Tag: vocabulary-of-myth

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.

The Meaning of Orpheus’ Myth…

Orpheus as Priest of Apollo…

As Sun God…

Music, the Harmony of the Spheres, and Orphic Withdrawal…

Orpheus as Resistor to Dionysian Religion…

As Dionysian Priest…

The authority claimed by the Orphic writings was presumed to flow, as I have said, from Orpheus himself, as their semi-divine author or inspirer. That Orpheus, if such a man ever lived, cannot have been either, is of course obvious, since the doctrines of Orphism belong manifestly to the climate of thought of the sixth century B.C., and most particularly to that of sixth-century Southern Italy, the home of Pythagoreanism and of the writers of the funereal inscriptions I’ve already mentioned.

Why, then, we must ask, was Orpheus chosen as the patron or prophet of this movement? To answer this question we must return to his myth, bearing in mind that all myths are aggregates of autonomous elements of different provenance and meaning, often in mutual contradiction, each of which must therefore be interpreted separately.

Looking at his myth in this way, the most obvious reason for the election of Orpheus, according to most scholars, is his connection with his patron Apollo, whom in many ways he resembled. There is, first of all, Orpheus’ musical skill, which reminds us immediately of the lyre-god. Both, moreover, were said to have made wild beasts gather around them in docile fashion. And if his myth tells us besides that Orpheus was Apollo’s priest, we may take this as significant: for the priest, as we’ve seen in the case of Dionysus, is also the earthly manifestation and human representative of the god.

The mythic Orpheus, then, is preeminently a sun-god, or at least the earthly incarnation of the solar deity. This explains, amongst other things, his descent into the underworld and his resurrection, a death and rebirth that the sun reprises every evening when it sets in the western sky and descends into the kingdom of the dead beneath the earth, arising every morning from the same realm of night and death, above the eastern horizon. It explains, by the same token, Orpheus’ relationship with Eurydice, who (like Persephone in her aspect as crone) is both goddess of the moon and the night and thus also a queen of the dead.

 

If Orpheus’ music had the power to pacify the breasts of wild beasts, and induce even inanimate stones to follow him, it must have been because these beings, like all things, were filled with soul. This was indeed the view of the Orphics, who taught a form of pantheism or hylozoism, according to which the entire material world was enlivened and alive with the one Soul-Substance, God in fact, which underwent an endless series of metamorphoses and yet remained the same.

Music, moreover, was the most potent way of reawakening the indwelling soul to an awareness of its celestial origins, nature, and unbroken connection with the Divine, since, in its original home amongst the stars, the pre-embodied soul heard the otherworldly harmony of the spheres (which Pythagoras so famously describes) as its birthsong. Since the sensual din of the world and the physical senses inevitably drowns out this transcendental harmony, the duty of the Orphic is to stop up his outer ears, to mortify and anesthetize his physical senses, and nurture instead the inner senses with which alone the heavenly music can be heard. The Orphic way of the salvation of the soul is thus, as Socrates describes the life of the philosopher in the Phaedo, a withdrawing of the soul from the world and the body into the stillness of the Divine that resides in its own depths.

 

The music of Orpheus, like that of Apollo, is thus the calm, rational, orderly, and soothing note of the lyre. It has apparently nothing to do with the riotous din of Dionysian flutes or tympana.

As such Orpheus’ devotion to Apollo and ostensible aversion to Dionysus is a prominent motive in his myth, and finds early illustration in the plot of Aeschylus’ lost play the Bassarids, which records the dismembering of Orpheus by the Maenads at the instigation of their god.

This story seems at first to fall into the pattern of a whole class of legends about the resistance to the introduction of the cult of Dionysus on the part of a Hellene and the subsequent vengeance exacted by the god (of which Euripides’ Bacchae is the most famous example). Except that Orpheus is a Hellene living in Thrace, supposedly offering opposition to Dionysus, accordingly, in his native land.

Orpheus’ calm and civilized demeanour, his resemblance to and championship of the Hellenic Apollo, and his opposition to the Thracian religion seem to make it impossible that he should have been imagined as an eastern barbaros; and yet this Hellene lives in the wild homeland of the Dionysian revels.

 

In fact, more than just his Thracian habitat associates Orpheus with Dionysus. As early as the end of the archaic period, he was regarded in some circles as the actual founder of the Dionsyian mysteries.

Dionsysus is mysteriously devoted to the Muses at the foot of Mt. Olympus, and so too Orpheus seems to be the leader of a retinue of Muse-mothers. As dying and reviving gods, both Orpheus and Dionysus journeyed to Hades and returned to life in the upper world, Dionysus to rescue his mother Semele and Orpheus his wife Eurydice. Like the Eleusinian triad Kore-Demeter-Persephone, the holy mother Semele too was one manifestation of the triple goddess, her crone persona being identified with Hecate, another famous queen of the dead. That Eurydice was originally a goddess of the underworld is suggested by the etymology of her name, “the all-judging one”. And finally, just as Dionsysus-Zagreus was torn to pieces by the Titans, so is Orpheus dismembered by the Maenads of Thrace.

One senses that the mythological tradition of Orpheus as a kind of missionary of Apollo to the Dionsysian wilds of Thrace suggests something important about the nature of the Orphic movement. The manner of Orpheus’ death, recapitulating as it does the sparagmos that was the culminating rite of the Dionysian cult, suggests paradoxically that before he became a disciple of Apollo, he was in fact a priest of Dionysus.

Orpheus’ dismemberment at the hands of the Maenads certainly recalls the central sacrament of the Dionysian mysteries, in which the god is torn apart and eaten in his animal or human manifestation in a sacramental ritual in which the god’s divine mana is assimilated by his votaries; and as I said, in ancient religion, the human incarnation of the god was his priest. The priest, as the god incarnate, had the privilege of dying with his god, and so also rising again in perfect identification with him. The rite was almost certainly mimetic, but the symbolism was clear nonetheless.

Thus the lost tragedy of Aeschylus seems to have two meanings: Orpheus suffers the fate of his god Dionysus, and yet he is assimilated to Apollo.

The Myth of Orpheus…

Orpheus’ Music…

Orpheus and the Argonauts…

And Eurydice…

His Descent into the Underworld…

Orpheus as Priest of Apollo…

His Rejection of Dionysus…

His Murder by the Maenads…

His Resurrection…

Since all religious movements must have a great charismatic founder, the Orphics attributed their sacred writings, for reasons that will soon become clear, either to the authorship or the inspiration of the legendary Orpheus, who was presumed to have lived — like all the mythic gods and heroes — in the epoch long before the Trojan War, though the Orphic texts clearly bear the marks of their sixth-century origin. Here follows the barest outline of Orpheus’ myth:

Orpheus was, in the usual manner of Greek mythology, a demigod, half-mortal and half-divine, the son of a Thracian King and his queen Calliope, one of the sacred Muses. As his parentage would suggest, he was a great musician: the culture hero, in fact, who was the first to bring the civilizing arts of poetry and music to the rude Greeks of the prehistoric age.

Orpheus was not of course the originator of music; that title belonged to the gods. Athena had invented the flute, although she refused to play it lest in doing so her face should become unpleasantly contorted. Pan is credited with the manufacture of the reed-pipe, and Hermes the shepherd’s pipe. Hermes also invented the lyre, and presented it to Apollo, who drew from its strings sounds so entrancing that when he played, the gods of Olympus forgot all else; indeed, even Zeus paused from his philandering for a time.

Of mortals, Orpheus was certainly the greatest musician, and for good reason. Apollo himself presented him with a lyre, his Muse mother and her sisters instructed him in its use, and his fortuitous upbringing in Thrace (one of the ancient homes of Dionysus) inevitably nurtured his young musical talent. So accomplished did it become that it was said that when Orpheus played his lyre on the Thracian mountainsides, its sweet sound uprooted trees, caused rocks to move, deflected the courses of rivers, and pacified the wild beasts, all of which left their wonted habitats to follow him. All of nature, animate and inanimate, sensate and insensate, seemed to be affected by his bewitching melody.

Following a visit to Egypt, Orpheus joined Jason’s Argonauts, and on several occasions saved the expedition from imminent disaster. When the sailors became weary, he would strike his lyre and inspire them to row with renewed zeal. If a quarrel threatened, he would play so tenderly that the most aggrieved spirits would be tranquilized and forget their anger. Orpheus saved the Argonauts from the Sirens, as well. Knowing that the sailors would be tempted to listen to the Sirens’ enthralling song, he took up his lyre and played a melody so beautiful that it drowned out the sound of the sisters’ fatal voices.

 

On his return from the quest for the golden fleece, Orpheus met and married Eurydice; but their joy was brief. After the nuptials, while promenading with her bridesmaids and picking flowers in a pleasant meadow, Eurydice was accosted by one of the wedding guests, Aristaeus, who tried to force her. Fleeing her attacker, she trod on a serpent and died of its bite.

Overwhelmed with grief, Orpheus determined to go down to the world of death to bring Eurydice back. To enter where no mortal may, he struck his lyre and charmed both the ferryman Charon and the ferocious canine guardian of hell’s gates, the three-headed dog Cerberus.

As he passed through Tartarus, his music gave temporary respite to the suffering sinners: for a moment, Ixion’s wheel ceased to revolve, Sisyphus sat peacefully upon his stone, and Tantalus listened, forgetting his hunger and thirst. For the first time, too, the faces of the dread Furies were wet with tears, and even Hades and Persephone, king and queen of the underworld, were moved to pity.

With unwonted tears flowing down his cheeks, the implacable King of the Dead could not refuse Orpheus’ request, which he granted on one condition: that he not look back at Eurydice as she followed him, until they both reached the upper world. The condition accepted, Orpheus re-ascended with Eurydice behind him, guided through the darkness by the sound of his music. But Orpheus was all the while desperate for some assurance of her safety, and when, upon reaching the sunlight, he looked anxiously backwards, she was still in the cavern. Thus, Orpheus lost her forever. Though he tried to rush back after her, he was prevented. Though the exemption had been granted on a few occasions — to Hercules, Theseus, and now Orpheus himself — , once was the limit. The gods would certainly not allow a mortal to enter the world of the dead a second time, while he was alive.

 

In utter desolation, Orpheus was forced to return to earth alone. There he forsook the company of men, and in fidelity to his dead wife, brusquely rebuffed the advances of the women who hoped to replace her. He wandered through the wild solitudes of Thrace, comfortless save for his lyre, playing for the rocks, rivers, trees, and beasts which were his only companions.

One day, when the mysteries of Dionysus were being celebrated, Orpheus in his grief and anger neglected to honour the god. Indeed, some say that he taught other sacred mysteries to the inhabitants of Thrace. Every morning he was said to rise to greet the dawn on the summit of Mt. Pangaeum, preaching that Apollo, the sun, was the greatest of gods.

Affronted, Dionysus set the Maenads upon him. Offended not only by Orpheus’ insult to Dionysus but also his general rebuff to womankind, the Maenads waited until their husbands had entered the temple of Apollo, where Orpheus served as chief priest; then they murdered their husbands and tore Orpheus limb from limb.

Orpheus’ head was unceremoniously thrown into the river Hebrus; but it floated, still singing, down to the sea, and was carried to the isle of Lesbos. Eventually it was recovered by the Muses, and along with his limbs which they tearfully collected, it was buried at the foot of Mount Olympus, where to this day the nightingales sing sweeter than anywhere else in the world. But the earth could not hold him, and Orpheus’ resurrected spirit was assumed into heaven, where he reigns as a god.