LOYAL READER,

Here follows, after a long hiatus, Part XIII of PARADISE, PURGATORY, AND HELL: A DANTESQUE JOURNEY THROUGH NORTHERN ITALY. I should not attribute any particular meaning to the interruption. Here, at Priceton.org, we believe that if anything is worth doing, it’s worth doing slowly; and that a meandering path, punctuated by excursions and indirections, is better than a straight one to any destination on the road of life.   (We demonstrate this wisdom every time we travel to Europe, and get hopelessly lost.)

Those who wish to refresh their memories will find the first twelve parts of PARADISE, PURGATORY, AND HELL: A DANTESQUE JOURNEY THROUGH NORTHERN ITALY in the Archives, under January, February, March, June, September, October, November, and December, 2015.

 

La Scala…

Illicit Photography…

 Selfie-ism…

Photographic Gunslinging…

 Museum Guard Lassitude…

 

A visit to Milan’s La Scala is worth the trouble, in spite of having to book in advance, tolerate the always intolerable “guided tour”, and pay an entrance fee that seems to be indexed to the cost of an opera ticket (though the house, of course, was dark). About ten of us were assembled on the steps in front of La Scala’s austere, neo-classical façade—whose chasteness intensifies the effect of its flamboyantly rococo interior—, then ushered up the back stairs and past a row of portraits and busts of famous nineteenth-century impresarios and prima donnas, before whom the cognoscenti mentally genuflected. All of this was contrived to instill in the operatic devotee the appropriate emotions of reverence and high expectation, leading up to the epopteia, in which we were led from the dimly lit hallway into the opulent light of the hall. From one of the boxes, we were then invited to gaze over the orchestra and stage for no longer than the permissible three minutes.   It was indeed an impressive sight: the gilded rings of balconies stacked one upon another in a triumph of architectural geometry. Continue reading “Paradise, Purgatory, and Hell: A Dantesque Journey through Northern Italy, Part 13”

In 1984, the late Allan Bloom published The Closing of the American Mind, his devastating critique of the intellectual and ideological conformity that then reigned on American campuses. In the thirty years since, the mind of the typical college professor and student has been padlocked, dead-bolted, sealed against threatening winds by the caulking guns of political correctness, shuttered against the light and shade of argument, and gone permanently on vacation. Today, the academic mind is so impervious to anything but progressive ideology that not even a team of world-champion oyster shuckers could pry it open. Continue reading “The Unshuckable Closing of the Academic Mind”

The Homeric Gulf between the Human and Divine…

And the inalienable Connection…

The Inhalation of the Logos…

Human Reason as a Spark of the Divine Fire…

Heracleitean Introspection, Contemptus Mundi, and Interiority…

Living “according to Nature”, and in Conformity with the Divine…

Heracleitus’ Anticipation of the Stoics…

And his Continuance of the Doctrine of the Pythagoreans…

The failure to perceive the underlying unity and immutability of the world is once again a failure of human perception, which is endemic to man’s condition. “It is not characteristic of men”, laments Heracleitus, “to be intelligent; but it is characteristic of god”. “Even the wisest of men”, as another fragment continues, “appears to be but an ape in comparison with god, both in wisdom and in beauty and in every other way.” Continue reading “The Vocabulary of Myth, Part XXXII”

The Universal Logos…

Versus the Relativity of Private Opinion…

The Fallibility of Sense-Perception…

“Nature loves to hide”…

Universal Allegory: the World as a Book and the Book of the World…

The Universal Harmony of Opposites…

As Heracleitus regularly laments, “The way up and the way down are the same” is a truth that very few are capable of understanding. Here are a few of the many fragments that have been preserved on this theme: Continue reading “The Vocabulary of Myth, Part XXXI”

Heracleitus, continued…

The “War of Opposites”…

Constancy amidst Eternal Flux…

Birth and Death, Womb and Tomb…

The Inscrutable Benevolence of Providence…

The Unity of All Things…

Heracleitus’ doctrine of “measure” goes back (again) to Anaximander, who warned that if any of the elements (earth, water, air, or fire) or the opposites (hot and cold, wet and dry) overstepped their limits and transgressed upon the provinces of the others, their “injustice” would immediately invoke “Nemesis”, and demand “reparations”. Continue reading “The Vocabulary of Myth, Part XXX”

Heracleitus the Obscure…

His Critique of the Olympian Gods…

God as Unitary Wisdom…

As Fire…

The Unity and Immutability of Fire throughout its Elemental Transformations…

Heracleitus was a native of Ephesus, more or less midway on the Asia Minor coast between Miletus and Colophon. Some time around 500 B.C., he produced a book of which a hundred or so fragments have survived: fragments whose cryptic tone and terseness have earned their author the cognomen, “the Obscure”. Continue reading “The Vocabulary of Myth, Part XXIX”

The Duality of Man…

The Orphic Life: Purgation of the “Titanic”, Cultivation of the “Dionysian”…

Orphic Abstinences…

Mystic Dromena

Eschatology…

Liberation from the Weary Wheel…

The awareness that man, being a creature of Dionysian and Titanic origin, is a composite of divine and mortal, spiritual and carnal, good and evil, is the essential datum of Orphism, and dawns in Greece for the first time. It is probably the most original and far-reaching intuition in the history of theology and philosophy. In living his life in full awareness of the duality of the human person, the Orphic becomes apprised of something akin to the later Christian doctrine of original sin.

For the first time in the history of religion, moreover, the psychological conditions are in place for a conscious, autonomous, and self-initiated soteriological method. Man is able to redeem himself merely by living the Orphic life: by mortifying the Titanic, and compensatorily reinvigorating the Dionysian, components of his inheritance.

For the Orphic, the Titanic denotes much the same thing as St. Paul means by the “Old” or “Outer Man”, or the “Old Adam”; it is not just the congenital human predilection to vice or sin, but that predilection understood as inherent in the unfortunate fact of his embodiment in the flesh and the world, sorely lamented by the Orphic as a “fall”, “exile”, “captivity”, and denaturing. Since the carnal envelope cuts the Dionysian soul off from the divine patria to which it originally and rightfully belongs, it is conceived as a prison and tomb.

The salvation of the Orphic consists, then, in his lifelong purgation of the external Titanic (i.e. worldly and carnal) component, his withdrawal therefrom into the capsule of the divine occulted in his psychic depths, and the soul’s eventual liberation from the body and world and flight back into the celestial aether. This redemptive regime is undergone both in this life and the next; through a long series of reincarnations and otherworldly convalescences, that is, the soul gradually purges itself of and atones for past sins and injustices. Finally, when the prescribed cycle of earthly lives, sojourns in the afterworld, and rebirths in the present, has been accomplished, and the soul has been completely cleansed of its taints, it returns to the heavenly regions whence it came, “the pure in communion with the pure”, as Socrates puts it in the Phaedo.

 

The Orphic life was thus dedicated to righteousness, sobriety, and purity; it included abstentions from every form of sensual pleasure, luxury, or superfluity, including the consumption of meat. The formal reason for the last, if not already obvious, is made so in a famous jibe by the philosopher Xenophanes at Pythagoras, who having come across a man beating a dog, supposedly exclaimed, “Stop. I recognize his voice. He was a friend of mine”. The solemn prohibition against the killing of animals, who were regarded as man’s brothers, ensured that the Orphic would not interfere with the migration of souls. The Orphics were forbidden to eat eggs, besides, not only because of their belief in transmigration, but because in the rhapsodic cosmogony, as we have seen, Phanes’ World-Egg is the sacred principle of life.

Beyond these abstinences, there were also certain formal rites of initiation or communion, teletai and dromena. About their exact nature, unfortunately, we know even less than we do about the secret mysteries of Pythagoras or Eleusis. It seems to have been established by scholars, at least, that the Orphic initiates were painted with lime and plaster, to symbolize the Titanic residue that clings to man’s being. Having been thereby dramatically reminded of their “original sin”, there ensued a dromenon in which the mystai re-enacted, or rather re-actualized, the life and sufferings of Dionysus. It has been suggested that the dromenon ended with an epiphany of Phanes; but whatever the culminating rite, there is no doubt that, as at Eleusis, it convinced the initiate of his rebirth and exaltation to the state of the divine.

 

But from references in Plato, it may be inferred that the Orphic life was intended to stress moral uprightness in general, rather more than ritual purity or the formal observation of such liturgical obligations. The Orphic doctrine of a retributive afterlife is directly of a piece with this.

It has been said that the Orphics were the first believers in Hell. There is no doubt that for the impure and the evildoers the Orphics furnished an appropriate hereafter of unremitting gloom and torment. From the meager notices in Homer and the classical poets, they constructed an elaborate underworld topography, which they populated with an ever-burgeoning cast of righteous judges, incurable sinners, and terrifying monsters. Most of the great poetic and religious accounts of descents into the underworld — including those recorded throughout Plato, in Virgil’s sixth Aeneid, in the early Christian narrative of Christ’s Harrowing of Hell, and in Dante’s Inferno — are directly or indirectly dependent upon the Orphic eschatological schema.

 

The Orphic eschatology is a complex system of myths and dogma, which can be partly reconstructed by synthesizing the accounts of the Pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles, the archaic poet Pindar, and Plato especially; it can be summarized as follows:

At death, our souls descend to Hades, the road to which, as Socrates says in the Phaedo and Gorgias, is forked. In the Republic, we learn that the just are allowed to take the right-hand fork, toward the Elysian Fields, whereas the unjust are sent ad sinistrum. This is all dramatically confirmed by the verses on the gold funereal plates from southern Italy, in which the righteous spirit is welcomed with the words: “Hail, hail, to thee journeying the right-hand road, to holy meadows and groves of Persephone”. But the soul is also given these admonitory instructions:

Thou shalt find to the left of the house of Hades a spring. To this spring approach not near. But thou shalt find another, from the lake of Memory, cold water flowing forth, and there are guardians before it. Say, “I am a child of Earth and starry heaven. But my race is of the heavens alone. This ye know yourselves. But I am parched with thirst and I perish. Give me quickly the cold water of the lake of Memory.” And of themselves they will give thee to drink of the holy spring, and thereafter among the other heroes thou shalt dwell.

In Plato’s myth of Er in book X of the Republic, all souls destined for reincarnation are forced to drink from the river Lethe to make them forget their experiences in the other world. Those who are wise avoid drinking too much, but this is difficult, since they have just come through the stifling heat of the desert plain of Lethe. The soul of the Orphic, which is considered to have achieved its final incarnation, must avoid drinking from Lethe altogether. As this soul proclaims in triumph, “I have flown out of the weary wheel.”

 

The whole circuit of the weary wheel went something like this. The soul dies and is judged, being assigned, in accordance with its merits, either to severe punishment in Tartarus or relative happiness in the Elysian Fields. In either case, the sojourn there is temporary. After a lapse of time which together with its earthly life-span fulfilled a period of a thousand years, it was required to submit to another incarnation. At this point in Plato occurs the episode of the choice of life. Then, after drinking from Lethe, the soul is reborn in a mortal body, either human or animal, in either case, a rank or species of which that reflected its moral progress.

The ordinary (uninitiated) mortal could expect to complete the cycle ten times before salvation could be hoped for. The Orphic who chose a righteous life three times in succession received a special dispensation whereby he could make his final escape from the weary wheel.

But besides these two categories, there was a third, that of the incurable sinners. These were consigned eternally to Tartarus to serve as an admonition to others. As one would expect, they included the traditional arch-sinners we first encounter in Homer’s epics (Tantalus, Sisyphus, Ixion, Tityus, and so on); but through the ages of Orphic influence upon the mythology of the underworld, their company continued to grow.

Elysium, or the Islands of the Blessed, is according to this doctrine only a temporary resort, where those who have lived a virtuous life are rewarded with the happiness they have earned for the remainder of the thousand year cycle. But at the end of it, they too must return to the meadow of choice to be reborn in a mortal body. In fact, Elysium ought be regarded as a testing-place, for Plato says that a period of ease, without the discipline of suffering, may seduce a soul into being careless in its choice of its next life.

 

Where, then, does the soul go, when it has finally escaped the weary wheel? It plunges back into the celestial aether whence it came. In conformity with practically all of the theologians and philosophers of antiquity, the Orphics regarded the human soul as composed of the element air; but if the soul which is condemned to be reborn into a mortal body — because it has not yet completed its cycle of purgation — , is said to be airy, the completely purified soul will become aetherial. It will travel beyond the lower and less pure regions of air into the lucid aether of the celestial sphere, like to like, divine to divine.

This is the final hope and telos of the Orphic life — to become one with the divine Mind which is at the same time the fiery aether that ensouls and orders the entire cosmos. To it the human soul is akin, but active sin, and even passive contact with the senses and the world, have cut it off, an exile to be enclosed in a body which is nothing but a prison and a tomb.

If the soul can remember its own celestial and divine origins and essential nature, if it can cleanse the impurities that have infected it through contact with the flesh and the world, and still cling to it even after death, deification will be its reward. The judges of the underworld will greet it with the cry: “Happy and blessed one, thou are become god instead of mortal”.

The Rhapsodies, continued

Phanes, Night, and the Hesiodic Theogony…

Archetypal and Material Creations…

Orphic Paradoxes: Night and Dream as the World of Reality…

The Orphic Dionysus and the Duality of Man…

In the heavens, Phanes then created the sun and the moon, and the mountains and cities, and men, though not of our race, but the blessed men of the Golden Age. (The Orphic Golden Age, as we’ll see, is what later Platonists interpreted as “the first world”, the purely incorporeal, eternal, immutable, blessed, and perfect archetypal heaven from which the corrupt material order was later created as by a fall.)

Then Phanes, being both male and female, bore to himself a daughter, Night, whom he took as consort and to whom he gave great power. Night alone was privileged to look upon her father; above all, she received from Phanes the authority to make laws, and the gift of prophecy, which she exercised in giving oracles from her darkened cave. Indeed, eventually, Phanes handed over to her his scepter, and she became the next in order of the rulers of the universe.

Night then bore to Phanes Gaia and Ouranos (Earth and Heaven), who in turn were the parents of the Titans Kronos, Rhea, Okeanos, and the rest of that pre-Olympian race of gods familiar from Homer and especially from Hesiod’s great cosmogonic epic, the Theogony. To Ouranos, she handed over the supreme power; and then there follow in the Rhapsodies the familiar Greek stories about the Titans, the supremacy of Kronos, his mutilation of his father Ouranos, his marriage to Rhea, his swallowing of his children and the trick by which Rhea preserved the life of Zeus and caused the others to be disgorged into the light of day. We hear, again, of the Kuretes who guarded the Cretan Zeus from Kronos in his birth cave near Mt. Ida, and thus we are now approaching our own era in the long succession of divine dynasties.

 

In the present “Orphic” age, Zeus is king, but he is also creator. How can this be, inasmuch as all was created long before he was born? The Orphic cosmogonist solves the problem in an ingenious, if mythologically hackneyed way.

Zeus simply swallows Phanes, and with him all things that exist. Thus, all things were, in and by Zeus, created anew: the celestial aether and the terrestrial sky, the sea and earth, great Ocean and the depths of Tartarus beneath it, all the blessed gods and goddesses, now reborn from Zeus’ cosmically pregnant belly.

The world of Zeus’ creation is, of course, the Platonic second world: the fallen material order in which we live. And yet by swallowing Phanes, Zeus assimilated, embodied, and bodied forth the incorporeal totality of the previous world. The world of Zeus is thus the conjunctio oppositorum of eternity and time, of the unseen archetypes and their visible material reflections. As the late-fourth-century A.D. Neoplatonist Proclus puts it, “After he had devoured Phanes, the essential forms of the universe became manifest in Zeus.”

Notably, in all of this work, Zeus seeks the advice of Night, who has lost none of her dignity as the supreme counselor and prophetic power to whom even the highest of the gods must now show deference; it was Night who proposed the plan for the overthrow of Kronos whose place Zeus would occupy, and it is Night who now advises him on the details and sequence of creation.

The importance of Night for the Orphics should be clear enough. She symbolizes the unconscious depths into which we descend in sleep and dream when the outer senses lapse into abeyance, and into which the soul passes after death in the other world. The great cycle which the soul undergoes of incarnations in this world and disembodied sojourns in the other world has its parallel in the daily alternation between the sleeping and waking state.

It is thus a regnant paradox of Orphism, as of all the philosophical schools that it inspired, that the physical world perceived by the waking senses is really a dream of unreality, and that only in the other world of sleep and death does the soul apprehend ultimate reality and touch the Divine. Even the Christian Father Clement of Alexandria is moved to agree with Plato and the Orphics that man’s birth in the body is a death, and his material existence a sleep of unreality, as Plato teaches in the myth of the Cave:

Plato, again, in the seventh book of the Republic [521 c], has called “the day here nocturnal”, and the descent of the soul into the body, sleep [533 c] and death…(Clement, Stromata V, xiv)

In the Rhapsodies, we now hear of the birth of Athena from Zeus’ head, and the birth to Zeus by Demeter of Kore-Persephone. With his daughter Persephone in turn, Zeus conceives Dionysus, to whom he hands over his power.

He sets Dionysus on the throne and puts his own scepter in his hand, saying to the gods, “Give ear…This one have I made your king.” The rest of the story is the conjoint property of Orphic and Dionysian mystery: it recounts the Titans’ becoming jealous of the new god; and their being incited to plot against him by Hera (who had her own reasons for resenting Zeus’ latest love child)

Distracting Dionysus with a mirror and other baubles, they set upon him while he is playing with his toys, slay him, and tear his body to pieces. Having dismembered the infant god, they cast his parts into a cauldron, boil them, and eat of his flesh. Fortunately, Dionysus’ heart is saved by Athena, and from it Zeus causes him to be reborn yet again: Dionysus, the dithyrambus, the “twice-born”.

The story mirrors the infancy narrative of the Cretan Zeus, who is taken from his mother Rhea to be nursed in Crete and protected by the armed Kuretes, whose ecstatic shouts and exuberant clashing of spears muffle the baby’s cries, and so save him from the infanticidal rage of his father Kronos. When we return to the myth of Dionysus in later installments of this series, we’ll have occasion to observe the close connections between Dionysian and Cretan religion: the syncretistic identification between Dionysus and the Cretan Zeus, and between Dionysus’ thiasos of Bacchantes and the infant Zeus’ retinue of Kuretes. Recognizing these affinities, the Orphics explicitly assimilated both cults in their own.

In retribution, as the Rhapsodies continue, Zeus launches his thunderbolt at the Titans, burns them up, and from their ashes arises the race of mortal men. Man’s nature is thus duplex: from the Titans, wicked sons of earth, we inherit all that is carnal, sensual, earthly, and appetitive in us; from Dionysus, all that is heavenly and divine.

It is thus to Dionysus that the Orphics send their prayers, “yearning to be set free from our sinful ancestry.” Dionysus can free us, wherefore we call him “Liberator”, “Dionysus the immortal”, the “resurrected”. Of Dionysus’ divinity there is yet a smouldering ember in each and every one of us. And knowing this, the aim of mortal life is clear: to purge away the gross titanic element, and in its place, to nurture and exalt the Dionysian.

At this point, the Orphic cosmogony leaves off.

The Orphic Cosmogony…

Phanes…

His Bifurcation of the Cosmos and the Pre-cosmogonic Divorce (again)…

Its Analogues in the Babylonian Creation Myth…

Orphism and Persian Religion…

Having considered the myth of Orpheus himself, we must turn, finally, to the mythological cosmogony attributed to his authorship by his followers.

The Orphic cosmogony (the curious, if not bizarre account of the creation of the gods and the world) deserves our attention not only in relation to its importance to the Orphic movement of the sixth century, but because its occult, Byzantine, at times oriental, extravagance is a feature which recurs in the speculations of the Neoplatonists, for whom Orpheus was the fons et origo of all divine wisdom.

As usual, the Orphic cosmogony comes down to us in fragments quoted by later authors, which, to further complicate the matter, are quotations from a number of different versions of the creation story. For present purposes, I will use the most complete, oft-quoted, and probably ancient of these (called by tradition the “Orphic Rhapsodies”), which in all likelihood descends from the nascency of the cult in the sixth century B.C.

 

Here follows (believe it or not) an abridged and harmonized version of the myth:

The first principle was Chronos, or Time, which existed from all eternity. Out of Time came the fiery Aether, and the “huge gulf” known as Chaos. Next, out of Aether and Chaos, Chronos fashioned a silver egg. The egg split in two, and Phanes (the “shining one”, the “revealer”, the “bringer of light”) issued forth, the very first god. Thus, Phanes is also called Protogonos, the First Born; but he has other names as well: Dionysus, Eros, and Metis (Wisdom).

As the summit and summation of this process, Phanes bears within himself infinite time, whose child he is, and Eros, the creative potency of the cosmos; he is the repository of all the seeds of being, the archetypal totality or pleroma, embodying in potentia all future species and generations: of things, of gods, and of men. By necessity, Phanes is thus also bisexual, and accordingly identified with the mythic Hermaphrodite.

Phanes is invariably described as a figure of shining light and marvelous beauty, bearing upon his shoulders golden wings and the heads of various animals, including those of bulls and a monstrous serpent, which is itself an ever-changing hybrid of many beasts. This fantastical iconography of beast forms has suggested to scholars oriental, particularly Babylonian and Persian influence, and as we’ll see, the inference is an eminently plausible one.

 

The sixth Orphic Hymn, dating from the Christian era but preserving much older elements, reveals something of the mystical piety that Phanes elicited from the Orphic community. Here it is translated in unfortunate rhyming couplets:

O mighty first-begotten, hear my prayer,
Twofold, egg-born, and wandering through the air;
Bull-roarer, glorying in thy golden wings,
From which the race of gods and mortals springs.
Eros-Bacchos, celebrated power,
Ineffable, occult, all-shining flower.
’Tis thine from darksome mists to purge the sight,
All-spreading splendour, pure and holy light;
Hence, Phanes, called the glory of the sky,
On waving pinions through the world you fly.

Phanes, then, like Apollo, is a solar deity. But he is much more: he is the aethereal light and fire-stuff, the divine spirit or pneuma that pervades the cosmos with soul, that infuses, animates, disposes in harmony and order, and unifies the dark material chaos of the multiform universe. He is, at the same time, the spark of the divine fire that smoulders in the depths of every human soul, ever threatened as it is with suffocation by its material container.

It is thus that we pray to him to purge the dark mists and shadows that envelop and obscure the human self, whose inner vision is blinded by the false glare of the senses and the passions, just as the inner ear is deafened and prevented from hearing the celestial harmonies by the sensual din that bombards it from the outside world. Illuminated by the immanent Phanes, the inner sight may recognize the divine light occulted within.

 

We are told next that Phanes made an eternal home for the gods and was their first king. From the two halves of his world egg, he created the heavens and the earth.

The motive of the bifurcation of the cosmos is no less universal than the world-egg itself, of course. In almost all cosmogonies, Father Sky and Mother Earth, the archetypal male and female principles, are at first chaotically conjoined, locked in a sterile embrace. Only after their pre-cosmogonic divorce, can their recombination be fruitful.

We first recognized this motive (in the first installments of this series) in cosmogonies throughout Egypt and Mesopotamia. It recurs as a feature of the cosmological speculations of the Pre-Socratic philosophers, especially Anaximander (as we saw) and Empedocles (as we’ll see), and it inevitably manifests itself again amongst the Orphics.

Here is how Orpheus himself is said to have begun his song of creation in Apollonius of Rhodes’ third-century B.C. Argonautica:

He sang of that past age when earth and sky were knit together in a single mould; how they were sundered after deadly strife.

That Phanes creates sky and earth out of the two halves of his egg reminds us in turn of the Babylonian creation epic Enuma Elish, in which the solar-creator god Marduk fillets the chaos dragon of the cosmogonic sea,Tiamat, establishing her upper half as the vault of heaven, and her lower as the earth and ocean.

As we have already seen, the Babylonian creation myth exercised a profound influence on the priestly author of the first chapters of Genesis, where the “formless deep” (in Hebrew t’hom) over which the Spirit of God broods in Gen. 1:2 is recognized by scholars as a corruption of Tiamat, and the peculiar motive in which God divides the waters above the firmament from those below it (calling the waters above Heaven and those below it Earth) is clearly an inflection of the bisection of Tiamat by Marduk. The same Babylonian myth, of course, stands behind the dragon-killing theme that runs throughout the biblical salvation history, Tiamat being the obvious progenitrix of the biblical sea-monster Leviathan.

 

The Babylonian afflatus of the Orphic cosmogony probably came to Greece via the Persians, with whom the Greeks were already at war in the sixth century. Indeed, there are deep and abiding similarities between Orphism and the Zoroastrian religion of the Persians: the importance of the Time principal, for instance, the great war between the spiritual and material orders, the proper attitude of contempt for the world and the flesh, the imagery of light and darkness, as expressed by the deities at the two extremes of the Persian trinity, Ahura Mazda and Ahreiman, whose opposing valencies are mediated by Mithras.

The modern world, we are told, is becoming smaller; but the more we know about antiquity, the smaller it too seems to become.

Orphism as a Blend of Dionysian and Apollonian Religion…

Orpheus as Fisher of Men

His Dismemberment…

And Osiris’…

The myth of Orpheus’ death as the priestly representative of Dionysus, who paradoxically dies because of his devotion to Apollo, seems to imply the possibility (as W.K.C. Guthrie has argued) that Orphism was an attempt at the Apollonian reformation of Dionysian religion. I have already alluded to the merely transient state of ecstasis and divine possession offered by participation in the Dionysian mysteries. For the Orphic, by contrast, the belief in the essential and abiding divinity and immortality of the human soul was axiomatic.

But the Orphics found the Dionysian mysteries unsatisfying in another regard: the Orphic initiate might believe in possession by the god and mystical communion with him as a means of attaining salvation, but he did not regard them as spiritually sufficient. Rather, Orphism placed great emphasis on moral purity, which was necessary not only on solemn occasions (as at Eleusis), but as a way of life.

The Orphic became an immortal god because he lived the Orphic life: the life of one who was aware of the celestial origins and essentially divine nature of his soul, an entity that therefore utterly transcended the mortal world. Such an awareness imposed upon him an elaborate system of rules and practices, both ascetical and penitential.

 

These two central tenets, then — first, a belief in the essential divinity and immortality of the soul, and second, the need for a constant ritual purity — , give us the clue both to the meaning of Orpheus’ myth and the reason why it was so congenial to the Orphic movement. The first of these tenets was of course to be found in the religion of the Thracian Dionysus, the second in that of the Delphic Apollo. The curious myth of Orpheus as apostle of Apollo to the Thracians thus throws a clear light on the Orphic religion as a blend of Dionsyian belief in immortality with Apollonian ideas of catharsis. From the former, Orphism took the possibility of union with the divine through ecstasy and enthusiasm; from the latter, its atmosphere of legal rigorism and ritual punctilio.

 

Ultimately, of course, Orpheus’ myth must be interpreted in a much broader context than that of either Dionysian or Apollonian religion, as the universal motive of his death and dismemberment suggests. The floating of Orpheus’ head down the Hebrus River and the collection of his body parts by the Muses cannot help but summon to mind a multitude of mythological parallels.

It would be impossible here to explore the vast universal significance of water in this context, although I might mention Dionysus’ power over that element as expressed by the dolphins who are amongst his sacred animals, and the colourful story, recorded in the Homeric Hymn to Dionysus, of his magical power over the pirate ship in which he is both captive and captor. Jesus’ power over water is well-known, and not only is the fish sacred to him, but he is called in the Gospels a “Fisher of Men”. Significantly, Orpheus’ name means, etymologically, the same thing. It is Orpheus, that is, who rescues human souls from the infernal waters of sin (from a drowning death in the body and the world); and by reminding them of their celestial origins and nature, confers upon them new life.

But the closest analogue to Orpheus’ dismemberment, watery interment, and revivification comes from the myth of another redeemer-god of seasonal and spiritual rebirth, the Egyptian Osiris, inventor of agriculture, year-god, and lord of the underworld, whose Egyptian mysteries were notably identified with those of Dionysus by the brilliant late-first-century A.D. philosopher and antiquarian Plutarch.

Osiris, like Sargon of Akkad, Perseus, and Dionysus (not to mention the biblical Noah, Moses, and Jonah) was shut up in a boat or ark (i.e., a funereal casket which is both tomb and womb) and floated down the Nile. At one point in his journey, his corpse was removed from the casket and cut up into fourteen pieces by his mortal enemy, Set, the god of wintry sterility and death. Osiris’ consort, the earth-goddess Isis, was bereft, and like Demeter, she wandered the earth (which she blighted in her anger and grief) until she collected Osiris’ scattered members and performed a magical ceremony over them, whence Osiris was reborn.

I mention these resonances without further comment to demonstrate what should already be clear: the practical ubiquity, that is, of this type of ancient mystery religion, to which Orphism evidently also belongs.