Note 55 — Chapter X · THE ORPHICS

Prohibition to bury corpses in woollen garments: Hdt. ii, 81 (in each case in order that nothing θνησείδιον might cling to the departed). Prohibition against eating eggs: Lob. 251 (eggs are part of the offering to the dead and the food of the χθόνιοι, and so forbidden: so rightly explained by Lob. 477). It was forbidden in Orphic poetry, as well as Pythagorean, to eat beans: Lob. 251; Nauck on Iamb., VP., p. 231 f.: the reason here, too, being that beans as part of the offerings to the dead, putantur ad mortuos pertinere (Fest.); see Lob. 254 and Crusius, Rh. Mus. 39, 165. The same or similar reasons are everywhere at work to cause the eating of certain foods to be forbidden both by the Pythagorean ordinances and in the mystical cult of the χθόνιοι: it is because they are used as offerings to the beings of the lower world, πρὸς τὰ περίδειπνα καὶ τὰς προκλήσεις τῶν νεκρῶν, or even because they have names which, like ἐρέβινθος or λάθυρος, recall ἔρεβος and λήθη: Plu., QR. 95, p. 286 E. The purified state requires above all complete separation from anything connected with the realm of the dead and the divinities of the dead.