Part 2 — CHAPTER X THE ORPHICS

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

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

The exact point of origin of this combined movement of religion and theosophy, the various steps and manner of its development remain hidden from us. Athens was a centre of Orphism; it does not therefore follow that Orphism had its origin there, any more than had the multifarious tendencies and activities in art, poetry, and science that at about the same period flowed together, and as though driven by an unseen intellectual current, found their meeting place at Athens. Onomakritos, we are told, the giver of oracles in the court of Peisistratos “founded the secret worship of Dionysos”.6 This appears to refer to the first founding of an Orphic sect at Athens; and we meet with the name of Onomakritos among the authors of Orphic poems. But the real authorship of these poems is far more often ascribed to certain men of Southern Italy and Sicily, who can be more or less clearly connected7 with the Pythagorean societies which were flourishing in those districts about the last decades of the sixth and the first of the fifth centuries.

It seems certain that in Southern Italy at that time, Orphic societies were already in existence—for whom else can these writers have intended their “Orphic” poems? In any case we must take it as certain that the correspondence of Orphic and Pythagorean doctrine on the subject of the soul is not purely accidental. Did Pythagoras when he came to Italy (about 532) find Orphic societies already settled in Kroton and Metapontum, and did he associate himself with their ideas? Or did the “Orphic” sectaries (as Herodotos imagined8) owe their inspiration to Pythagoras and his disciples? The various cross-currents of reciprocal influence can no longer be disentangled by us, but if the Pythagoreans were the sole creditors in the bargain we should undoubtedly find the whole body of Orphic doctrine thoroughly permeated with conceptions that belong exclusively to the Pythagorean school. In the wreckage of the Orphic poems, however, except for a few negligible traces of the Pythagorean mystic theory of numbers,9 we find nothing that must necessarily have been derived by the Orphics from Pythagorean sources.10 Least of all did they need to derive the doctrine of the migration of souls and its application from this source. It is possible, therefore, that it was the independently developed Orphic doctrine which exerted an influence upon Pythogoras and his adherents in Southern Italy; just as it was a ready-made Orphic teaching (and that, too, perhaps, brought from Southern Italy) with which Onomakritos, the founder of the Orphic sects at Athens, associated himself—about the same time as Pythagoras’ similar action in Kroton. It is hardly possible to interpret in any other way the various relations of the Orphics with each other when we learn that at the court of the Peisistratids, in addition to Onomakritos, two other men who had arrived from Southern Italy were active and were counted among the earliest writers of Orphic poems.11

§ 2

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

The Orphic sect had a fixed and definite set of doctrines; this alone sufficed to distinguish it both from the official worships of the state, and from all other cult-associations of the time. The reduction of belief to distinct doctrinal formulæ may have done more than anything else to make Orphism a society of believers—none of the other theologi of the time, Epimenides, Pherekydes, etc., accomplished as much. Without its fundamental religious doctrine Orphism in Greece is inconceivable; according to Aristotle the “doctrines” of Orpheus were put into poetical form by the founder of the Orphic sect in Athens, Onomakritos.16 The uncertain accounts given us by the later authorities do not allow us to make out quite clearly17 what was the extent of Onomakritos’ work in the formation or collection of Orphic doctrinal poetry. What is important is the fact that he is distinctly named as the author of the poem called “Initiations”.18 This poem must have been one of the basic, and in the strictest sense “religious”, writings of the sect; a poem of this character may very well have had for its central incident the dismemberment of the god at the hands of the Titans—a story which Onomakritos is said to have put into verse.19

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

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

§ 3

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

This abstract speculation, however, reached its climax in a religious narrative of the first importance for the beliefs and cult of the sect. At the end of the series of genealogically connected deities came the son of Zeus and Persephone, Dionysos, who was also given the name of the underworld deity Zagreus.27 To him, even in infancy, was entrusted the rule of the world by Zeus. But the wicked Titans, urged on by Hera, approached him by a stratagem. They were the enemies of Zeus, and had already been overthrown by Ouranos,28 but had, it seems, been let loose again by Zeus from Tartaros. They made Dionysos trust them by giving him presents, and while he was looking at his own image in a mirror29 that they had given him, they fell upon him. He tried to escape them by repeated transformations of shape; finally, in the form of a bull,30 he was at last overcome and his body torn to pieces which his savage foes thereupon devoured. The heart alone was rescued by Athene, and she brought it to Zeus who swallowed it. From Zeus there sprang the “new Dionysos”, the son of Zeus and Semele, in whom Zagreus came to life again.

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

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

With the rule of the new-born Dionysos and the origin of mankind, the series of mythological events in the Orphic poetry came to an end.40 With the entry of mankind into Creation41 the existing period of the world begins; the period of world-revolutions is over. The poems now turn to the subject of man and the revelation of his fate, his duty and his purpose in the world.

§ 4

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

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

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

It is not only the sacred mysteries themselves, in the form in which Orpheus has ordained them, which prepare for the release; a complete “Orphic life”52 must be developed out of them. Asceticism is the prime condition of the pious life. This does not mean the practice of the respectable bourgeois virtues, nor the discipline and moral reformation of a man’s character; the height of morality is in this case the turning again towards god,53 and the turning away not merely from the weaknesses and errors of earthly being but from the whole of earthly life itself; renunciation of all that ties man to mortality and the life of the body. The fierce determination with which the Indian penitent tears away his will from life, to which every organ in his body clings desperately—for this, indeed, there was no place among the Greeks, the lovers of life—not even among the world-denying ascetics. Abstention from the eating of flesh was the strongest and most striking species of self-denial practised by the Orphic ascetics.54 Apart from this, they kept themselves in all essentials uncontaminated by certain things and situations which rather suggested to a religious symbolism than actually indicated in themselves attachment to the world of death and transitoriness. The long-standing ordinances of the priestly ritual of purification were taken up and added to;55 but they were also raised to a higher plane. They are no longer intended to free men from the effects of daimonic contacts; the soul itself is made pure by them56—pure from the body and its polluting association, pure from death and its loathsome mastery. In expiation of “guilt” the soul is confined within the body,57 the wages of sin is in this case that life upon earth which for the soul is death. The whole multiplicity of the universe, emptied of its innocent and natural sequence of cause and effect, appears to these zealots under the uniform aspect of a correlation between crime and punishment, between pollution and purification. Thus, mysticism enters into the closest alliance with kathartic practices. The soul which comes from the divine and strives to return thither, has no other purpose to fulfil upon earth (and therefore no other moral law to obey); it must be free from life itself and be pure from all that is earthly.

The Orphics, moreover, were the only people who could venture among themselves or before strangers to greet each other with the special name of the “Pure”.58 The first reward of his piety was received by the initiate of the Orphic mysteries in that intermediate region whither men must go after their earthly death. When a man dies, Hermes leads the “deathless soul” into the underworld.59 Special poems of the Orphic community announced the terrors and delights of the underworld kingdom.60 What the Orphic mystery-priests vouchsafed to their public upon these hidden matters—outdoing the promises made in the Eleusinian mysteries in coarse appeal to the senses—may have been the most popular, but was certainly not the most original feature of Orphic teaching.61 In Hades a judgment awaited the soul—it was no instinctive fancy of the people, but the “sacred doctrine”62 of these sectaries which first introduced and elaborated the idea of compensatory justice in the world of the dead. The impious suffer punishment and purgation in the depths of Tartaros;63 those who have not been made pure by the Orphic mysteries lie in the miry Pool;64 “dreadful things65 await” the disdainer of the sacred worship. By a conception that is quite unique in ancient religion, participation in the Orphic ceremonial enables the descendant to obtain from the gods “pardon and purification” for his departed ancestors who may be paying the penalty in the next world for the misdeeds of the past.66 But for the initiate of the Orphic mysteries himself who has not merely borne the narthex but has been a true Bakchos,67 his reward is that he shall obtain a “milder fate” in the kingdom of the underworld deities whom he has revered on earth, and dwell “in the fair meadows of deep-running Acheron”.68 The blessed home of refuge no longer lies like the Homeric Elysium upon earth, but below in the world of the Souls, for only the released soul reaches there. There, the initiated and purified will live in communion with the gods of the nether world69—we feel that we are listening to Thracian and not Greek conceptions of the ideal when we hear of the “Banquet of the Pure” and the uninterrupted intoxication which they enjoy there.70

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

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

§ 5

This, then, is the keystone that completes the arch of Orphic religion—the belief in the divine, immortal, and abiding life of the soul for whom union with the body and its desires is a thwarting hindrance and repression—a punishment from which its one desire, as soon as it is awakened to a full knowledge of itself is to escape in order that it may belong entirely to itself in full enjoyment of its powers. The contrast between these ideas and those of the Homeric world is complete; there, the soul released from the body was credited only with a poor, shadowy, half-conscious existence, so that an eternity of godlike being in the full enjoyment of life and its powers was only thinkable if the body and the soul, the twofold self of man, were translated in undissolved communion out of the world of mortality. The Orphic legends about the origin of the human race do not tell us the real source and derivation of the very different beliefs about the soul held by the Orphics; those legends only give expression to the way—and only one of many ways77—in which the already established confidence in the divinity of the soul was deducible from what might be considered the oldest historical story of mankind, and how it might be brought into connexion with the Orphic legend of the gods. This persuasion, the belief that a god was living in man and a god that could not be free until he had broken through the prison of the body, was deeply rooted in the worship of Dionysos and the ecstasies belonging to that worship; we cannot be in much doubt that it was taken over ready-made, together with the “enthusiastic” cult of the divinity, and further developed by the Orphic believers. We have already met with traces of this belief even in the Thracian home of the Dionysiac cult; and in what we know of the Thracian form of the religion, traces are not absolutely wanting of an ascetic tendency of living that would easily and naturally arise from such a belief.78 Even in those Northern countries we found the belief in the transmigration of souls bound up with the religion of Dionysos, and that belief, when it is naively held, has as its essential presupposition the idea that the soul, in order to have a complete life, and one that can survive bodily death, must of necessity be united to another body. Even this idea is, however, quite foreign to Orphism. The Orphics retained, in spite of everything, the doctrine of transmigration, and combined it in a strange alliance with their own belief in the divinity of the soul and its vocation to a life of perfect liberty. It is evidently improbable that they invented that doctrine entirely on their own account; the first principles of their creed by no means led necessarily to it. Herodotos79 asserts distinctly that the doctrine of transmigration came to the Greeks from Egypt; and as a consequence, that it was from Egyptian tradition that the Orphics received it. This assertion has no more to recommend it than any other of Herodotos’ many pronouncements as to the Egyptian origin of Greek opinions and legends, and it is even less likely to mislead us in view of the fact that it is by no means certain and not even probable that a belief in transmigration ever really existed in Egypt.80 This belief has arisen independently in many places on the surface of the earth, without the need of transmission from one place to another;81 it might easily arise in a country where the belief prevailed that there existed only a limited number of souls of which each one—in order that no earthly body might be without its spiritual guest—must inhabit many perishable life-tenements, and not be bound to any one of them by a real inner necessity. This, however, is a conception common to popular psychology all over the world.82 If it is still considered more probable that the idea of a migration of the soul through many temporary bodies was not spontaneously evolved by the Orphics, but was received by them from the hands of others, there is yet no reason to reject the most natural assumption—namely, that this also was one of the beliefs that the Orphics took over with the cult of Dionysos from Thrace. Like other mystics,83 the Orphics took over the belief in transmigration from popular tradition and turned it into a serviceable member of their own body of doctrine.84 It served them by giving a striking and physical expression to their own conception of the inevitable connexion between guilt and penance, pollution and the refining power of punishment, piety and future blessedness upon which all their religious ethic depended. It was with an exactly similar purpose that they also retained and developed the old Greek idea of a place of the souls in the depths below the earth.

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