### ORPHICS, MYSTERIES
ORPHICS, MYSTERIES. — Orphism is the greatest religious phenomenon of a mystical nature that emerged in the history of Greece in the 6th century B.C. It can be considered as the theological transposition of the mysteries of Dionysus (v.), of traditional origins, appropriated by the Greeks thanks to their receptive and creatively agile psyche. He is a god of the wild nature, ruler of a region rich in wooded mountains and deep valleys where the howling wind between the mountain gorges appears as the living presence of the god who delights in frenzied pursuit and loves to be worshipped in the same exalted form in which he makes himself present.
His cult’s adherents are above all women (μαχι-νάδες) who form the god’s retinue. Dressed in a fawn or sometimes fox skin, crowned with ivy, wielding the thyrsus, during the great festivals, which took place every two years, they would run through the mountains clutching to their breasts a fawn or a kid, an incarnation of the god, to the deafening sound of cymbals, drums, and flutes. This noisy nocturnal race would excite the maenads to paroxysm until they ended up tearing apart the raw flesh of the animal they held to their breasts (“omophagia” from όμιλος = raw and φαγεῖν = to eat). This rite, despite
---
**ORPHICS, MYSTERIES - Orpheus and Eurydice, Greek relief post-fiducia - Naples, National Museum.**
---
his wild appearance, was susceptible to a religious elevation, parallel to the development of the social environment, because in the omophagic incorporation of the god was contained, in germ, the mystical union with him through the sacrifice of the sacred animal; and in the originally vegetative character of the god, with his double aspect of death and resurrection, conforming to the perennial cycle of nature, was contained the prospect of a similar resurrection for the faithful if he assimilated himself to him through the initiatory rite. This religious sublimation of the cult of Dionysus was accomplished in the 6th century by Orphism.
The 6th century is for Greece an era of profound social transformation. It marks the end of the so-called Greek Middle Ages, which lies between the collapse of the ancient monarchies reflected in the poems of Homer, and the rise of the democratic States of which Athens is the most illustrious example. In this agitated epoch, Orphism represents the link to liberation from a regime of oppression and violence, the refuge of the best spirits where comfort in the present and freedom in the future are promised to the initiates. For this reason, among the Orphics there is a lively horror of blood, a powerful desire for justice (Δίχη) and law (Νόμος). For this reason, Dionysus, the god characterized by his sufferings and unjust death, the foreign and popular god who came from Thrace, is assumed as the central god of Orphism, instead of the Olympian gods who had glorified the old warrior aristocracies sung by Homer.
**I. Orpheus.** — He is the legendary Thracian singer capable of drawing not only animals but all of nature to the sound of his lyre (Euripides, *Bacchae*, 560).
His mythical figure contains so many elements, a reflection of the religious system attributed to him, that it is no longer possible to delineate his original form. Indeed, he is of Thracian origin like Dionysus, dies a Dionysian death because he is torn apart by the Bacchae (Aeschylus, *Bassarai*, in *Trag. Graec. Fragm.*, Fr. 113 Nauck); his head and lyre are carried by the sea to Lesbos, the island of singers; he is connected with the Underworld where he goes to retrieve his dead wife Eurydice, granted to him by Persephone in compensation.
---
**Orphei, Mysteries - Orpheus and Eurydice, Greek relief post-fiducia - Naples, National Museum.**
---
His figure is also linked to the myth of Zagreus (v. II), to the invention of the lyre, to the descent into Hades (Virgil, *Georg.*, IV, 454; Ovid, *Met.*, X, 10); he takes part in the enterprise of the Argonauts; he is the inventor of the alphabet; the presumed author of hymns, oracles, and cathartic formulas, the baggage of Orphism and later Neoplatonism. The etymology of his name is also uncertain, which might derive from δρφανός in the sense of solitary (Kern); from the root δρφ in the sense of dark, as an inhabitant of the Underworld (G. Curtius); from the fish δρφος in the sense of fisherman (Eisler). Whatever one may think of his historical figure, it is certain that at the origins of the Orphic movement there must have been an Orpheus, that is, a man of profound theological insight and deep religious inspiration who sublimated the pre-existing Dionysian mystery by framing it within a philosophical cosmogony (myth of Zagreus) and developing its moral prescriptions with a view to the superior destiny reserved for the initiates.
**II. THE MYTH OF ZAGREUS.** — Dionysus, son of Zeus and Persephone, the last figure of the divine generations, receives in Orphism the particular name of Zagreus (Ζα + ἄγρευς) in the sense of great hunter (of souls), with which he is especially linked to the underworld.
He has received from his father the scepter of the world. But the Titans, children of the Earth, incited by the jealous Hera, plot against his existence and while Zagreus, as an innocent child, plays in the fields, they deceive him with various objects (which correspond to the secondary instruments of the Orphic ritual) among which the most important is a mirror (Clement of Alexandria, *Protr.*, 2, 17, 2; Arnobius, 5, 19; Nonnus, *Dionys.*, 6, 197-210). He tries to escape by changing shape, but the Titans manage to capture him precisely when he has assumed the form of a bull, they tear him apart and devour him raw. But Athena saves the heart of Dionysus and brings it to Zeus, who then generates from Semele a new Dionysus, a glorious resurrection of the ancient one (Nonnus, *Dionys.*, 6, 165 ff.; Macrobius, *In somn. Scip.*, I, 12, 12). The Titans, for their impiety, are struck by Zeus’s lightning and from their ashes the human race is formed, in which therefore the two elements, evil and good, the Titanic and the Dionysian, are fused together ever since the Titans devoured the divine body of Zagreus. The entire Orphic discipline consists precisely in the liberation of the luminous, celestial, Dionysian element, which is the soul, from the dark, material, Titanic element which is the body. In this reconstruction of the myth of Zagreus, laboriously but definitively carried out by the most erudite Lobeck, all the fundamental elements of the ancient Dionysian sacrifice are found: Dionysus under the name of Zagreus, the sacrificial bull, the tearing apart (σπαργμός) of the victim, the eating of raw flesh (homologa). These elements still ritually produce all their religious efficacy because the rite always draws from its own depths the power of its action, independently of the orientations of the myth. But whereas in the Dionysian concept the sacrifice had the value of an ecstatic communion with the god, renewed each time, in Orphic theology the sacrifice is the memorial of a primordial immolation which is a crime, a deicide, from which derives the sad condition of man on earth, his dark imprisonment, from which liberation is long and difficult.
**III. ESCHATOLOGY.** — On the destiny of the soul and the means to achieve it rest the Orphic morality and eschatology: morality and eschatology of the highest significance, which have offered to later speculation the richest sources of inspiration and to pious souls the sweetest ecstasies and the most consoling certainties. The soul, therefore, for the Orphics, is of divine origin and the body is a tomb (σῶμα, σῆμα) into which it has fallen as a result of a primordial fault. And the distance separating the dark prison of the body from the blessed abode to which the soul yearns to return can be shortened and eliminated only at the price of purifying expiation, of a catharsis (χάθαρισμός).
This expiation can be accomplished by following two
Orphics, Mysteries — Orpheus and Eurydice. Relief of post-Phidian Greek art — Naples, National Museum.
The Orphic path offers two roads. The first is that of rebirths, for a single life is not enough to complete expiation, and the soul is condemned to transmigrate from body to body in a succession of lives that returns upon itself like a circle: the circle of generation (ὁ κύκλος τῆς γενέσεως) which turns inexorably like a wheel, the wheel of fate (ὁ τῆς μοίρας τροχός). The second road is that of purification in Hades, a place of terrors and delights, where the soul descends after death but does not find its joy, even in the most blissful of circumstances, because its only true joy is to reunite with its principle, which is Zagreus.
To attain its final goal, which is to reunite with the divinity, the Orphic adheres to a life of purity, asceticism, and ceremonial purification, whose merits could also be applied to the dead. These prescriptions were contained in special rituals and performed by Orphic priests for the benefit of individuals and cities. Even external signs distinguish those who lead such a life: a
For those who have led a pure existence, beyond the tomb there opens a prospect that has stirred the hope of generations of Orphics and inspired Pindar to a lofty description (O., 2, 62). In the Orphic Hades reign Eubuleus (the well-advised), an epithet of the infernal Dionysus, Hades also called Eukles (the well-known), and above all Persephone, who dominates the popular Orphic conception. Two main paths branch from the entrance, to the right and left, in the shape of a Y, leading to the flowery meadows of the good and to Tartarus, the punisher of the wicked. There flows the Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, proper to Hades where there is no memory of life — a concept dear to the Orphics, who have abandoned the shadowy life of the world to attain in Zagreus the source of divine life. Upon entering Hades, the Orphic must take not the left, ill-fated path of evil spirits, marked by a white poplar, but the right, which guides him to the spring of Mnemosyne. Special guardians keep away those who have not had the privilege of initiation. He gives the password that declares him a son of Uranus and Gaia, of Heaven and Earth, that is, a participant in the Dionysian and Titanic compound according to the sect’s cosmogonic myth, and he asks the Queen of the Underworld, Persephone, to judge him (this is a new concept, purely Orphic) and assign him to the sweet spring of her fields, awaiting the final return to the one Zagreus.
ORPHICS, MYSTERIES — Orpheus taming animals. Fresco from the late 4th century — Rome, Domitilla catacomb.
religious sentiment of the time longed for and was reinforced by the philosophical-religious tradition of Egypt, Chaldea, and Persia, whose sages transmitted to the Greco-Roman West elements that can be summarized in the concept of salvific gnosis.
Indeed, if one considers that often unbalanced ferment of ideas that at the dawn of Christianity spread in the East under the complex name of Gnosticism, one will find there, transmitted through the great Neoplatonic current—though reinforced by rare dualist elements and Babylonian astral speculations, which would later culminate in the strange Manichaean religion—that which is the central thought of Orphism: man is a mixture of good and evil; the soul is a ray of divine light immersed in the darkness of matter; the whole duty of man consists in acquiring gnosis, the doctrine that teaches him both the reality of this situation and points out the way to liberation.
VI. ORPHISM AND CHRISTIANITY
Among the various depictions that Orpheus received in pagan art—singer accompanying himself on the lyre; attacked and killed by the Maenads; near Eurydice; seated in the midst of wild beasts, taming them with the sound of his lyre—the last has been the only one accepted and reproduced in funerary paintings by Christianity (cf. Wilpert, *Pitture*, pp. 223 ff.); in the Domitilla catacomb it is the most faithful in reproducing the elements of the pagan design (id., *ibid.*, pl. 229); in the Catacomb of Callisto, where Orpheus appears as the Good Shepherd with sheep and doves (id., *ibid.*, pl. 37); in the catacomb of SS. Marcellino e Pietro with Orpheus and six rams (id., *ibid.*, pl. 98); in the Priscilla catacomb with Orpheus in the midst of the flock (cf. G. B. De Rossi, *Bull. arch. crit.*, 4th ser., 5 [1887], pl. 6; see also the entry *GESÙ CRISTO*, VII. *Iconography*).This preference is not due to any specific dependence of Christianity on Orphic mysteries but to the symbolism suggested by the divine and irresistible efficacy of Jesus’ call, which draws all men to follow Him. Any elements of Orphism that have been thought to be found in Christianity actually belong to the religious ideas current in the Hellenistic era, namely: the fundamental dualism between soul and body, the otherworldly sanction of actions performed in life, the yearning for moral purity, respect for the figure of a founder, and deference for his doctrine. What is specifically Christian doctrine is: faith in the voluntary and expiatory death (not by the violence of others, as in the case of Zagreus) of Christ, and in His resurrection—a faith not due to the theological elaboration of St. Paul but one he found alive and operative at the dawn of the new religion; the baptismal rite understood as the renewal of the inner man, whereas in later Orphism, or Neo-Orphism—the form prevalent in the Hellenistic age—salvation is achieved through rites and formulas that have a magical flavor.