ORPHEUS.
‘πολλοὶ μὲν ναρθηκοφόροι, παῦροι δέ τε Βάκχοι.’
Mythology has left us no tangle more intricate and assuredly no problem
half so interesting as the relation between the ritual and mythology of
Orpheus and Dionysos.
By the time of Herodotus[1146] the followers of Orpheus and of Bacchus
are regarded as substantially identical. In commenting on the taboo
among the Egyptians against being buried in woollen garments he says:
‘In this respect they agree with the rites which are called Bacchic and
Orphic but are really Egyptian and Pythagorean.’ The identification is of
course a rough and ready one, an identification of race on the precarious
basis of a similarity of rites, but one thing is clear to the mind of
Herodotus—Orphic and Bacchic and Egyptian rites are either identical or
closely analogous. The analogy between Orpheus and Bacchus passed by the
time of Euripides into current language. Theseus[1147] when he would
taunt Hippolytus with his pseudo-asceticism says:
‘Go revel thy Bacchic rites
With Orpheus for thy Lord,’
and Apollodorus[1148] in his systematic account of the Muses states
that Orpheus ‘invented the mysteries of Dionysos.’ The severance of the
two figures by modern mythologists has often led to the misconception
of both. The full significance, the higher spiritual developments of
the religion of Dionysos are only understood through the doctrine of
Orpheus, and the doctrine of Orpheus apart from the religion of Dionysos
is a dead letter.
And yet, clearly linked though they are, the most superficial survey
reveals differences so striking as to amount to a spiritual antagonism.
Orpheus reflects Dionysos, yet at almost every point seems to contradict
him. The sober gentle musician, the precise almost pedantic theologist,
is no mere echo, no reincarnation of the maddened, maddening wine-god.
Diodorus expresses a truth that must have struck every thinker among the
Greeks, that this real and close resemblance veiled an inner, intimate
discrepancy. He says[1149], in telling the story of Lycurgus, ‘Charops,
grandfather of Orpheus, gave help to the god, and Dionysos in gratitude
instructed him in the orgies of his rites; Charops handed them down
to his son Oiagros, and Oiagros to his son Orpheus.’ Then follow the
significant words: ‘Orpheus, being a man gifted by nature and highly
trained above all others, _made many modifications in the orgiastic
rites_: hence they call the rites that took their rise from Dionysos,
Orphic.’ Diodorus seems to have put his finger on the secret of Orpheus.
He comes later than Dionysos, he is a man not a god, and his work is to
modify the rites of the god he worshipped.
It is necessary at the outset to emphasize the humanity of Orpheus. About
his legend has gathered much that is miraculous and a theory[1150] has
been started and supported with much learning and ability, a theory which
sees in Orpheus an underworld god, the chthonic counterpart of Dionysos,
and that derives his name from chthonic darkness (ὄρφνη). This is to my
mind to misconceive the whole relation between the two.
ORPHEUS AS MAGICAL MUSICIAN.
Like the god he served, Orpheus is at one part of his career a Thracian,
unlike him a magical musician. Dionysos, as has been seen (p. 452),
played upon the lyre, but music was never of his essence.
In the matter of Thracian music we are happily on firm ground. The
magical musician, whose figure to the modern mind has almost effaced the
theologist, comes as would be expected from the home of music, the North.
Conon[1151] in his life of Orpheus says expressly, ‘the stock of the
Thracians and Macedonians is music-loving.’ Strabo[1152] too is explicit
on this point. In the passage already quoted (p. 415), on the strange
musical instruments used in the orgies of Dionysos, he says: ‘Similar
to these (i.e. the rites of Dionysos) are the Kotyttia and Bendideia
practised among the Thracians, and with them also Orphic rites had their
beginning.’ A little further he goes on to say that the Thracian origin
of the worship of the Muses is clear from the places sacred to their
cult. ‘For Pieria and Olympus and Pimplea and Leibethra were of old
Thracian mountains and districts, but are now held by the Macedonians,
and the Thracians who colonized Boeotia consecrated Helicon to the Muses
and also the cave of the Nymphs called Leibethriades. And those who
practised ancient music are said to have been Thracians, Orpheus and
Musaeus and Thamyris, and the name Eumolpus comes from Thrace.’
The statement of Strabo is noticeable. As Diodorus places Orpheus two
generations later than Dionysos, so the cult of the Muses with which
Orpheus is associated seems chiefly to prevail in Lesbos and among
the Cicones of Lower Thrace and Macedonia. We do not hear of Orpheus
among the remote inland Bessi. This may point to a somewhat later date
of development when the Thracians were moving southwards. That there
were primitive and barbarous tribes living far north who practised
music we know again from Strabo. He tells[1153] of an Illyrian tribe,
the Dardanii, who were wholly savage and lived in caves they dug under
dung-heaps, but all the same they were very musical and played a great
deal on pipes and stringed instruments. The practice of music alone does
not even now-a-days necessarily mark a high level of culture, and the
magic of Orpheus was, as will later be seen, much more than the making of
sweet sounds.
Orpheus, unlike Dionysos, remained consistently a Northerner. We have
no universal spread of his name, no fabulous birth stories everywhere,
no mystic Nysa; he does not take whole nations by storm, he is always
known to be an immigrant and is always of the few. At Thebes we hear of
magical singers Zethus and Amphion, but not of Orpheus. In Asia he seems
never to have prevailed; the orgies of Dionysos and the Mother remained
in Asia in their primitive Thracian savagery. It is in Athens that he
mainly re-emerges.
* * * * *
To the modern mind the music of Orpheus has become mainly fabulous, a
magic constraint over the wild things of nature.
‘Orpheus with his lute made trees
And the mountain tops that freeze
Bow themselves when he did sing.’
This notion of the fabulous music was already current in antiquity. The
Maenads in the _Bacchae_[1154] call to their Lord to come from Parnassos,
‘Or where stern Olympus stands
In the elm woods or the oaken,
There where Orpheus harped of old,
And the trees awoke and knew him,
And the wild things gathered to him,
As he sang among the broken
Glens his music manifold,’
and again in the lovely song of the _Alcestis_[1155], the chorus sing to
Apollo who is but another Orpheus:
‘And the spotted lynxes for joy of thy song
Were as sheep in the fold, and a tawny throng
Of lions trooped down from Othrys’ lawn,
And her light foot lifting, a dappled fawn
Left the shade of the high-tressed pine,
And danced for joy to that lyre of thine.’
In Pompeian wall-paintings and Graeco-Roman sarcophagi it is as magical
musician, with power over all wild untamed things in nature, that Orpheus
appears. This conception naturally passed into Christian art and it is
interesting to watch the magical musician transformed gradually into the
Good Shepherd. The bad wild beasts, the lions and lynxes, are weeded out
one by one, and we are left, as in the wonderful Ravenna[1156] mosaic,
with only a congregation of mild patient sheep.
It is the more interesting to find that on black and red-figured
vase-paintings, spite of this literary tradition, the power of the
magical musician is quite differently conceived. Orpheus does not appear
at all on black-figured vases—again a note of his late coming—and on
red-figured vases never with the attendant wild beasts.
[Illustration: FIG. 142.]
On a vase found at Gela and now in the Berlin Museum[1157], reproduced
in fig. 142, we have Orpheus as musician. He wears Greek dress and
sits playing on his lyre with up-turned head, utterly aloof, absorbed.
And round him are not wild beasts but wild _men_, Thracians. They wear
uniformly the characteristic Thracian dress, the fox-skin cap and the
long embroidered cloak, of both of which Herodotus[1158] makes mention as
characteristic. The Thracians who joined the Persian expedition, he says,
‘wore fox-skins on their heads and were clothed with various-coloured
cloaks.’ These wild Thracians in the vase-painting are all intent on the
music; the one to the right looks suspicious of this new magic, the one
immediately facing Orpheus is determined to enquire into it, the one just
behind has gone under completely; his eyes are shut, his head falling, he
is mesmerized, drunken but not with wine.
This beautiful picture brings to our minds very forcibly one note of
Orpheus, as contrasted with Dionysos, his extraordinary quiet. Orpheus
never plays the flute ‘that rouses to madness’ nor clangs the deafening
cymbals; he plays always on the quiet lyre, and he is never disturbed or
distraught by his own music. He is the very mirror of that ‘orderliness
and grave earnestness’ (τάξις καὶ σπουδή) which, as we have seen (p.
441), Plutarch took to be the note of Apollo. Small wonder that Apollo
was imaged as Orpheus.
Orpheus, before the dawn of history, had made his home in Thrace. His
music is all of the North, but after all, though mythology always
emphasizes this music, it was not the whole secret of his influence.
He was more priest than musician. Moreover, though Orpheus has certain
Apolline touches, the two figures are not really the least like. About
Apollo there is no atmosphere of mysticism, nothing mysterious and
ineffable; he is all sweet reasonableness and lucidity. Orpheus came to
Thrace and thence to Thessaly, but he came, I believe, from the South. It
will later be seen that his religion in its most primitive form is best
studied in Crete. In Crete and perhaps there only is found that strange
blend of Egyptian and primitive Pelasgian which found its expression in
Orphic rites. Diodorus[1159] says Orpheus went to Egypt to learn his
ritual and theology, but in reality there was no need to leave his native
island. From Crete by the old island route[1160] he passed northwards,
leaving his mystic rites as he passed at Paros, at Samos, at Samothrace,
at Lesbos. At Maroneia among the Cicones he met the vine-god, among the
Thracians he learnt his music. All this is by anticipation. That Crete
was the home of Orphism will best be seen after examination of the
mysteries of Orpheus (p. 565). For the present we must be content to
examine his mythology.
The contrast between Orpheus and Dionysos is yet more vividly emphasized
in the vase-painting[1161] next to be considered (fig. 143), from a
red-figured hydria of rather late style. Again Orpheus is the central
figure, and again a Thracian in his long embroidered cloak and fox-skin
cap is listening awe-struck. It is noticeable that in this and all
red-figured vases of the fine period Orpheus is dressed as a Greek; he
has been wholly assimilated, nothing in his dress marks him from Apollo.
It is not till a very late date, and chiefly in Lower Italy, that the
vase-painter shows himself an archaeologist and dresses Orpheus as a
Thracian priest. Not only a Thracian but a Satyr looks and listens
entranced. But this time Orpheus will not work his magic will. He may
tame the actual Thracian, he may tame the primitive population of Thrace
mythologically conceived of as Satyrs, but the real worshipper of
Dionysos is untameable as yet. Up from behind in hot haste comes a Maenad
armed with a great club, and we foresee the pitiful end.
[Illustration: FIG. 143.]
THE DEATH OF ORPHEUS.
The story of the slaying of Orpheus by the Thracian women, the Maenads,
the Bassarids, is of cardinal importance. It was the subject of a lost
play by Aeschylus, but vases of the severe red-figured style remain our
earliest extant source. Manifold reasons, to suit the taste of various
ages, were of course invented to account for the myth. Some said Orpheus
was slain by Zeus because Prometheus-like he revealed mysteries to man.
When love came into fashion he suffers for his supposed sin against the
Love-God. Plato[1162] made him be done to death by the Maenads, because,
instead of dying for love of Eurydice, he went down alive into Hades. But
serious tradition always connected his death somehow with the cult of
Dionysos. According to one account he died the death of Dionysos himself.
Proklos[1163] in his commentary on Plato says: ‘Orpheus, because he was
the leader in the rites of Dionysos, is said to have suffered the like
fate to his god.’ It will later be shown in discussing Orphic mysteries
(p. 484) that an important feature in Dionysiac religion was the rending
and death of the god, and no doubt to the faithful it seemed matter of
edification that Orpheus, the priest of his mysteries, should suffer the
like passion.
But in the myth of the death by the hands of the Maenads there is
another element, possibly with some historical kernel, the element of
hostility between the two cults, the intimate and bitter hostility of
things near akin. The Maenads tear Orpheus to pieces, not because he
is an incarnation of their god, but because he despises them and they
hate him. This seems to have been the form of the legend followed by
Aeschylus. It is recorded for us by Eratosthenes[1164]. ‘He (Orpheus)
did not honour Dionysos but accounted Helios the greatest of the gods,
whom also he called Apollo. And rising up early in the morning he climbed
the mountain called Pangaion and waited for the rising of the sun that
he might first catch sight of it. Therefore Dionysos was enraged and
sent against him his Bassarids, as Aeschylus the poet says. And they
tore him to pieces and cast his limbs asunder. But the Muses gathered
them together and buried them in the place called Leibethra.’ Orpheus
was a reformer, a protestant; there is always about him a touch of the
reformer’s priggishness; it is impossible not to sympathize a little with
the determined looking Maenad who is coming up behind to put a stop to
all this sun-watching and lyre-playing.
The devotion of Orpheus to Helios is noted also in the hypothesis to the
Orphic _Lithika_[1165]. Orpheus was on his way up a mountain to perform
an annual sacrifice in company with some friends when he met Theiodamas.
He tells Theiodamas the origin of the custom. When Orpheus was a child
he was nearly killed by a snake and he took refuge in a neighbouring
sanctuary of Helios. The father of Orpheus instituted the sacrifice and
when his father left the country Orpheus kept it up. Theiodamas waits
till the ceremony is over, and then follows the discourse on precious
stones.
That there was a Thracian cult of the Sun-god later fused with that of
Apollo is certain. Sophocles[1166] in the _Tereus_ made some one say:
‘O Helios, name
To Thracian horsemen dear, O eldest flame!’
Helios was a favourite of monotheism, as we learn from another fragment
of Sophocles[1167]:
‘Helios, have pity on me,
Thou whom the wise men call the sire of gods
And father of all things.’
The ‘wise men’ here as in many other passages[1168] may actually be
Orphic teachers, anyhow they are specialists in theology. Helios, as
all-father, has the air of late speculation, but such speculations are
often only the revival in another and modified form of a primitive faith.
By the time of Homer, Helios had sunk to a mere impersonation of natural
fact, but he may originally have been a potent sky god akin to Keraunios
and to Ouranos, who was himself effaced by Zeus. Orpheus was, as will
later be seen, a teacher of monotheism, and it was quite in his manner to
attempt the revival of an ancient and possibly purer faith.
Be this as it may, it is quite certain that ancient tradition made him
the foe of Dionysos and the victim of the god’s worshippers. His death
at their hands is depicted on numerous vase-paintings of which a typical
instance is given in fig. 144. The design is from a red-figured stamnos
in the Museo Gregoriano of the Vatican[1169]. The scheme is usually much
the same; we have the onset of the Thracian women bearing clubs or double
axes or great rocks for weapons. Usually they are on foot, but on the
Vatican stamnos one Maenad appears mounted, Amazon fashion. Before this
fierce onset the beautiful musician falls helpless, his only weapon of
defence the innocent lyre. On a cylix[1170] with white ground about the
date of Euphronios, the Thracian Maenad who slays Orpheus is tattooed;
on the upper part of her right arm is clearly marked a little stag.
Popular aetiology connected this tattooing with the death of Orpheus.
The husbands of the wicked women tattooed them as a punishment for their
crime, and all husbands continued the practice down to the time of
Plutarch. Plutarch[1171] says he ‘cannot praise them,’ as long protracted
punishment is ‘the prerogative of the Deity.’ Prof. Ridgeway[1172] has
shown that the practice of tattooing was in use among the primitive
Pelasgian population but never adopted by the Achaeans.
[Illustration: FIG. 144.]
The Maenads triumphed for a time.
‘What could the Muse herself that Orpheus bore,
The Muse herself for her enchanting son,
Whom universal nature did lament,
When by the rout that made the hideous roar
His gory visage down the stream was sent,
Down the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian shore?’
The dismal savage tale comes to a gentle close. The head of Orpheus,
singing always, is found by the Muses, and buried in the sanctuary at
Lesbos. Who are the Muses? Who but the Maenads repentant, clothed and in
their right minds.
That Maenads and Muses, widely diverse though they seem to us, were not
by classical writers sharply sundered is seen in the variant versions
of the story of Lycurgus. Dionysos in Homer is attended by his nurses
(τιθῆναι) and these, as has already been shown (p. 402), are Maenads,
but, when we come to Sophocles, these same nurses, these ‘god-inspired’
women, are not Maenads, but Muses. The chorus in the _Antigone_[1173]
sings of Lycurgus; how he
‘Set his hand
To stay the god-inspired woman-band,
To quell his Women and his joyous fire,
And rouse the fluting Muses into ire.’
Nor is it poetry only that bears witness. In the introduction to the
eighth book of his _Symposiacs_ Plutarch[1174] is urging the importance
of mingling improving conversation with the drinking of wine. ‘It is
a good custom,’ he says, ‘that our women have, who in the festival of
the Agrionia seek for Dionysos as though he had run away, and then they
give up seeking and say that _he has taken refuge with the Muses_ and
is lurking with them, and after some time when they have finished their
feast they ask each other riddles and conundrums (αἰνίγματα καὶ γρίφους).
And this mystery teaches us....’ In some secret Bacchic ceremonial extant
in the days of Plutarch and carried on by women only, Dionysos was
supposed to be in the hands of his women attendants, but they were known
as Muses not as Maenads. The shift of Maenad to Muse is like the change
of Bacchic rites to Orphic; it is the informing of savage rites with the
spirit of music, order and peace.
THE HERO-SHRINE OF ORPHEUS.
Tradition says that Orpheus was buried by the Muses, and fortunately
of his burial-place we know some definite particulars. It is a general
principle in mythology that the reputed death-place of a god or hero
is of more significance than his birth-place, because, among a people
like the Greeks, who practised hero-worship, it is about the death-place
and the tomb that cultus is set up. The birth-place may have a mythical
sanctity, but it is at the death-place that we can best study ritual
practice.
Philostratos[1175] in the _Heroicus_ says: ‘After the outrage of the
women the head of Orpheus reached Lesbos and dwelt in a cleft of the
island and gave oracles in the hollow earth.’ It is clear that we have
here some form of _Nekyomanteion_, oracle of the dead. Of such there were
many scattered all over Greece; in fact, as has already been seen (p.
341), the tomb of almost any hero might become oracular. The oracular
tomb of Orpheus became of wide repute. Inquirers, Philostratos[1176]
tells us, came to it even from far-off Babylon. It was from the shrine of
Orpheus in Lesbos that in old days there came to Cyrus the brief, famous
utterance: ‘Mine, O Cyrus, are thine.’
Lucian[1177] adds an important statement. In telling the story of the
head and the lyre he says: ‘The head they buried at the place where
now they have a sanctuary of Bacchus. The lyre on the other hand was
dedicated in a sanctuary of Apollo.’ The statement carries conviction.
It would have been so easy to bury head and lyre together. The truth
probably was that the lyre was a later decorative addition to an old
head-oracle story; the head was buried in the shrine of the god whose
religion Orpheus reformed.
Antigonus[1178] in his ‘History of Wonderful Things’ records a lovely
tradition. He quotes as his authority Myrtilos, who wrote a treatise on
Lesbian matters. Myrtilos said that, according to the local tradition,
the tomb of the head of Orpheus was shown at Antissaia, and that
the nightingales sang there more sweetly than elsewhere. In those
wonder-loving days a bird had but to perch upon a tomb and her song
became a miracle.
The oracle shrine of Orpheus is depicted for us on a somewhat late
red-figured cylix of which the obverse[1179] is reproduced in fig. 145.
It is our earliest definite source for his cult. The head of Orpheus is
prophesying with parted lips. We are reminded of the vase-painting in
fig. 10, where the head of Teiresias emerges bodily from the sacrificial
trench near which Odysseus is seated. A youth has come to consult the
oracle and holds in his hands a tablet and style. Whether he is putting
down his own question or the god’s answer is uncertain. We know from
Plutarch[1180] that at the oracle shrine of another hero, Mopsos,
questions were sometimes sent in on sealed tablets[1181]. In the case
cited by Plutarch a test question was set and the oracle proved equal to
the occasion. The vase-painting calls to mind the lines in the _Alcestis_
of Euripides where the chorus sings[1182]:
‘Though to high heaven I fly,
Borne on the Muses’ wing,
Thinking great thoughts, yet do I find no thing
Stronger than stern Necessity.
No—not the spell
On Thracian tablets legible
That from the voice of Orpheus fell,
Nor those that Phoebus to Asklepios gave
That he might weary woe-worn mortals save.’
[Illustration: FIG. 145.]
Orpheus on the vase-painting is a voice (γῆρυς) and nothing more. As
to the tablets, if we may trust the scholiast on the passage, tablets
accredited to Orpheus actually existed. He quotes Herakleitos[1183]
the philosopher as stating that Orpheus ‘set in order the religion of
Dionysos in Thrace on Mount Haemus, where they say there are certain
writings of his on tablets.’ There is no reason to doubt the tradition,
and it serves to emphasize the fact that Orpheus was an actual person,
living, teaching, writing, writing perhaps in those old ‘Pelasgian’
characters which Linos used long before the coming of Phoenician letters,
characters which it may be are those still undeciphered which have come
to light in Crete[1184].
Above the head of Orpheus in the vase-painting (fig. 145) stands Apollo.
In his left hand he holds his prophetic staff of laurel, his right
is outstretched, but whether to command or forbid is hard to say. A
curious account of the oracle on Lesbos given by Philostratos[1185] in
his Life of Apollonius of Tyana informs us that the relations of Apollo
and Orpheus were not entirely peaceable. Apollonius, says Philostratos,
landed at Lesbos and visited the adyton of Orpheus. They say that in this
place of old Orpheus was wont to take pleasure in prophecy until Apollo
took the oversight himself. For inasmuch as men no longer resorted to
Gryneion for oracles nor to Klaros nor to the place of the tripod of
Apollo, but the head of Orpheus, recently come from Thrace, alone gave
responses, the god came and stood over him as he uttered oracles and
said: ‘Cease from the things that are mine, for long enough have I borne
with thee and thy singing.’ Apollo will brook no rivalry even of his most
faithful worshipper. The quaint story is evidence of the intolerance of a
dominant and missionary cult.
Most circumstantial of all accounts of Orpheus is that given by
Conon[1186]. No one would of course accept as evidence _en bloc_ the
statements of Conon, concerned as he mainly is to compile a complete and
interesting story. Certain of his statements however have an inherent
probability which makes them of considerable value. He devotes to
Orpheus the whole of one of his narrations. He tells all the orthodox
details, how Orpheus won the hearts of Thracians and Macedonians by his
music, how he charmed rocks and trees and wild beasts and even the heart
of Kore, queen of the underworld. Then he proceeds to the story of the
death. Orpheus refused to reveal his mysteries to women, whom since the
loss of his own wife he had hated _en masse_. The men of Thrace and
Macedonia were wont to assemble in arms on certain fixed days, in a
building at Leibethra of large size and well arranged for the purpose
of the celebration of rites. When they went in to celebrate their
orgiastic rites they laid down their arms before the entrance gate. The
women watched their opportunity, seized the arms, slew the men and tore
Orpheus to pieces, throwing his limbs into the sea. There was the usual
pestilence in consequence and the oracular order that the head of Orpheus
should be buried. After some search the head was found by a fisherman at
the mouth of the river Meles. ‘It was still singing nor had it suffered
any change from the sea, nor any other of the outrages that the Keres
which beset mortals inflict on the dead, but it was still blooming
and even then after the long lapse of time it was bleeding with fresh
blood.’ Other stories of bleeding miraculous heads occur in antiquity.
Aelian[1187] records several and Phlegon[1188] in his ‘Wonders’ tells of
the miracle that happened at the battle against Antiochus in 191 A.D. A
bleeding head gave an oracle in elegiac verse and very wisely ordained
that the spectators were not to touch it but only to listen.
The details supplied by Conon are of course aetiological, but we seem to
discern behind them some possible basis of historical fact, some outrage
of the wild women of Thrace against a real immigrant prophet in whose
reforms they saw contempt of their rites. The blood of some real martyr
may have been the seed of the new Orphic church. How this came to be
Conon at the end of his narrative explains: ‘When the miraculous head,
singing and bleeding, was found, they took it and buried it beneath a
great monument and fenced it in with a sacred precinct, a precinct that
no woman might ever enter.’ The significant statement is added that the
tomb with its precinct was at first a _heroön_, but later it obtained as
a _hieron_ and the proof was that it was honoured with burnt sacrifices
(θυσίαις) and all the other meeds of the gods.
* * * * *
Conon has undoubtedly put his finger on the truth. Orpheus was a real
man, a mighty singer, a prophet and a teacher, bringing with him a new
religion, seeking to reform an old one. He was martyred and after his
death his tomb became a mantic shrine. So long as it was merely a hero
shrine the offerings were those proper to the dead (ἐναγίσματα), but an
effort was made by the faithful to raise him to the rank of an upperworld
Olympian. Locally burnt sacrifices, the meed of the Olympians of the
upper air, were actually no doubt offered, but the cult of Orpheus _as
a god_ did not obtain. Translation to the Upper House of the Olympians
was not always wholly promotion. What you gain as a personage you are
apt to lose as a personality. Orpheus sacrificed divinity to retain his
beautiful humanity. He is somewhere on the same plane with Herakles and
Asklepios (p. 347), too human ever to be quite divine. But the escape was
a narrow one. Probably if a greater than he, Apollo, had not ‘taken the
oversight,’ the sequel would have been otherwise.
Conon writing in the time of Augustus believed Orpheus to have been
a real man. So did Strabo[1189]. In describing the Thermaean gulf he
says that the city of Dium is not on the coast but about seven stadia
distant and ‘near the city of Dium is a village called Pimpleia where
Orpheus lived.... Orpheus was of the tribe of the Cicones and was a man
of magical power both as regards music and divination. He went about
practising orgiastic rites and later, waxing self-confident, he obtained
many followers and great influence. Some accepted him willingly, others,
suspecting that he meditated violence and conspiracy, attacked and slew
him.’ He adds that ‘in olden times prophets were wont to practise the art
of music also.’
Still more completely human is the picture that Pausanias[1190] draws of
the life and work of Orpheus. In the monument to Orpheus that he saw on
Mt. Helicon the spell-bound beasts are listening to the music, and by
the musician’s side is the figure of _Telete_, ‘Rite of Initiation.’
Pausanias comments as follows: ‘In my opinion Orpheus was a man who
surpassed his predecessors in the beauty of his poems and attained to
great power, because he was believed to have discovered rites of the
gods and purifications for unholy deeds and remedies for diseases and
means of averting divine wrath.’ And again, at the close of his account
of the various miraculous legends that had gathered about Orpheus he
says: ‘Whoever has concerned himself with poetry knows that all the hymns
of Orpheus are short and that the number of them all is not great. The
Lycomids[1191] know them and chant them over their rites. In beauty they
may rank as second to the hymns of Homer, but they have attained to even
higher divine favour.’
Pausanias puts the relation between Homer and Orpheus in much the same
fashion as Aristophanes[1192], who makes Aeschylus recount the service of
poets to the state:
‘It was Orpheus revealed to us holy rites, our hands from bloodshed
withholding;
Musaeos gave us our healing arts, oracular words unfolding;
And Hesiod showed us to till the earth and the seasons of fruits and
ploughing;
But Homer the god-like taught good things, and this too had for his
glory
That he sang of arms and battle array and deeds renowned in story.’
Homer sang of mortals, Orpheus of the gods; both are men, but of the two
Orpheus is least fabulous. About both gather alien accretions, but the
kernel remains human not divine.
Orpheus then halted half way on the ladder between earth and heaven,
a ladder up which many mortals have gone and vanished into the remote
unreality of complete godhead.
S. Augustine admirably hits the mark when he says[1193]: ‘After the same
interval of time there came the poets, who also, since they wrote poems
about the gods, are called theologians, Orpheus, Musaeus, Linus. But
these theologians were not worshipped as gods, though in some fashion the
kingdom of the godless is wont to set Orpheus as head over the rites of
the underworld.’
The line indeed between hero and underworld god was, as has already been
abundantly seen, but a shifting shadow. It is useless however to urge
that because Orpheus had a local shrine and a cult he was therefore a god
in the current acceptation of the term. Theseus had a shrine, so had
Diomede, so had each and every canonical hero; locally they were potent
for good and evil, but we do not call them gods. Athenaeus[1194] marks
the distinction. ‘Apollo,’ he says, ‘the Greeks accounted the wisest and
most musical of the gods, and Orpheus of the semi-gods.’
Once we are fairly awake to the fact that Orpheus was a real live man,
not a faded god, we are struck by the human touches in his story, and
most by a certain vividness of emotion, a reality and personality of like
and dislike that attends him. He seems to have irritated and repelled
some as much as he attracted others. Pausanias[1195] tells how of old
prizes were offered for hymns in honour of a god. Chrysothemis of Crete
and Philammon and Thamyris come and compete like ordinary mortals, but
Orpheus ‘thought such great things of his rites and his own personal
character that he would not compete at all.’ Always about him there
is this aloof air, this remoteness, not only of the self-sufficing
artist, who is and must be always alone, but of the scrupulous moralist
and reformer; yet withal and through all he is human, a man, who
Socrates-like draws men and repels them, not by persuading their reason,
still less by enflaming their passions, but by sheer magic of his
personality. It is this mesmeric charm that makes it hard even now-a-days
to think soberly of Orpheus.
ORPHEUS AT ATHENS.
Orpheus, poet, seer, musician, theologist, was a man and a Thracian,
and yet it is chiefly through his influence at Athens that we know him.
The author of the _Rhesos_ makes the Muse complain that it is Athene
not Odysseus that is the cause of the tragedy that befell the Thracian
prince. She thus appeals to the goddess[1196]:
‘And yet we Muses, we his kinsmen hold
Thy land revered and there are wont to dwell,
And Orpheus, he own cousin to the dead,
Revealed to thee his secret mysteries.’
The tragedian reflects the double fact—the Thracian _provenance_, the
naturalization in Athens.
Orpheus, we know, reorganized and reformed the rites of Bacchus. How
much he was himself reorganized and reformed we shall never fully know.
The work of editing and popularizing Orpheus at Athens was accredited
to Onomacritos, he who made the indiscreet interpolation in the oracles
of Musaeus and was banished for it by the son of Peisistratos[1197]. If
Onomacritos interpolated oracles into the poems of Musaeus, why should he
spare Orpheus? Tatian[1198] writes that ‘Orpheus was contemporary with
Herakles,’ another note that he is heroic rather than divine, and adds:
‘They say that the poems that were circulated under the name of Orpheus
were put together by Onomacritos the Athenian.’ Clement[1199] goes
further. He says that these poems were actually by Onomacritos who lived
in the 50th Olympiad in the reign of the Peisistratidae. The line in
those days between writing poems of your own and editing those of other
people was less sharply drawn than it is to-day. Onomacritos had every
temptation to interpolate, for he himself wrote poems on the rites of
Dionysos. Pausanias[1200] in explaining the presence of the Titan Anytos
at Lycosura says: ‘Onomacritos took the name of the Titans from Homer and
composed orgies for Dionysos and made the Titans the actual agents in the
sufferings of Dionysos.’
Something then was done about ‘Orpheus’ in the time of the Peisistratidae
as something was done about ‘Homer,’ some work of editing, compiling,
revising. What form precisely this work took is uncertain. What is
certain is that somehow Orphism, Orphic rites and Orphic poems had,
before the classical period, come to Athens. The effect of this Orphic
spirit was less obvious, less widespread, than that of Homer, but
perhaps more intimate and vital. We know it because Euripides and Plato
are deep-dyed in Orphism, we know it not only by the signs of actual
influence, but by the frequently raised protest.
* * * * *
Orpheus, it has been established in the mouth of many witnesses,
modified, ordered, ‘rearranged’ Bacchic rites. We naturally ask—was this
all? Did this man whose name has come down to us through the ages, in
whose saintly and ascetic figure the early Church saw the prototype of
her Christ, effect nothing more vital than modification? Was his sole
mission to bring order and decorum into an orgiastic and riotous ritual?
Such a notion is _a priori_ as improbable as it is false to actual fact.
Externally Orpheus differs from Dionysos, to put it plainly, in this.
Dionysos is drunken, Orpheus is utterly sober. But this new spirit of
gentle decorum is but the manifestation, the outward shining of a lambent
flame within, the expression of a new spiritual faith which brought to
man at the moment he most needed it, the longing for purity and peace in
this life, the hope of final fruition in the next.
Before proceeding to discuss in detail such records of actual Orphic
rites as remain, this new principle must be made clear. Apart from it
Orphic rites lose all their real sacramental significance and lapse into
mere superstitions.
THE CARDINAL DOCTRINE OF ORPHISM.
The whole gist of the matter may thus be summed up. Orpheus took an
ancient superstition, deep-rooted in the savage ritual of Dionysos, and
lent to it a new spiritual significance. The old superstition and the new
faith are both embodied in the little Orphic text that stands at the head
of this chapter:
‘Many are the wand-bearers, few are the Bacchoi.’
Can we be sure that this is really an Orphic text or was it merely a
current proverb of any and every religion and morality? Plato[1201] says:
‘Those who instituted rites of initiation for us said of old in a parable
that the man who came to Hades uninitiated lay in mud, but that those
who had been purified and initiated and then came thither dwell with the
gods. For those who are concerned with these rites say, They that bear
the wand are many, the Bacchoi are few.’ Plato does not commit himself to
any statement as to who ‘those who are concerned with these rites’ were,
but Olympiodorus commenting on the passage says: ‘He (Plato) everywhere
misuses the sayings of Orpheus and therefore quotes this verse of his,
“Many are the wand-bearers, few are the Bacchoi,” giving the name of
wand-bearers and not Bacchoi to persons who engage in politics, but the
name of Bacchoi to those who are purified.’
It has already been shown that the worshippers of Dionysos believed
that they were possessed by the god. It was but a step further to pass
to the conviction that they were actually identified with him, actually
_became_ him. This was a conviction shared by all orgiastic religions,
and one doubtless that had its rise in the physical sensations of
intoxication. Those who worshipped Sabazios became Saboi, those who
worshipped Kubebe became Kubeboi, those who worshipped Bacchos Bacchoi;
in Egypt the worshippers of Osiris after death became Osiris. The mere
fact of intoxication would go far to promote such a faith, but there is
little doubt that it was fostered, if not originated, by the pantomimic
character of ancient ritual. It has been seen (p. 415) that in the
Thracian rites ‘bull-voiced mimes’ took part, Lycophron (p. 435) tells
that the women who worshipped the bull-Dionysos wore horns. It is a
natural primitive instinct of worship to try by all manner of disguise to
identify yourself more and more with the god who thrilled you.
Direct evidence of this pantomimic element in the worship of Dionysos
is not wanting, though unhappily it is of late date. In the course of
the excavations on the west slope of the Acropolis, Dr Dörpfeld laid
bare a building known to be an ‘Iobaccheion,’ superimposed on an ancient
triangular precinct of Dionysos, that of Dionysos in the Limnae. On this
site was discovered an inscription[1202] giving in great detail the
rules of a thiasos of Iobacchoi in the time of Hadrian. Among a mass
of regulations about elections, subscriptions, feast-days, funerals of
members and the like, come enactments about a sacred pantomime in which
the Iobacchoi took part. The divine persons to be represented were
Dionysos, Kore, Palaemon, Aphrodite, Proteurhythmos, and the parts were
distributed by lot.
The name Proteurhythmos, it will later (p. 656) be shown, marks the
thiasos as Orphic, and thoroughly Orphic rather than Dionysiac are the
regulations as to the peace and order to be observed. ‘Within the place
of sacrifice no one is to make a noise, or clap his hands, or sing,
but each man is to say his part and do it in all quietness and order
as the priest and the Archibacchos direct.’ More significant still and
more beautiful is the rule, that if any member is riotous an official
appointed by the priest shall set against him who is disorderly or
violent the thyrsos of the god. The member against whom the thyrsos
is set up, must if the priest or the Archibacchos so decide leave the
banquet hall. If he refuse, the ‘Horses’ appointed by the priest shall
take him and set him outside the gates. The thyrsos of the god has become
in truly Orphic fashion the sign not of revel and license, but of a
worship fair and orderly.
We have noted the quiet and order of the representation because it is so
characteristically Orphic, but the main point is that in the worship of
Dionysos we have this element of direct impersonation which helped on the
conviction that man could identify himself with his god. The term Bacchae
is familiar, so familiar that we are apt to forget its full significance.
But in the play of Euripides there are not only Bacchae, god-possessed
women worshippers, but also a Bacchos, and about his significance
there can be no mistake. He is the god himself incarnate as one of
his own worshippers. The doctrines of possession and incarnation are
complementary, god can become man, man can become god, but the Bacchic
religion lays emphasis rather on the one aspect that man can become
god. The Epiphany of the Bacchos, it may be noted, is after a fashion
characteristically Orphic; the beautiful stranger is intensely quiet,
and this magical quiet exasperates Pentheus just as Orpheus exasperated
the Maenads. The real old Bromios breaks out in the Epiphany of fire and
thunder, in the bull-god and the madness of the end.
The savage doctrine of divine possession, induced by intoxication and
in part by mimetic ritual, was it would seem almost bound to develope a
higher, more spiritual meaning. We have already seen (p. 453) that the
madness of Dionysos included the madness of the Muses and Aphrodite,
but, to make any real spiritual advance, there was needed it would seem
a man of spiritual insight and saintly temperament, there was needed an
Orpheus. The great step that Orpheus took was that, while he kept the old
Bacchic faith that man might become a god, he altered the conception of
what a god was, and he sought to obtain that godhead by wholly different
means. The grace he sought was not physical intoxication but spiritual
ecstasy, the means he adopted not drunkenness but abstinence and rites of
purification.
All this is by anticipation, to clear the ground; it will be abundantly
proved when Orphic rites and documents known to be Orphic are examined.
Before passing to these it may be well to emphasize one point—the
salient contrast that this new religious principle, this belief in the
possibility of attaining divine life, presented to the orthodox Greek
faith.
* * * * *
The old orthodox anthropomorphic religion of Greece made the gods in
man’s image, but, having made them, kept them aloof, distinct. It never
stated in doctrine, it never implied in ritual, that man could become
god. Nay more, against any such aspiration it raised again and again
a passionate protest. To seek to become even _like_ the gods was to
the Greek the sin most certain to call down divine vengeance, it was
‘Insolence.’
Pindar is full of the splendour and sweetness of earthly life, but
full also of its insuperable limitation. He is instant in warning
against the folly and insolence of any attempt to outpass it. To one
he says[1203], ‘Strive not thou to become a god’; to another[1204],
‘The things of mortals best befit mortality.’ It is this limitation,
this constant protest against any real aspiration, that makes Pindar,
for all his pious orthodoxy, profoundly barren of any vital religious
impulse. Orphic though he was in certain tenets as to a future life, his
innate temperamental materialism prevents his ever touching the secret
of Orphism ‘werde was du bist,’ and he transforms the new faith into
an other-worldliness. He is compounded of ‘Know thyself’ and ‘Nothing
too much.’ ‘In all things,’ he says, ‘take measure by thyself[1205].’
‘It behoveth to seek from the gods things meet for mortals, knowing the
things that are at our feet and to what lot we are born. Desire not,
thou soul of mine, life of the immortals, but drink thy fill of what
thou hast and what thou canst[1206].’ In the name of religion it is
all a desperate unfaith. We weary of this reiterated worldliness. It
is not that he beats his wings against the bars; he loves too well his
gilded cage. The gods are to him only a magnificent background to man’s
life. But sometimes, just because he is supremely a poet, he is ware
of a sudden sheen of glory, an almost theatrical stage effect lighting
the puppet show. It catches his breath and ours. But straightway we are
back to the old stock warnings against Tantalos, against Bellerophon,
whose ‘heart is aflutter for things far off[1207].’ Only one thing he
remembers, perhaps again because he was a poet, that winged Pegasos
‘dwelt for ever in the stables of the gods[1208].’
* * * * *
The cardinal doctrine of Orphic religion was then the possibility
of attaining divine life. It has been said by some that the great
contribution of Dionysos to the religion of Greece was the hope of
immortality it brought. Unquestionably the Orphics believed in a future
life, but this belief was rather a corollary than of the essence of
their faith. Immortality, immutability, is an attribute of the gods. As
Sophocles says[1209]:
‘Only to gods in heaven
Comes no old age nor death of anything,
All else is turmoiled by our master Time.’
To become a god was therefore incidentally as it were to attain
immortality. But one of the beautiful things in Orphic religion was that
the end completely overshadowed the means. Their great concern was to
become divine now. That could only be attained by perfect purity. They
did not so much seek purity that they might become divinely immortal,
they needed immortality that they might become divinely pure. The choral
songs of the _Bacchae_ are charged with the passionate longing after
purity, in the whole play there is not one word, not one hint, of the
hope of immortality. Consecration (ὁσιότης), perfect purity issuing in
divinity, is, it will be seen, the keynote of Orphic faith, the goal of
Orphic ritual.