Dionysiac soul. The serpents are explained by a custom peculiar to the Sabazian rites of putting a live serpent into the bosom of the initiate’s garment and taking it out at the foot in memory of the shape in which Zeus begot Dionysos on his daughter Persephone. The mystic cry of “Evoe” is a well known feature of the orgiastic worship of Dionysos; while “Saboï” seems to cover some name or epithet of Sabazius^[426], and the phrase “Hyes Attis” shows the connection with Attis, 139whose identity with Dionysos forms the subject of more than one Orphic Hymn^[427]. In all this also it may be noticed that there is no pretence of considering conduct as influencing the destiny of the initiate or even of conciliating the divinity invoked. The whole of the rites described are entirely magical, and owe all their efficacy to the knowledge of the right means to be used to compel the spiritual world to perform the votaries’ will. It is obvious that people with such ideas will be in no great hurry to extend the advantage of their discoveries to others less lucky than themselves and will on the contrary do much to keep them a secret confined to a few^[428].

Did the Orphics, however, at any time form themselves into a church or brotherhood pledged to mutual support and the propagation of the faith? Some writers of authority have thought so^[429]; but there seems to be no evidence available to 140warrant the supposition. Although the worshippers of Cybele, Attis, Adonis, Dionysos, the Eleusinian deities, and Sabazius, were by no means averse from announcing the nature of their faith on their tombstones, we nowhere find any funeral inscriptions declaring the dead to have belonged to any body of worshippers calling themselves Orphici. A more likely theory is that the Orphics were banded together in the small independent associations known as Thiasi, Erani, or Orgeones^[430], like those which we have seen founded at Athens and elsewhere for the worship of foreign gods. It would seem probable enough; but as yet all documentary evidence is entirely lacking. Records, generally in the shape of stelas or tablets containing the lists of members and the regulations of the associations, have been found in some numbers for the thiasi of nearly all the gods honoured by the Orphic poets who were not the gods of the Greek States; but among them no association calling itself Orphic has yet been discovered. What we do know is, that in the days of Plato, there was a class of strolling charlatans called Orpheotelestae who were accustomed to haunt the doors of the rich with a heap of books said to have been written by Orpheus, out of which they offered, in exchange for money, to perform ceremonies of purification and initiation which they affirmed would purge from the recipient all trace of personal or inherited guilt and assure him a happy lot in the next world^[431]. They also told fortunes, offered to dispose of enemies, and sometimes gathered together in some numbers so as to make a more vivid and imposing representation of the pains of the uninitiated in Hades, and thus induce the superstitious to pay the price of their charms^[432]. They had a certain amount of success, and Theophrastus in his Characters exhibits his Deisidaemon or Superstitious Man as going to them with his wife and family to be purified once a month^[433]. Such vagabonds could hardly have made a living had there been any organized 141body ready to render like services in a regular way, and the fact of their existence and the contempt with which they are spoken of by the writers of the period go some way to show that no more regular Orphic brotherhood or sect was ever known in Greece.

There have nevertheless come down to us upwards of eighty hymns attributed to Orpheus which all bear a certain likeness to each other and were evidently intended by the compiler for use in some religious or magical ceremony^[434]. They are, like all the fragments of Orphic poems that we have, in hexameter verse, and most of them conclude with an invocation to the divinity to whom they are addressed to be present or to aid in the accomplishment of some “work,” while this invocation often alludes to “mysteries” and “initiates.” More than one text of these hymns exist, and the differences between them are so small that it is plain that their contents must for a long time have been known and settled. Much variety of opinion exists among the learned as to their date, the theory of their first modern commentator being that they were the actual hymns used in the Eleusinian Mysteries^[435], while Petersen thought that they were composed in the Ist or IInd century of our era, although he admitted that some eight or nine of them were probably older^[436]. One of the latest and best opinions seems to be that of Prof. Albrecht Dieterich, who thinks that the collection dates from the period between 200 B.C. and the birth of Christ, and that it was probably made on the sea-coast of Asia Minor and that of Egypt near Alexandria^[437]. That the hymns were brought 142together for some religious or magical use associated with the Orphic teaching, is evident from the Preface, which purports to be an address to Musaeus, the legendary son of Orpheus, although it is really an invocation to all the gods worshipped by the Orphics, including several who are not specially addressed in the hymns which follow. Of the 87 or 88 hymns common to most of the codices, all but nine bear after their titles a specification of the particular perfume—frankincense, myrrh, spices and the like—to be burnt while they are sung or recited. Most of the texts bear also an endorsement in another hand reading “Comrade! use [it] with good fortune!” and this has induced Prof. Dieterich and others to conclude that the collection was made for the liturgic use of some confraternity or thiasus professing Orphic doctrines^[438]. The following Hymn to Persephone will perhaps give a fair notion of the lines upon which these hymns are framed:

HYMN TO PERSEPHONE^[439].

“Persephone, daughter of great Zeus, come, thou beloved one,

Only-begotten^[440] goddess, accept the offerings well pleasing to thee.

Much-honoured consort of Pluto, dear giver of life,

Praxidice, decked with love-locks, chaste offspring of Deo.

Giver of birth to the Eumenides, queen of those below the earth,

Virgin whom Zeus begot in unspeakable nuptials^[441]

Mother of the loud-shouting, many-formed Eubuleus^[442].

143Playfellow of the Hours, light-bringer of glorious form,

Dread ruler of all, virgin teeming with fruit

Brilliant-rayed, horned-one, the sole desire of mortals.

Vernal one, who rejoicest in the breath of the meadows

Who dost bring to light the sacred shape of green fruit buds.

Who in autumn time wast wedded in a ravished bed:

Who art alone the life and death of much-enduring mortals.

Persephone! For thou dost ever nourish and slay all things.

Hear, blessed goddess, and send up fruits from the earth

Granting us in abundance peace and gentle-handed health

And a life of happiness, such as leads old age untroubled

To thy realm, O queen, and to dread Pluto.”

By the side of this we may perhaps put the Hymn to Dionysos in the same collection. It is probably later than the other in date, the syncretism which equates Persephone with Aphrodite, Cybele, and Isis pointing to a post-Alexandrian origin.

[HYMN] OF MISE—PERFUME: STORAX^[443].

“I invoke the law-giving, rod-bearing, Dionysos

The never-to-be-forgotten seed, Eubuleus of many names

Who art^[444] sacred and sacrosanct Mise, ineffable queen!

Male and female, of double nature, the redeemer [or curse-loosing]^[445] Iacchos

Whether thou art delighting in the sweet-smelling temple of Eleusis

Or art solemnizing mysteries with the Mother in Phrygia,

Or art rejoicing in Cyprus with the fair-crowned Cytherea,

Or dost exult in the pure wheat-bearing plains

With thy mother divine, black-robed, august Isis

And thy busy nurses^[446] near the Egyptian stream,

Be gracious and come thou benevolent to accomplish our tasks.”

144Whatever date be assigned to these hymns, it is at least admitted by all commentators that they were composed for the use of persons professing Orphic doctrines, and we shall be on safe grounds if we assume that they represent the later state of the Orphic teaching. Collating them with the fragments of Orphic verses preserved in the quotations of writers during the late Pagan and early Christian centuries, we are able to reconstitute the whole Orphic creed, as it was known shortly before the triumph of Christianity. We see from this that the Orphics attributed the actual beginning of the universe to their god Dionysos, who first appeared from the egg formed from Night or Chaos. In that manifestation, he was bisexual^[447], and thus mother, as well as father, of all the gods and goddesses of the popular pantheon, the swallowing of his heart by Zeus making him one with the Homeric “father of gods and men.” His second birth was due to the ineffable, or mystic, union of Zeus and Demeter, and he was in infancy torn in pieces and eaten by the Titans as narrated above. From the ashes of these last, men were born, while Dionysos himself became Hades, the King of the Dead, over whom he rules with his consort Persephone, the daughter, as Dionysos is the son, of Zeus and Demeter, and perhaps known to the initiate as only the female form of her consort^[448]. This pair preside over the life and death of mortals, the soul or Dionysiac spark within each man or woman having to pass repeatedly through the bodies of other human beings and animals until finally purified, when it will be united with Dionysos and thus become god^[449]. But the process can be made easier and shorter by the saving grace of the Mysteries, which by the knowledge they confer on the initiate of the constitution and ramification of 145the divine nature, of the geography, so to speak, of the next world, and of the magical words and formulas to be there repeated, give him a vast advantage over his less favoured fellows^[450]. The third incarnation of Dionysos, god of wine, begotten by the father of gods and men on Semele, daughter of Cadmus, after the heart of the infant Zagreus had been sewn in his thigh, must be looked upon as a concession to the popular belief in a different mythology. To those initiated, whether in the Eleusinian or in other mysteries, the last incarnation of Dionysos was that brought about by the union of Zeus in serpent shape^[451] with Persephone, and he must have been the child whose mystic birth was acted in the Mysteries of Eleusis where he was identified with Iacchos, the leader of the procession.

The effect of this creed, the real symbol of the greatest movement which ever took place within the religion of the pre-Christian Greeks, upon the religions that followed its appearance, remains to be considered. In the first place, Orphism went a great way towards weaning the minds of men from the idea of separate gods for different nations, and towards teaching them that all their national and local deities were but different forms of one great Power, who was himself the source of all being. There can be little doubt that the Orphics thus regarded their god Dionysos, whom they made one with his father Zeus, and hailed as being in himself female as well as male, and the common type of all goddesses as well as of all gods. By their readiness to identify him alike with the chthonian god of Eleusis, and with all the foreign gods—Adonis, Attis, Sabazius, and Osiris—with whom they were brought in contact, they showed how far they were willing to go in the path of syncretism; and, but for the rise of Christianity and other religions, there can be little doubt but that the whole of the Graeco-Roman deities 146would eventually have merged in Dionysos^[452]. Yet although in this, as well as in their sanguine idea of the perfectibility of man’s nature, the Orphics may seem to have done somewhat towards elevating and purifying religion, it seems plain that their influence was on the whole hostile to it, and had they ever aimed at and attained supreme power, would have ended in the negation of all religion whatever. Whether the Orphics originally demanded from their followers any moral as well as material purification cannot now be said; but the proceedings of the Orpheotelestae show us how very early in their teaching all such ideas were dropped, and the magical theory of the efficacy of the Mysteries as a means of salvation came to outweigh everything else in the eyes of their votaries. The compulsion of the gods, however, is an idea that, once rooted in the mind of man, is sure to bring forth most unwholesome fruit; and Orphism seems to have brought with it from the beginning all the worst practices of magic. The Orpheotelestae did not scruple, as has been said, to undertake to rid their initiates of an inconvenient adversary^[453]; and although this may not at the outset have implied anything worse than idle curses, it was at any rate murder in intention, and in Greece, as everywhere else, early led to the calling-in of the aid of poison. Magical rites, too, generally bring with them a more or less pronounced worship of devils or evil beings as such, and there are many signs that the Orphics by no means confined their invocations to powers supposed to be friendly to man. Among the Orphic Hymns may be found an invocation to the Titans, who were the legendary enemies of Zeus Dionysos and all the celestial gods, and it is probable that this instance is not a solitary one^[454]. The worship of gods given up to evil generally results in the depravation of the morals of their votaries, and the purposes for which they are invoked are seldom sublime. Most of this 147evil sorcery seems to have centred round the cult of Hecate, herself a mystery goddess revered at Eleusis and especially dear to the Orphics^[455]. Down to the very end of paganism, and indeed, onward through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Hecate remained the mistress of magicians and the patron saint of sorcerers^[456].

One other consequence of the Orphic teaching deserves to be noted. The syncretistic tendency, which led the true Orphic to regard Zeus, Apollo, Hades, and all the gods and goddesses of the popular pantheon as so many varying forms of his own Dionysos, must have always rendered him indifferent as to what deity received his public devotions. Secure in the sacramental grace bestowed upon him by the mere participation in the Mysteries, and fortified by the knowledge of the formulas which were by themselves sufficient to ensure him a happy lot in the next world, it is plain that he must always have held himself at liberty to adore any god or goddess worshipped by those among whom he found himself, and that he must have been ready to conform outwardly to any religion which seemed to offer him any personal advantage. Knowledge, not faith, was to him the one thing needful to the soul, and he would be as little likely to think of enduring persecution for opinion’s sake as to approve of inflicting it. The secret rites and the secret formulas comprised the whole of his religion.

To sum up, then, the practical result of their speculations, the Orphics taught that the universe had passed through several stages of evolution since it was formed from chaos by its First God or Divine Workman. Each of these stages was described as the reign of a fresh ruler or supreme divinity, who was the “son” of the foregoing or, as it would seem, a new incarnation of him. Man came into being through the mystic death and dispersion throughout the universe of one of the last of these incarnations, and therefore contains within himself a spark 148of the Divine nature which is capable of purification from the contamination of soulless matter. This is effected in the ordinary way by a succession of deaths and rebirths in the course of which man’s soul would pass into that of other animals and human beings. But the process was thought to be shortened by participation in certain mysteries or secret rites handed down by tradition, wherein the hidden constitution and purpose of Nature were disclosed to the initiate, and he was equipped with mysterious names and formulas thought to possess magical power. These, by their mere utterance, gave him the right to demand his release from the painful circle of rebirths which was the common lot of mankind, and in effect turned him into a being superior to man. The possession of this wonder-working knowledge or gnosis was not however granted indiscriminately to all, but remained a secret confined to a favoured few, who were pledged under sufficiently severe sanctions not to disclose it. That all religions professed by mankind were equal and indifferent in the eyes of the Orphic seems to follow logically from this, as does the position that he might himself profess any of them that seemed to him expedient. We shall find all these features present in the many sects of post-Christian Gnostics.

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