CHAPTER XI.

ORPHIC ESCHATOLOGY.

‘Χαίρετ’, ἐγὼ δ’ ὔμμιν θεὸς ἄμβροτος, οὐκέτι θνητός.’

_a._ THE ORPHIC TABLETS.

The monuments in question are a series of eight inscribed tablets

all of very thin gold, which have come to light in tombs. Six out of

the eight were found in Lower Italy, in the neighbourhood of ancient

Sybaris, one near Rome, one in Crete. In the first and third cases, it

should be noted, the place _provenance_ is an ancient home of Orphism.

These tablets are of such cardinal importance that they will need to be

examined separately and in detail. But all have this much in common:

buried with the dead they contain instructions for his conduct in the

world below, exhortations to the soul, formularies to be repeated,

confessions of faith and of ritual performed, and the like. They belong

to the domain of ritual rather than of literature, and therefore offer

evidence the more unimpeachable; but, though defective in style and

often regardless of metre, they are touched with a certain ecstasy of

conviction that lifts them sometimes to a high level of poetry.

The Orphic tablets have frequently been discussed[1415], but their full

importance as documents for the history of Greek religion has perhaps as

yet not been fully realized. Their interpretation presents exceptional

difficulties; the shining surface and creased condition of the gold-leaf

on which they are written make them difficult to photograph and irksome

to decipher; moreover the text, even when deciphered, is in some cases

obviously fragmentary. It has been thought best to reserve all textual

difficulties for separate discussion[1416].

The series of tablets or scrolls is as follows:

I. _The Petelia tablet_[1417] (fig. 162).

[Illustration: FIG. 162.]

‘Thou shalt find on the left of the House of Hades a Well-spring,

And by the side thereof standing a white cypress.

To this Well-spring approach not near.

But thou shalt find another by the Lake of Memory,

Cold water flowing forth, and there are Guardians before it.

Say: “I am a child of Earth and of Starry Heaven;

But my race is of Heaven (alone). This ye know yourselves.

And lo, I am parched with thirst and I perish. Give me quickly

The cold water flowing forth from the Lake of Memory.”

And of themselves they will give thee to drink from the holy

Well-spring,

And thereafter among the other Heroes thou shalt have lordship....’

The text breaks off at this point. The scattered words that remain make

no consecutive sense. Of the last line, written from bottom to top of the

right edge of the tablet, the two last words only are legible, ‘darkness

enfolding’ (σκότος ἀμφικαλύψας).

As sequel to this tablet comes a second found in Crete:

II. _The Eleuthernae tablet_[1418].

‘I am parched with thirst and I perish.—Nay, drink of Me,

The well-spring flowing for ever on the Right, where the Cypress is.

Who art thou?...

Whence art thou?—I am son of Earth and of Starry Heaven.’

The soul itself speaks to the Well of Mnemosyne and the Well makes answer.

Both tablets contain the same two elements, the Well of Remembrance, and

the avowal of origin. The avowal of origin constitutes in each the claim

to drink of the Well.

The origin claimed is divine. Hesiod[1419] uses exactly the same words in

describing the parentage of the gods. He bids the Muse

‘Sing the holy race of Immortals ever existing,

Who from Earth were born and born from Starry Heaven.’

We have in the avowal of the soul the clearest possible statement of the

cardinal doctrine of Orphic faith—immortality is possible only in virtue

of the divinity of humanity. The sacrament of this immortality is the

drinking of a divine well.

THE WELL OF MNEMOSYNE.

On the first tablet the soul is bidden to avoid a well on the left hand.

This well is left nameless, but contrasted as it is with the Well of

Mnemosyne or Remembrance, we may safely conclude that the forbidden well

is Lethe, Forgetfulness.

The notion that in death we forget, forget the sorrows of this

troublesome world, forget the toilsome journey to the next, is not

Orphic, not even specially Greek; it is elemental, human, and may occur

anywhere.

The Fiji islanders[1420] have their ‘Path of the Shades’ beset with

perils and their Wai-na-dula, a well from which the dead man drinks and

forgets sorrow. ‘He passed the twin goddesses Nino who peered at him

and gnashed their terrible teeth, fled up the path and came to a spring

and stopped and drank, and, as soon as he tasted the water, he ceased

weeping, and his friends also ceased weeping in his home, for they

straightway forgot their sorrows and were consoled. Therefore this spring

is called the Wai-na-dula, Water of Solace.’ After many other perils,

including the escape from two savage Dictynnas who seek to catch him in

their nets, the soul at last is allowed to pass into the dancing grounds

where the young gods dance and sing.

This Fiji parallel is worth noting because it is so different. The Fiji

soul drinks of forgetfulness, and why? Because his friends and relations

must put a term to their irksome mourning, and till the soul sets the

example and himself forgets they must remember. His confession of faith

is also somewhat different. Before he can be admitted to his Happy Land

he must prove that he has died a violent death, otherwise he must go back

to the upper air and die respectably, i.e. violently.

I have noted the Lethe of the Fiji islands to shew that I am not unaware

that savage parallels exist, that a well may be drunk on the ‘Path of the

Shades’ in any land, and that there is no need to suppose that the Greeks

borrowed their well either from Fiji or from Egypt; and yet in this

particular case it can, I believe, be shewn that the Orphic well came

from Egypt[1421], came I believe to Crete, and passed with Orpheus from

Crete by the islands to Thrace and to Athens, and thence to Magna Graecia.

Osiris in Egypt had a ‘cold’ well or water of which he gave the souls to

drink. On tombs of Roman date[1422] the formulary appears: ‘May Osiris

give thee the cold water.’ Sometimes it is Aïdoneus sometimes Osiris who

is invoked, for by that time the two were not clearly distinguished.

In so far as Osiris was a sun-god the well became a well of light, in

which the sun-god Ra was wont to wash his face. In one of the magical

papyri[1423] the line occurs

‘Hail to the water white and the tree with the leaves high hanging,’

which seems to echo vaguely the white cypress and the forbidden well.

The well of Osiris, whatever the precise significance of its Egyptian

name, would easily to the Greeks become of double significance; ψυχρόν

would suggest ψυχή, and the well would be both cool and fresh and

_life_-giving; by it the soul would _revive_ (ἀναψύχειν), it would become

‘a living water, springing up into everlasting life.’

A ‘living water’ given by Osiris to the thirsty soul was part of the

eschatology of Egypt, but, so far as we know, Egypt had neither Lethe nor

Mnemosyne. In the _Book of the Dead_ there occurs indeed the _Chapter

of making a man possess memory in the underworld_ (No. XXV.), but the

process has no connection with the drinking from a well. The _Chapter of

drinking water in the underworld_ (No. LXII.) is quite distinct. Lethe

and Mnemosyne are, I think, Greek developments from the neutral _fonds_

of Egypt, and developments due to the influence of Orpheus.

* * * * *

Lethe as a person is as old as Hesiod[1424]. She is bad from the

beginning:

‘Next hateful Strife gave birth to grievous Toil,

Forgetfulness and Famine, tearful Woes,

Contests and Slaughters.’

By the time of Aristophanes the ‘plain of Lethe’ is part of the stock

furniture of Hades. In the _Frogs_[1425] Charon on the look-out for

passengers asks:

‘Who’s for the plain of Lethe? Who’s for the Donkey-shearings?

Who’s for the Cerberus folk? or Taenarus? Who’s for the Rookeries?’

The mystic comic Hades of Aristophanes is thoroughly Orphic. He mentions

no well, but he knows of a _Stone of Parching_[1426], where it may be the

thirsty soul sat down to rest.

Lethe as a water, a river, first appears in the _Republic_ of Plato[1427]

and in such fashion that it seems as though it was by that time

proverbial. ‘Our story,’ says Socrates, ‘has been saved and has not

perished, and it will save us if we are obedient to it, and we shall make

a good passage of the river of Lethe and shall not be defiled in our

souls.’ It is noticeable that to Plato Lethe is of death and pollution.

Just before, Socrates has recounted the myth of Er, a myth steeped in

Orphic eschatology of metempsychosis and retribution. The souls have

been forced to pass each one into the plain of Lethe through scorching

suffocating heat, for the plain of Lethe was devoid of trees and of

plants that spring from the earth. Towards evening they took shelter by

the river of Unmindfulness whose water no vessel can hold[1428]. Of this

all were compelled to drink a certain measure, and those who were not

safe-guarded by wisdom drank more than the measure, and each one as he

drank forgot all things. The river _Ameles_, Unmindfulness, is of course

Lethe: Plato likes to borrow a popular notion and slightly rechristen

it. Just so he takes Mnemosyne, Remembrance, and makes of her Anamnesis,

Remembering-again. It was not the fashion of his day to give chapter and

verse for your borrowings, and Plato so detested the lower side of Orphic

rites that perhaps he only half realized the extent of his debts. It is a

human and rather malicious touch, that in the order of those who remember

again, the man who lives the ‘initiated life’ comes only fifth, side by

side with the seer, below the philosopher and the lover and the righteous

king and the warrior, below even the economist and the man of business;

but after all he cannot much complain, for low though he is, he is above

the poet and the artist. Moreover Plato would take as clearly and vividly

known to the initiated all that through lapse of time has become dim to

us, and his constant use of the technical terms of initiation is adequate

acknowledgement. He tells[1429] of the uninitiate (ἀμύητος), the partly

initiate (ἀτέλεστος), the newly initiate (νεοτελής), wholly initiate

(ἀρτιτελής), of the man rapt by the divine (ἐνθουσιάζων), whom the vulgar

deem distraught, of how before we were caught in the prison of the body

we celebrated (ὠργιάζομεν) a most blessed rite, being initiated to

behold dimly and see perfectly (μυούμενοι καὶ ἐποπτεύοντες) apparitions

complete, simple, quiet and happy, shining in a clear light.

For Mnemosyne and Lethe in Greek religion we are not however dependent

on the myths and philosophy of Plato. We have definite evidence in local

ritual. Mnemosyne herself takes us straight to the North, the land of

Eumolpos and the Muses, to Pangaion, to Pieria, to Helicon. If Orpheus

found in Egypt, or as is more probable in Crete, a well of living water,

that well was I think nameless, or at least did not bear the name of

Mnemosyne. It may of course be accidental, but in the tablet from Crete

the well, though obviously the same as that in the Petelia tablet, is

unnamed. The name Mnemosyne was found for the well when Orpheus took

it with him to the land of the Muses, where he himself got his magic

lyre. Not ten miles away from the slopes of Helicon, at the sanctuary of

Trophonios at Lebadeia, we find a well not only of Mnemosyne but also of

Lethe, and we find the worshipper is made to drink of these wells not in

the imagined kingdom of the dead, but in the actual ritual of the living.

Man makes the next world in the image of this present.

Pausanias[1430] has left us a detailed account of the ritual of the

oracle of Trophonios of which only the essential points can be noted

here. Before the worshipper can actually descend into the oracular

chasm, he must spend some days in a house that is a sanctuary of the

Agathos Daimon and of Tyche; then he is purified and eats sacrificial

flesh. After omens have been taken and a black ram sacrificed into a

trench, the inquirer is washed and anointed and led by the priests to

certain ‘springs of water which are very near to one another, and then

he must drink of the water called Forgetfulness (Λήθης), that there may

be forgetfulness of everything that he has hitherto had in his mind, and

after that he drinks of yet another water called Memory (Μνημοσύνης), by

which he remembers what he has seen when he goes down below.’ He is then

shown an image which Daedalus made, i.e. a very ancient xoanon, and one

which was only shown to those who are going to visit Trophonios; this he

worships and prays to, and then, clad in a linen tunic—another Orphic

touch—and girt with taeniae and shod with boots of the country he goes

to the oracle. The ritual that follows is of course a descent into the

underworld, the man goes down into the oven-shaped cavity, an elaborate

artificial chasm, enters a hole, is dragged through by the feet, swirled

away, hears and sees ‘the things that are to be’ (τὰ μέλλοντα), he comes

up feet foremost and then the priests set him on the seat, called the

seat of Memory, which is near the shrine. They question him and, when

they have learnt all they can, give him over to his friends, who carry

him possessed by fear and unconscious to the house of Agathe Tyche and

Agathos Daimon where he lodged before. Then he comes to himself and, one

is relieved to hear, is able to laugh again. Pausanias says expressly

that he had been through the performance himself and is not writing from

hearsay.

The Orphic notes in this description are many. To those already discussed

we may add that Demeter at Lebadeia was known as Europa, a name which

points to Crete. Another Cretan link indicates that the worship of

Trophonios was, as we should expect if it is Dionysiac, of orgiastic

character. Plutarch[1431], in a passage that has not received the

attention it deserves, classes together certain daemons who ‘do not

always stay in the moon, but descend here below to have the supervision

of _oracular shrines_, and they are present at and _celebrate the

orgies of the most sublime rites_. They are punishers of evil deeds

and _watchers_ over such.’ The word watchers (φύλακες) is the same as

that used in the tablet of the guardians of Mnemosyne’s well. If in the

performance of their office they themselves do wrong either through fear

or favour, they themselves suffer for it, and in characteristically

Orphic fashion they are thrust down again and tied to human bodies.

Then comes this notable statement. ‘Those of the age of Kronos said

that they themselves were of the better sort of these daemons, and the

Idaean Daktyls who were formerly in Crete, and the Korybantes who were

in Phrygia, and the Trophoniads in Lebadeia, and thousands of others

throughout the world whose titles, sanctuaries and honours remain to this

day.’ The rites of Daktyls, Korybants and Trophoniads are all the same

and all are orgiastic and of the nature of initiation, all deal with

purgation and the emergence of the divine. All have rites that tell of

‘things to be’ and prepare the soul to meet them.

Pausanias of course understands ‘things to be’ (τὰ μέλλοντα) as merely

the future, his attention is fixed on what is merely oracular and

prophetic. The action of Lethe is to prepare a blank sheet for the

reception of the oracle of Mnemosyne, to make the utterance of the oracle

indelible. In point of fact, no doubt, the Trophoniads, the Orphics,

found when they came to Lebadeia an ancient hero-oracle. That is clear

from the sacrifice of the ram in the trench, a sacrifice made, be it

observed, not to Trophonios but to Agamedes, the old hero. That the

revelation at Lebadeia of ‘things to be’ was to the Orphic a vision

of and a preparation for the other world (τὰ ἐκεῖ) is clear from the

experiences recounted by Timarchos[1432] as having occurred to him in the

chasm of Trophonios. Socrates, it is said, was angry that no one told

him about it while Timarchos was alive, for he would have liked to hear

about it at first hand. What Timarchos saw was a vision of heaven and

hell after the fashion of a Platonic myth, and his guide instructed him

as to the meaning of things and how the soul shakes off the impurities

of the body. The whole ecstatic mystic account beginning with the

sensation of a blow on the head and the sense of the soul escaping,

reads like a trance-experience or like the revelation experienced under

an anaesthetic. It may be, and probably is, an invention from beginning

to end. The important point is that this vision of things invisible is

considered an appropriate experience to a man performing the rites of

Trophonios.

The worshipper initiated at Lebadeia drank of Lethe; there was evil

still to forget. The Orphic who, after a life spent in purification,

passed into Hades, had done with forgetting; his soul drinks only of

Remembrance. It is curious to note that in the contrast between Lethe and

Mnemosyne we have what seems to be an Orphic protest against the lower,

the sensuous side of the religion of Dionysos. To Mnemosyne, it will be

remembered (p. 509), as to the Muses, the Sun and the Moon and the other

primitive potencies affected by the Orphics, the Athenians offered only

wineless offerings, but ‘ancestral tradition,’ Plutarch[1433] tells us,

‘consecrated to Dionysos, Lethe, together with the narthex.’ It is this

ancestral tradition that Teiresias[1434] remembers when he tells of the

blessings brought by the god, and how

‘He rests man’s spirit dim

From grieving, when the vine exalteth him.

He giveth sleep to sink the fretful day

In cool forgetting. Is there any way

With man’s sore heart save only to forget?’

To man entangled in the flesh, man to whom sleep for the body, death

for the soul was the only outlook, Lethe became a Queen of the Shades,

Assessor of Hades[1435]. Orestes[1436], outworn with madness, cries

O magic of sweet sleep, healer of pain,

I need thee and how sweetly art thou come.

O holy Lethe, wise physician thou,

Goddess invoked of miserable men.’

Orpheus found for ‘miserable men’ another way, not by the vine-god, but

through the wineless ecstasy of Mnemosyne. The Orphic hymn[1437] to the

goddess ends with the prayer

‘And in thy mystics waken memory

Of the holy rite, and Lethe drive afar.’

Lethe is to the Orphic as to Hesiod wholly bad, a thing from which he

must purge himself. Plato[1438] is thoroughly Orphic when he says in the

_Phaedrus_ that the soul sinks to earth ‘full of forgetfulness and vice.’

The doctrine as to future punishment which Plutarch[1439] expounds in

his treatise ‘On Living Hidden’ touches the high water mark of Orphic

eschatology. The extreme penalty of the wicked in Erebos is not torture

but unconsciousness (ἄγνοια). Pindar’s ‘sluggish streams of murky

night,’ he says, receive the guilty, and hide them in unconsciousness

and forgetfulness. He denies emphatically the orthodox punishments, the

gnawing vulture, the wearisome labours; the body cannot suffer torment or

bear its marks, for the body is rotted away or consumed by fire; ‘the one

and only instrument of punishment is unconsciousness and obscurity, utter

disappearance, carrying a man into the smileless river that flows from

Lethe, sinking him into an abyss and yawning gulf, bringing in its train

all obscurity and all unconsciousness.’

* * * * *

The Orphic well of Mnemosyne lives on not only in the philosophy of

Plato, but also, it would seem, in the inspired vision of Dante. At the

close of the _Purgatorio_, when Dante[1440] is wandering through the

ancient wood, his steps are stayed by a little stream so pure that it

hid nothing, and beside it all other waters seemed to have in them some

admixture. The lady gathering flowers on the further bank tells him he

is now in the Earthly Paradise: the Highest Good made man good and for

goodness and gave him this place as earnest of eternal peace. Man fell

away,

‘changed to toil and weeping

His honest laughter and sweet mirth.’

Then she tells of the virtue of the little stream. It does not rise, like

an earthly water, from a vein restored by evaporation, losing and gaining

force in turn, but issues from a fountain sure and safe, ever receiving

again by the will of God as much as on two sides it pours forth.

‘On this side down it flows and with a virtue

That takes away from man of sin the memory,

On that the memory of good deeds it bringeth.

Lethe its name on this side and Eunoë

On that, nor does it work its work save only

If first on this side then on that thou taste it.’

Dante hears a voice unspeakable say _Asperges me_, and is bathed in

Lethe, and thereafter cannot wholly remember what made him to sin.

Beatrice says to him smiling,

‘And now bethink thee thou hast drunk of Lethe;

And if from smoke the flame of fire be argued,

This thine oblivion doth conclude most clearly

A fault within thy Will elsewhere intended.’

And she turns to her attendant maid saying,

‘See there Eunoë from its source forth flowing.

Lead thou him to it, and as thou art wonted

His virtue partly dead do thou requicken.’

And Dante comes back from ‘that most holy wave’:

‘Refect was I, and as young plants renewing

Their new leaves with new shoots, so I in spirit

Pure, and disposed to mount towards starry heaven.’

The Eunoë[1441] of Dante is Good-Consciousness, or the Consciousness of

Good. It is the result of a purified, specialized memory, from which

evil has fallen away. On the tomb-inscriptions the formulary occurs

εὐνοίας καὶ μνήμης χάριν ‘for good thought and remembrance’ sake,’ where

the two are very near together. It is just what the Orphic meant by his

Remembrance of the Divine, and, when we come to the next tablet, it will

seem probable that not only the idea of Good-Consciousness but the very

name _Eunoia_ may perhaps have been suggested to Dante by an analogous

Orphic well _En_noia.

THE SYBARIS TABLETS.

Six tablets still remain to be considered. Of these five were all found

in tombs in the territory of ancient Sybaris, in the modern commune of

Corigliano-Calabro. Two of them (III and IV) were found together in a

tomb known locally as the _Timpone grande_. They were folded closely

together, and lay near the skull of the skeleton. Their contents, so far

as they can be deciphered, are as follows:

III. _Timpone grande tablet (a)_[1442].

‘But so soon as the Spirit hath left the light of the sun,

To the right...............................of Ennoia

Then must man..............being right wary in all things.

Hail, thou who hast suffered the Suffering. This thou hadst never

suffered before.

Thou art become God from Man. A kid thou art fallen into milk.

Hail, hail to thee journeying on the right.........

...Holy meadows and groves of Phersephoneia.’

The second line seems to be a fragment of a whole sentence or set of

sentences put for the whole, as we might put ‘Therefore with Angels and

Archangels,’ leaving those familiar with our ritual to supply the missing

words. Popular quotations and extracts always tend to make the grammar

complete or at least intelligible.

The name of the well, ‘Ennoia,’ depends on a conjectural emendation. The

tablet of course cannot be the actual source of Dante’s Eunoë. It is,

however, very unlikely that Dante invented the name; he may have known

of _En_noia, and modified it to _Eu_noia. It has been seen that Lethe is

regarded as the equivalent of Agnoia, Unconsciousness, and to _Ag_noia

_En_noia would be a fitting contrast.

The formularies that occur at the end, the ‘Suffering,’ the ‘kid’ and the

‘groves of Phersephoneia,’ will be considered in relation to other and

more complete tablets (p. 586).

* * * * *

With the ‘Ennoia’ tablet was found

IV. _Timpone grande tablet (b)_[1443]. The inscription on this tablet is

unhappily as yet only partially read. It appears to be in some cryptic

script.

The broken formularies of tablet (_a_) and the cryptic script of (_b_)

mark a stage in which the Orphic prescriptions are ceasing to be

intelligent and intelligible, and tending to become cabalistic charms.

Orphism shared the inevitable tendency of all mystic religions to lapse

into mere mechanical magic. In the _Cyclops_ of Euripides[1444], the

Satyr chorus, when they want to burn out the eye of the Cyclops, say they

know

‘A real good incantation

Of Orpheus, that will make the pole go round

Of its own accord.’

Three tablets found near Sybaris yet remain. All these were found in

different tombs in the same district as the _Timpone grande_ tablets. In

each case the tablet lay near the hand of the skeleton. The tombs were on

the estate of Baron Compagno, who presented the tablets to the National

Museum at Naples. In form of letters and in content they offer close

analogies. They are all three reproduced in the Appendix, and will be

considered together[1445].

V. _Compagno tablet (a)_[1446].

‘Out of the pure I come, Pure Queen of Them Below,

Eukles and Eubouleus and the other Gods immortal.

For I also avow me that I am of your blessed race,

But Fate laid me low and the other Gods immortal

..............starflung thunderbolt.

I have flown out of the sorrowful weary Wheel.

I have passed with eager feet to the Circle desired.

I have sunk beneath the bosom of Despoina, Queen of the Underworld.

I have passed with eager feet from the Circle desired.

Happy and Blessed One, thou shalt be God instead of mortal.

A kid I have fallen into milk.’

VI. _Compagno tablet (b)_[1447].

‘Out of the pure I come, Pure Queen of the Pure below,

Eukles and Eubouleus and the other Gods and Daemons.

For I also, I avow me, am of your blessed race.

I have paid the penalty for deeds unrighteous

Whether Fate laid me low or.......

with starry thunderbolt.

But now I come a suppliant to holy Phersephoneia

That of her grace she receive me to the seats of the Hallowed.’

VII. _Compagno tablet (c)_[1448].

But for one or two purely verbal differences tablet (_c_) is precisely

the same as (_b_). It is written carelessly on both sides of the gold

plate, and but for the existence of (_b_) could scarcely have been made

out. Tablet (_b_) has itself so many omissions that its interpretation

depends mainly on the more complete contents of (_a_).

The last tablet to be considered presents two features of special

interest. First, the name of its owner Caecilia Secundina[1449] is

inscribed, and from this fact, together with the loose cursive script in

which it is written, the tablet can be securely dated as of Roman times.

Second, the contents show but too plainly that the tablet was buried with

magical intent.

VIII. _Caecilia Secundina tablet._

‘She comes from the Pure, O Pure Queen of those below

And Eukles and Eubouleus.—Child of Zeus, receive here the armour

Of Memory, (’tis a gift songful among men)

Thou Caecilia Secundina, (armour) in due rite to avert evil for ever.’

The tablet reads like a brief compendium from the two sets of formularies

already given. We have the statement made to Despoina, Eukles and

Eubouleus on behalf of Caecilia that she comes from the congregation of

the pure, but it is not followed by the detailed confession of ritual

performed—that is, so to speak, ‘taken as read.’ Mention is further made

of the divine origin of Caecilia and of Mnemosyne, but in both cases

after significant fashion. The ‘gift of Mnemosyne’ is now not water from

a well, but rather the tablet itself, a certificate of Caecilia’s purity,

in verse (ἀοίδιμον), and graven on imperishable gold. Caecilia claims

divine descent not from the Orphic Zagreus but from Zeus, who as has

already been shown (p. 480) took on, in popular monotheism, something

of the nature and functions of Zagreus. Caecilia’s theology, like that

of the Lower Italy vases (pp. 602, 603), is Orphism made orthodox,

Olympicized, conventionalized. The word νόμῳ ‘in due rite’ seems to

imply that the tablet has been ‘certified and found correct’ by human

authority. It is the usual priestly confusion: the soul _is_ divine—that

no Orphic priest dare deny; and yet this divine soul needs the ὅπλα,

the ‘armour’ forged by mortal hands. The concluding words αἰεὶ ἀπαγωγά,

‘averting evil for ever,’ make it certain that the intent is magical.

The Orphic reverts to the spirit and the vocabulary of the old ritual

of ‘Aversion.’ The ὅπλον, the armour, is perhaps touched with symbolism

like ‘the whole armour of God,’ but it is also in part the magic gear of

the charlatan. The ‘Superstitious Man’ of Theophrastus[1450] is ‘apt to

purify his house frequently, alleging that there has been an induction

(ἐπαγωγή) of Hecate,’ Caecilia Secundina brings a tablet engraved with

Orphic formularies, and thereby secures means for ‘the _aversion_ of evil

for ever.’

* * * * *

If the mutilated condition of tablet VII, the illegible character of IV

and the express statement of VIII are evidence of the lower, the magical

side of Orphism, the complete text of tablets V and VI are the expression

of its highest faith, of a faith so high that it may be questioned

whether any faith, ancient or modern, has ever out-passed it.

Tablets V and VI both begin with a prayer or rather a claim addressed

to the queen of the underworld, later defined as Phersephoneia or

Despoina, and to two gods called Eukles and Eubouleus. The two are

manifestly different titles of the same divinity. Eukles, ‘Glorious One,’

is only known to us from a gloss in Hesychius[1451], who defines it as

a euphemism for Hades. Eubouleus, ‘He of good Counsel,’ the local hero

and underworld divinity of Eleusis, the equivalent of Plouton, occurs

frequently in the Orphic Hymns as an epithet of Dionysos[1452]. Eukles

and Eubouleus are in fact only titles of the one god of Orphism who

appears under many forms, as Hades, Zagreus, Phanes and the like. The

gist of this monotheism will fall to be discussed when we come to the

theogony of Orpheus (Chap. XII.). For the present it is sufficient to

state that the Eukles-Eubouleus of the tablets, whom the Orphic invokes,

is substantially the same as the Zagreus to whom the Cretan Orphic (p.

480) was initiated. To the names named, i.e. the Queen of the Underworld,

Eukles and Eubouleus, the Orphic adds ‘the other gods and daemons.’ This

is a somewhat magical touch. The ancient worshipper was apt to end his

prayer with some such formulary; it was dangerous to leave any one out.

The word δαίμονες, daemons or subordinate spirits, is significant at once

of the lower, the magical side of Orphism, and as will be seen later (p.

656) of its higher spirituality. Orphism tended rather to the worship of

potencies (δαίμονες) than of anthropomorphic divinities (θεοί).

* * * * *

The Orphic then proceeds to state the general basis of his claim: he is

of divine birth,

‘For I also avow me that I am of your blessed race.’

By this he means, as has been shewn in examining the legend of Zagreus,

that some portion of the god Zagreus or Eubouleus or whatever he be

called was in him; his fathers the Titans had eaten the god and he sprang

from their ashes. That this is the meaning of the tablets is quite clear

from the words

‘But Fate laid me low ... starflung thunderbolt.’

He identifies himself with the whole human race as ‘dead in trespasses

and sins.’ If this were all, his case were hopeless; ‘dust we are and

unto dust we must return.’ He urges at the outset another claim,

‘Out of the pure I come.’

That is, as an Orphic I am purified by the ceremonials of the Orphics.

He presents as it were his certificate of spiritual health, he is free

from all contagion of evil. ‘Bearer is certified pure, coming from a

congregation of pure people.’ In like fashion in the Egyptian _Book of

the Dead_ (No. CXXV.) after the long negative confession made to Osiris

the soul says, ‘I am pure,’ ‘I am pure,’ ‘I am pure,’ ‘I am pure.’ He

then proceeds to recite his creed, or rather in ancient fashion[1453] to

confess or acknowledge the ritual acts he has performed. The gist of them

each and all is, ‘Bad have I fled, better have I found,’ or as we should

put it, ‘I have passed from death unto life.’ He does not himself say, I

am a god—that might be overbold—but the answer he looks for comes clear

and unmistakeable,

‘Happy and Blessed One, thou shalt be God instead of mortal.’

The confession he makes of ritual acts is so instructive as to his

convictions, so expresses his whole attitude towards religion that it

must be examined sentence by sentence.

I say advisedly confession of _ritual acts_, because each of the little

sentences describes in the past tense an action performed, ‘I have

escaped,’ ‘I have set my feet,’ ‘I have crept,’ ‘I have fallen.’ These

several acts described are, I believe, statements of actual ritual

performed on earth by the Orphic candidate for initiation, and in the

fact that they have been performed lies his certainty of ultimate bliss.

They are the exact counterpart of the ancient Eleusinian confession

formularies, ‘I have fasted, I have drunk the _kykeon_’ (p. 155).

THE RITUAL FORMULARIES.

The first article in the creed or confession of the Orphic soul is

κύκλου δ’ ἐξέπταν βαρυπενθέος ἀργαλέοιο.

‘I have flown out of the sorrowful weary Wheel.’

The notion of existence as a Wheel, a cycle of life upon life ceaselessly

revolving, in which the soul is caught, from the tangle and turmoil

of which it seeks and at last finds rest, is familiar to us from the

symbolism of Buddha. Herodotus[1454] expressly says that the Egyptians

were the first to assert that the soul of man was immortal, born and

reborn in various incarnations, and this doctrine he adds was borrowed

from the Egyptians by the Greeks. To Plato[1455] it was already ‘an

ancient doctrine that the souls of men that come Here are from There

and that they go There again and come to birth from the dead.’ It was

indeed a very ancient saying or doctrine. It has already been observed

in discussing (p. 179) the mythology of the Keres and Tritopatores.

Orpheus took it as he took so many ancient things that lay to his hand,

and moralized it. Rebirth, reincarnation, became for him _new_ birth.

The savage logic which said that life could only come from life, that

new souls are old souls reborn in endless succession, was transformed by

him into a Wheel or cycle of ceaseless purgation. So long as man has not

severed completely his brotherhood with plants and animals, not realized

the distinctive marks and attributes of his humanity, he will say with

Empedocles[1456]:

‘Once on a time a youth was I, and I was a maiden,

A bush, a bird, and a fish with scales that gleam in the ocean.’

To Plato the belief in the rebirth of old souls was ‘an ancient

doctrine,’ but because the Orphics gave it a new mystical content the

notion was for the most part fathered on Orpheus or Pythagoras. Diogenes

Laertius[1457], who is concerned to glorify Pythagoras, said that he was

the first to assert that ‘the soul went round in a changing Wheel of

necessity, being bound down now in this now in that animal.’ A people

who saw in a chance snake the soul of a hero would have no difficulty in

formulating a doctrine of metempsychosis. They need not have borrowed it

from Egypt, and yet it is probable that the influence of Egypt, the home

of animal worship, helped out the doctrine by emphasizing the sanctity

of animal life. The almost ceremonial tenderness shown to animals by the

Pythagorean Orphics is an Egyptian rather than a Greek characteristic.

The notion of kinship with the brute creation harmonized well with the

somewhat elaborate and self-conscious humility of the Orphic.

What precisely the ritual of the Wheel was we do not know. That there

was an actual Wheel[1458] in the rites and that some form of symbolical

release was enacted is probable. It is indeed almost certain, as

we know that Wheels formed part of the sacred furniture of certain

sanctuaries. It is worth noting that on Orphic vases of Lower Italy to

be discussed later (p. 600) wheels are suspended in the palace of Hades

and Persephone, and these are of two kinds, solid and spoked, designed

probably for quite different uses. The grammarian Dionysios, surnamed

the Thracian, wrote a book on ‘The Interpretation of the Symbolism that

has to do with Wheels,’ which probably contained just the necessary

missing information. Clement[1459] has preserved for us one valuable

sentence which makes the ritual use of Wheels a certainty. ‘People

signify actions,’ he says, ‘not only by words but by symbols, by words

as in the case of the Delphic utterances “Nothing too much” and “Know

thyself,” and in like manner by symbols as in the case of the Wheel that

is turned round in the precincts of the gods and that was derived from

the Egyptians.’ Dionysios is probably right. The Wheel like the Well may

have come from Egypt, or from Egyptianized Crete.

Hero of Alexandria[1460] in his curious treatise on ‘Machines moved by

air’ twice mentions Wheels as in ritual use. ‘In Egyptian sanctuaries

there are Wheels of bronze against the door-posts, and they are moveable

so that those who enter may set them in motion, because of the belief

that bronze purifies; and there are vessels for purifying so that those

who enter may purify themselves. The problem is how to arrange so that

when the Wheel is turned the water may flow mechanically so that as

aforesaid it may be sprinkled for purifying.’ The problem which Hero

faced mechanically the Orphics solved in metaphor—how to connect the

Wheel with purification. It was not difficult. Bronze, as Hero notes,

was supposed to be a purifier; in another section he says the Wheel was

actually called _Hagnisterion_, the thing for purification. Each metal

when first it comes into use is regarded as having magical properties.

A resonant metal was of special use because it frightened away bogeys.

Simaetha[1461] in her incantations cries

‘The goddess at the Crossways. Sound the gong,’

and the Scholiast on the passage remarks instructively that bronze was

sounded at eclipses of the moon, inasmuch as it was held to be pure and

to have the power of warding off pollutions, and he quotes the treatise

of Apollodorus ‘Concerning the Gods’ as his authority for the statement

that bronze was in use in all kinds of consecration and purification. It

was appropriate to the dead, he adds, and at Athens the Hierophant beats

a gong when Kore is invoked.

Here again we have a primitive superstition ready to the hand of the

Orphic. He is familiar with bronze-beating as a piece of apotropaic

ritual; he sees, probably in an Egyptian temple, a bronze wheel known

by some name that he translates as ‘a thing for purifying’; he has a

doctrine of metempsychosis and an ardent longing after purification; he

puts them all together and says with Proclus[1462] the one salvation

offered by the creator is that the spirit free itself from the wheel of

birth. ‘This is what those who are initiated by Orpheus to Dionysos and

Kore pray that they may attain, to

“Cease from the Wheel and breathe again from ill.”’

The notion of escape whether from the tomb of the body, or from the

restless Wheel or from the troubled sea, haunts the Orphic, haunts

Plato, haunts Euripides, lends him lovely metaphors of a fawn escaped,

makes his Bacchants sing[1463],

‘Happy he, on the weary sea

Who hath fled the tempest and won the haven.

Happy whoso hath risen free

Above his striving.’

The downward steps from purification to penance, from penance to

vindictive punishment, were easy to take and swiftly taken. Plato, in

the vision of Er, though he knows of purification, is not free from this

dismal and barren eschatology of vengeance and retribution. On Lower

Italy vases under Orphic influence, as will later be seen (p. 606), great

Ananke, Necessity herself, is made to hold a scourge and behave like a

Fury. That such notions were not alien to Orphism is clear from the line

in tablet VI:

‘I have paid the penalty for deeds unrighteous.’

The deeds unrighteous are not only the soul’s own personal sins but

his hereditary taint, the ‘ancient woe’ that is his as the heir of the

earth-born Titans.

* * * * *

The next avowal is

ἱμερτοῦ δ’ ἐπέβαν στεφάνου ποσὶ καρπαλίμοισι.

‘I have passed with eager feet to the Circle desired.’

It occurs in a second form, thus:

ἱμερτοῦ δ’ ἀπέβαν στεφάνου ποσὶ καρπαλίμοισι.

‘I have passed with eager feet _from_ the Circle desired.’

It is impossible to say which form is correct. It may be that both were

indispensable, that the neophyte had to pass first _into_ and then _out

of_ a ring or circle.

The word ἐπιβαίνω (I step on or over) is of course frequently used

metaphorically with the meaning ‘I entered on, embarked on.’ It might

therefore be possible to translate the words as ‘with eager feet I

entered on, i.e. I obtained, the crown I longed for.’ But as the word

στέφανος means not only a crown for the head, but a ring or circle, a

thing that encloses, it is perhaps better to take it here in its wider

sense[1464]. The mystic has escaped from the Wheel of Purgation, he

passes with eager feet over the Ring or circle that includes the bliss

he longs for, he enters and perhaps passes out of some sort of sacred

enclosure. As to the actual rite performed we are wholly in the dark.

Possibly the innermost shrine was garlanded about with mystic magical

flowers. This is however pure conjecture. We know[1465] that the putting

on of garlands or στέμματα was the final stage of initiation for

Hierophants and other priests, a stage that was as it were Consecration

and Ordination in one; but the putting on of garlands is not the entering

of a garlanded enclosure, and it is the entering of an enclosure that the

‘eager feet’ seem to imply.

* * * * *

Next comes the clause,

δεσποίνας δ’ ὑπὸ κόλπον ἔδυν χθονίας βασιλείας.

‘I have sunk beneath the bosom of Despoina, Queen of the Underworld.’

That this clause is an avowal of an actual rite performed admits of no

doubt. It is the counterpart of the ‘token’ of the mysteries of the

Mother: ‘I have passed down into the bridal-chamber,’ but here the

symbolism seems to be rather of birth than marriage. In discussing the

ritual of the Semnae (p. 244), it has been seen that the ‘second-fated

man’ had to be reborn before he could be admitted to the sanctuary,

and the rebirth was a mimetic birth[1466]. The same ceremony was gone

through among some peoples at adoption[1467]. Dionysos himself in Orphic

hymns is called ὑποκόλπιε, ‘he who is beneath the bosom.’ If the rites

are enumerated in the order of their performance this rite of birth or

adoption must have taken place _within_ the Circle, after the entrance

_into_ and before the exit _from_.

In the highest grades of initiation not only was there a new birth but

also a new name given, a beautiful custom still preserved in the Roman

Church. Lucian[1468] makes Lexiphanes tell of a man called Deinias, who

was charged with the crime of having addressed the Hierophant and the

Dadouchos by name, ‘and that when he well knew that from the time they

are consecrated they are nameless and can no longer be named, on the

supposition that they have from that time holy names.’

* * * * *

The last affirmation of the mystic is

ἔριφος ἐς γάλ’ ἔπετον,

‘A kid I have fallen into milk,’

a sentence which occurred, it will be remembered, in the second person,

on tablet III.

The quaint little formulary is simple almost to fatuity. Mysticism, in

its attempt to utter the ineffable, often verges on imbecility.

Before we attempt to determine the precise nature of the ritual act

performed, it may be well to consider the symbolism of the kid and

the milk. It is significant that in both cases the formulary occurs

immediately after another statement:

‘Thou shalt be God instead of mortal.’

It would seem that about the kid there is something divine. Eriphos

according to Hesychius[1469] was a title of Dionysos. Stephanus[1470]

the Byzantine says that Dionysos bore the title Eriphios among the

Metapontians, i.e. in the very neighbourhood where these Orphic tablets

were engraved. It is clear that there was not only a Bull-Dionysos

(Eiraphiotes) but a Kid-Dionysos (Eriphos), and this was just the sort of

title that the Orphics would be likely to seize on and mysticize. In the

_Bacchae_ it has been seen (p. 446) that there seems to attach a sort of

special sanctity to young wild things, a certain mystic symbolism about

the fawn escaped, and the nursing mothers who suckle the young of wolves

and deer. It may be that each one thought her nursling was a Baby-God.

Christian children to this day are called Christ’s Lambs because Christ

is the Lamb of God, and Clement[1471] joining new and old together says:

‘This is the mountain beloved of God, not the place of tragedies like

Cithaeron but consecrated to the dramas of truth, a mount of sobriety

shaded with the woods of purity. And there revel on it not the Maenads,

sisters of Semele the thunderstruck, initiated in the impure feast of

flesh, but the daughters of God, fair Lambs who celebrate the holy rites

of the Word, raising a sober choral chant.’

The initiated then believed himself new born as a young divine animal,

as a kid, one of the god’s many incarnations; and as a kid he falls

into milk. Milk was a god-given drink before the coming of wine, and

the Epiphany of Dionysos was shown not only by wine but by milk and

honey[1472]:

‘Then streams the earth with milk, yea streams

With wine and honey of the bee.’

Out on the mountain of Cithaeron he gives his Maenads draughts of

miraculous wine, and also[1473]

‘If any lips

Sought whiter draughts, with dipping finger-tips

They pressed the sod, and gushing from the ground

Came springs of milk. And reed-wands ivy-crowned

Ran with sweet honey.’

The symbolism of honey, the nectar of gods and men, does not here

concern us, but it is curious to note how honey, used in ancient days to

embalm the dead body, became the symbol of eternal bliss. A sepulchral

inscription of the first century A.D. runs as follows[1474]:

‘Here lies Boethos Muse-bedewed, undying

Joy hath he of sweet sleep in honey lying.’

Boethos lies in honey, the mystic falls into milk, both are symbols taken

from the ancient ritual of the _Nephalia_ and mysticized.

The question remains—what was the exact ritual of the falling into

milk? The ritual formulary is not ἔπιον γάλα ‘I _drank_ milk,’ but

ἔπετον ἐς γάλα ‘I _fell into_ milk.’ Did the neophyte actually fall

into[1475] a bath of milk, or, as in the case of ‘I stepped on the crown

I longed for,’ is the ritual act of drinking milk from the beginning

metaphorically described? The question unhappily cannot with certainty be

decided. The words ‘I fell into milk’ are not even exactly what we should

expect if a rite of Baptism were described; of a rite of immersion in

milk we have no evidence.

It is however from primitive rites of Baptism that we get most light as

to the general symbolism of the formulary. In the primitive Church the

sacrament of Baptism was immediately followed by Communion. The custom

is still preserved among the Copts[1476]. The neophyte drank not only of

Wine but also of a cup of Milk and Honey mixed[1477], those ‘new born in

Christ’ partook of the food of babes. Our Church has severed Communion

from Baptism and lost the symbolism of Milk and Honey, nor does she any

longer crown her neophytes after Baptism[1478].

S. Jerome[1479] complains in Protestant fashion that much was done in

the Church of his days from tradition that had not really the sanction

of Holy Writ. This tradition which the early Church so wisely and

beautifully followed can only have come from pagan sources. Among the

unsanctioned rites S. Jerome mentions the cup of Milk and Honey. That the

cup of Milk and Honey was pagan we know from a beautiful prescription

preserved in one of the Magic Papyri[1480] in which the worshipper is

thus instructed: ‘Take the honey with the milk, drink of it before the

rising of the sun, and there shall be in thy heart something that is

divine.’ The milk and honey can be materialized into a future ‘happy

land’ flowing with milk and honey, but the promise of the magical papyrus

is the utmost possible guerdon of present spiritual certainty. We find in

every sacrament what we bring.

* * * * *

If the formularies inscribed on the tablets have been actually recited

while the Orphic was alive we naturally ask—When and at what particular

Mysteries? To this question no certain answer can be returned. Save for

one instance,

‘I have sunk beneath the bosom of Despoina, Queen of the Underworld,’

the formularies of the tablets bear no analogy either to the tokens of

Eleusis or to those of the Great Mother. The Greater Mysteries at Eleusis

were preceded, we know, by Lesser Mysteries celebrated at Agra[1481],

a suburb of Athens. These mysteries were sacred to Dionysos and Kore

rather than to Demeter, and it is noticeable that in the tablets there

is no mention of Demeter, no trace of agricultural intent; the whole

gist is eschatological. But, found as they are in Crete and Lower

Italy, it is more probable that these tablets refer to Orphic mysteries

pure and simple before Orphic rites have blended with those of the

Wine-God. Pythagoras, tradition[1482] says, was initiated in Crete; he

met there ‘one of the Idaean Daktyls and at their hands was purified by

a thunderbolt; he lay from dawn outstretched face-foremost by the sea

and by night lay near a river covered with fillets from the fleece of a

black lamb, and he went down into the Idaean cave holding black wool and

spent there the accustomed thrice nine hallowed days and beheld the seat

bedecked every year for Zeus, and he engraved an inscription about the

tomb with the title “Pythagoras to Zeus” of which the beginning is:

“Here in death lies Zan, whom they call Zeus,”

and after his stay in Crete he went to Italy and settled in Croton.’

The story looks as if Pythagoras had brought to Italy from Crete Orphic

rites in all their primitive freshness. The religion of Dionysos was not

the only faith that taught man he could become a god. The dead Egyptian

also believed that he could become Osiris. The Orphic in Crete and Lower

Italy may have had rites dealing with his conduct in the next world more

directly than those of the Great Mother or of Eleusis.

This is made the more probable from the fact that we certainly know

that the sect of the Pythagoreans had special burial rites, strictly

confined to the Initiated. Of this Plutarch[1483] incidentally gives

clear evidence in his discourse of ‘The Daemon of Socrates.’ A young

Pythagorean, Lysis, came to Thebes and died there and was buried by his

Theban friends. His ghost appeared in a dream to the Pythagorean friends

he had left in Italy. The Pythagoreans, more skilled in these matters

than modern psychical experts, had a certain sign by which they knew

the apparition of a dead man from the phantasm of the living. They got

anxious as to how Lysis had been buried, for ‘there is something special

and sacrosanct (ὅσιον) that takes place at the burial of the Pythagoreans

and is peculiar to them, and if they do not attain this rite they think

that they will fail in reaching the very happy end that is proper to

them.’ So concerned were some of the Pythagoreans that they wished to

have the body of Lysis disinterred and brought to Italy to be reburied.

Accordingly one of them, Theanor, started for Thebes to make enquiries as

to what had been done. He was directed by the people of the place to the

tomb and went in the evening to offer libations, and he invoked the soul

of Lysis to give inspired direction as to what was to be done. ‘As the

night went on,’ Theanor recounts, ‘I saw nothing, but I thought I heard

a voice say “Move not that which should not be moved,” for the body of

Lysis was buried by his friends with sacrosanct ceremonies (ὁσίως), and

his spirit is already separated from it and set free into another birth,

having obtained a share in another spirit.’ On enquiry next morning

Theanor found that Lysis had imparted to a friend all the secret of the

mysteries so that the funeral rites had been performed after Pythagorean

fashion.

What precisely the ὅσια, the sacrosanct rites, were we cannot in detail

say, but we may be tolerably sure that something special was done for

the man who had been finally initiated, who was like the Cretan mystic

ὁσιωθείς, ‘consecrated.’ This something may have included the burial with

his body of tablets inscribed with sentences from his ‘Book of the Dead.’

This I think is implied in a familiar passage of Plato. Socrates in the

_Phaedo_[1484] says that ‘the journey to Hades does not seem to him a

simple road like that described by Aeschylus in the _Telephos_. On the

contrary it is neither simple nor one. If it were there would be no need

of guides. But it appears in point of fact to have many partings of the

ways and circuits. And this,’ he adds, ‘I say conjecturing it from the

customary and sacrosanct (ὁσίων) rites which we observe in this world.’

The customary rites (νόμιμα) were for each and all; the sacrosanct rites

(ὅσια) were for the initiated only, for they only were sacrosanct (ὅσιοι).

The Pythagoreans we know revived the custom of burial in the earth,

which had been at least in part superseded by the Northern practice of

cremation. It was part of their general return to things primitive. Earth

was the kingdom of ‘Despoina, Queen of the underworld,’ who was more

to them than Zeus of the upper air. To their minds bent on symbolism

burial itself would be a consecration, they would remember that to the

Athenians the dead were Δημητρεῖοι[1485], Demeter’s people, that burial

was refused to the traitor because he was unworthy ‘to be consecrated

by earth[1486],’ and burial in itself may well have been to them as to

Antigone a mystic marriage:

‘I have sunk beneath the bosom of Despoina, Queen of the Underworld.’

_b._ ORPHIC VASES OF LOWER ITALY.

Orphic religion, as seen on the tablets just discussed, is singularly

free from ‘other-worldliness.’ It is a religion promising, indeed,

immortality, but instinct not so much with the hope of future rewards

as with the ardent longing after perfect purity; it is concerned with

the state of a soul rather than with its circumstances. We have the

certainty of beatitude for the initiated, the ‘seats of the blessed,’ the

‘groves of Phersephoneia,’ but the longing uttered is ecstatic, mystic

not sensuous; it is summed up in the line:

‘Happy and Blessed One, thou shalt be God instead of mortal.’

None knew better than the Orphic himself that this was only for the few:

‘Many are they that carry the narthex, few are they that are made one

with Bacchus.’ For the many there remained other and lower beatitudes,

there remained also—a thing wholly absent from the esoteric Orphic

doctrine—the fear of punishment, punishment conceived not as a welcome

purification, but as a fruitless, endless vengeance. Of the existence of

this lower faith or rather _un_faith in the popular forms of Orphism we

have definite and curious evidence from a class of vases, found in Lower

Italy, representing scenes in the underworld and obviously designed under

Orphic influence.

* * * * *

Two specimens[1487] of these ‘Apulian’ vases are given in figs. 163 and

164. It will be obvious at the first glance that the composition of both

designs is substantially the same. This need not oblige us to conjecture

any one great work of art of which these two and the other designs not

figured here are copies; it only shows that some vase-painter of note in

the 4th century B.C. conceived the scheme and it became popular in his

factory.

The main lines of both compositions are as follows: in the centre the

palace of Hades with Plouton and Persephone. Immediately below, and

also occupying a central position, is Herakles, carrying off Cerberus.

Immediately to the left of the temple and therefore also fairly central,

is the figure of Orpheus. About these central figures various groups of

criminals and other denizens of Hades are diversely arrayed.

With this scheme in our minds we may examine the first specimen, the most

important of the series, because inscribed. The vase itself, now in the

Naples Museum and usually known from the place where it was found as the

‘Altamura’ vase[1488], is in a disastrous condition. It was put together

out of hundreds of fragments, painted over and freely restored after

the fashion of the day, and it has never yet been subjected to a proper

chemical cleaning. Much therefore in the drawing remains uncertain,

and only such parts and inscriptions will be dealt with as are above

suspicion.

The palace of Hades, save for the suspended wheels (p. 591), presents no

features of interest. In the ‘Altamura’ vase many of its architectural

features are from the hand of the restorer, but from the other vases the

main outlines are sure. In the Altamura vase both Hades and Persephone

are seated—in the others sometimes Persephone, sometimes Plouton

occupies the throne. Had the designs been exclusively inspired by

Orphic tradition, more uniform stress would probably have been laid on

Persephone.

[Illustration: FIG. 163.]

The figure of Orpheus, common to both vases, is interesting from its

dress, which reminds us of Vergil’s[1489] description,

‘There too the Thracian priest in trailing robe.’

The vase-painter of the late 4th cent. B.C. was more archaeologist than

patriot. In the Lesche picture of Polygnotus, Pausanias[1490] expressly

notes that Orpheus was ‘Greek in appearance,’ and that neither his

dress nor the covering he had on his head was Thracian. The Orpheus of

Polygnotus must have been near akin to the beautiful Orpheus of the

vase-painter in fig. 142. Polygnotus, too, made him ‘seated as it were

on a sort of hill, and grasping his cithara with his left hand; with

the other he was touching some sprays of willow, and he leant against a

tree.’ Very different this from the frigid ritual priest.

[Illustration: FIG. 164.]

* * * * *

About this figure of Orpheus an amazing amount of nonsense has been

written. The modern commentator thinks of Orpheus as two things—as

magical musician, which he _was_, as passionate lover, which in early

days he was _not_. The commentator’s mind is obsessed by ‘Che farò senza

te, Eurydice?’ He asks himself the question, ‘Why has Orpheus descended

into Hades?’ and the answer rises automatically, ‘To fetch Eurydice.’

As regards these Lower Italy vases there is one trifling objection to

this interpretation, and that is that _there is no Eurydice_. Tantalos,

Sisyphos, Danaides, Herakles, but no Eurydice. This does not deter the

commentator. The figure of Eurydice is ‘inferred rather than expressed.’

Happily this line of interpretation, which might lead us far, has been

put an end to by the discovery of a vase in which Eurydice _does_ appear;

Orpheus leads her by the wrist and a love-god floats above. It is evident

that when the vase-painter wishes to ‘express’ Eurydice he does not leave

her to be ‘inferred.’

It may be taken as an axiom in Greek mythology that passionate lovers are

always late. The myth of Eurydice is of considerable interest, but not as

a love-story. It is a piece of theology taken over from Dionysos, and,

primarily, has nothing to do with Orpheus. Anyone who realizes Orpheus at

all would feel that the intrusion of desperate emotion puts him out of

key. Semele, the green earth, comes up from below, year by year; with her

comes her son Dionysos, and by a certain instinct of chivalry men said he

had gone to fetch her. The mantle of Dionysos descends on Orpheus.

Eurydice is one of those general, adjectival names that are appropriate

to any and every goddess: she is the ‘Wide-Ruler.’ At Trozen,

Pausanias[1491] saw ‘a Temple of Artemis the Saviour, and in it were

altars of those gods who are said to rule below the earth, and they

say that in this place Semele was brought up from Hades by Dionysos,

and that here Herakles dragged up the hound of Hades.’ Pausanias is

sceptical: ‘But I do not the least believe that Semele died, she who

was the wife of Zeus, and as to the beast called the hound of Hades, I

shall state what I am sure is the truth about him in another place.’ The

cult of Artemis is clearly superposed over an ancient, perhaps nameless,

anyhow forgotten cult of underworld gods. There was probably a cleft at

hand and a legend of a rising Earth-goddess, as at the rock of Recall,

_Anaklethra_ (p. 283), and the Smileless Rock at Eleusis (p. 127); and

of course, given somebody’s _Anodos_, a Kathodos is soon supplied, and

then a formal descent into Hades. At the Alcyonian lake, near Argos,

which Nero tried in vain to sound, the Argives told Pausanias[1492] that

Dionysos went down to Hades to fetch Semele, and Polymnos, a local hero,

showed him the way down, and ‘there were certain rites performed there

yearly.’ Unfortunately, as is mostly the case when he comes to the real

point, Pausanias found it would ‘not be pious’ to reveal these rites to

the general public. At Delphi, too, it will be remembered (p. 403), the

Thyiades knew the mystic meaning of the festival of Heroïs, and ‘even an

outsider could conjecture,’ Plutarch says, ‘from what was done, that it

was an upbringing of Semele.’

Orpheus, priest of Dionysos, took on his resurrection as well as his

death; that is the germ from which sprang the beautiful love-story. A

taboo-element, common to many primitive stories, is easily added. You

may not look back when spirits are about from the underworld. If you do

you may have to join them. Underworld rites are often performed ‘without

looking back’ (ἀμεταστρεπτί, see p. 24 note 2).

* * * * *

There is another current fallacy about these underworld vases.

Commentators are not only prone to the romantic tendency to see a

love-story where none is, but, having once got the magical musician into

their minds, they see him everywhere. In these vases, they say, we have

‘the power of music to stay the torments of hell.’ They remember, and

small wonder, the amazing scene in Gluck’s opera, where Orpheus comes

down into the shades playing on his lyre, and the clamour of hell is

spell-bound; or they bethink them of Vergil:

‘The very house itself, the inmost depths

Of Death stood still to hearken.’

But the vase-painter of the 4th cent. B.C. is necessarily guiltless of

Vergil as of Gluck. Moreover his work is untinged by any emotion, whether

of poetry or religion; his composition is simply an _omnium gatherum_ of

conventional orthodox dwellers in Hades. Orpheus is there because, by

that time, convention demanded his presence. The vase-painter’s wealthy

clients—these Apulian vases were as expensive as they are ugly—would have

been ill-pleased had the founder of popular mysteries not had his fitting

place. But if interest focusses anywhere in a design so scattered and

devitalized, it is on the obvious ‘record’ of Herakles, who, tradition

said, had been initiated, not on the secret magic of Orpheus. It is true

that the ‘Danaides,’ when they appear, are doing nothing but dangling

their pitchers in attitudes meant to be decorative, but Tantalos still

extends a hand to keep off his rock, and Sisyphos still uprolls the

‘pitiless’ stone; there is no pause in their torments.

It remains to note the figures in the side groups. In the top row to the

left are Megara and her sons, placed there by a pardonable anachronism,

out of compliment to Herakles and Athens. We should never have guessed

their names, but the inscriptions are certain. Opposite them to the

right a group which on the Altamura vase is almost certainly due to

restoration. The figures are Myrtilos, Pelops, and Hippodameia. To

the left of Orpheus are two _Poinae_, developments, as has been seen

(p. 231), of the tragic Erinyes. Above Sisyphos is another figure,

a favourite of the Orphics, Ananke, Necessity. Only three letters

(ναν) of the name remain, but the restoration is practically certain.

Opposite Orpheus are the three ‘Judges’ of Hades, Triptolemos, Aiakos,

Rhadamanthys. Below the Judges are women bearing water-vessels, to whom

provisionally we may give the canonical name of ‘Danaides.’ The sea horse

is probably due to the restorer.

* * * * *

Turning to the Canosa vase, now in the Old Pinakothek at Munich[1493], we

find that, though none of the figures are inscribed, most can easily be

traced. Some modifications of the previous scheme must be noted. Tantalos

the Phrygian takes the place of the Danaides. Near Orpheus, in place of

the _Poinae_, is a group, man, wife and child, who are hard to interpret.

No mythological figures quite suit them, and some authorities incline to

see in the group just a human family initiated by Orpheus in his rites.

In face of the fact that all the other figures present are mythological,

this is, I think, difficult to accept. The figures are best left unnamed

till further evidence comes to light. On the right hand, in the top row,

is a group of great interest, Theseus, Peirithoös and Dike, armed with a

sword.

To resume, we have as certain elements in these vases Orpheus, the three

Judges of Hades, two heroes, Herakles and Theseus, who go down into Hades

and return thence, two standard Homeric criminals, Sisyphos and Tantalos,

and, in the case of the Altamura vase, the Danaides. The question

naturally rises, is there in all these figures any common factor which

determines their selection, or is it a mere haphazard aggregate?

The answer is as simple as instructive, and may be stated at the outset:

_All the canonical denizens of the underworld are hero and heroine

figures of the older stratum of the population_. Hades has become a sort

of decent Dower-house to which are relegated the divinities of extinct or

dying cults.

* * * * *

In discussing hero-worship, we have already seen (p. 336) that Tityos and

Salmoneus are beings of this order. Once locally the rivals of Zeus, they

paled before him, and as vanquished rivals became typical aggressors,

punished for ever as a warning to the faithful. Tityos does not appear

on Lower Italy vases, but Pausanias[1494] saw him on the fresco of

Polygnotus at Delphi, a ‘dim and mangled spectre,’ and Aeneas[1495] in

the underworld says:

‘I saw Salmoneus cruel payment make,

For that he mocked the lightning and the thunder

Of Jove on high.’

It was an ingenious theological device, or rather perhaps unconscious

instinct, that took these ancient hero figures, really regnant in the

world below, and made the place of their rule the symbol of their

punishment. According to the old faith all men, good and bad, went below

the earth, great local heroes reigned below as they had reigned above;

but the new faith sent its saints to a remote Elysium or to the upper air

and made this underworld kingdom a place of punishment; and in that place

significantly we find that the tortured criminals _are all offenders

against Olympian Zeus_.

We must confine our examination to the two typical instances selected by

the vase-painter, Sisyphos and Tantalos.

We are apt to think of Sisyphos and Tantalos as punished for overweening

pride and insolence, and to regard their downfall as a warning of the

ephemeral nature of earthly prosperity.

‘Oh what are wealth and power! Tantalus

And Sisyphus were kings long years ago,

And now they lie in the lake dolorous;

The hills of hell are noisy with their woe,

Aye swift the tides of empire ebb and flow.’

Kings they were, but kings of the old discredited order. Homer says

nothing of their crime, he takes it as known; but in dim local legends we

can in both cases track out the real gist of their ill-doing: they were

rebels against Zeus.

This is fairly clear in the case of Tantalos. According to one

legend[1496] he suffered because he either stole or concealed for

Pandareos the golden hound of Zeus. According to the epic author[1497]

of the ‘Return of the Atreidae,’ he had been admitted to feast with the

gods, and Zeus promised to grant him whatever boon he desired. ‘He,’

Athenaeus says, ‘being a man insatiable in his desire for enjoyment,

asked that he might have eternal remembrance of his joys and live after

the same fashion as the gods.’ Zeus was angry; he kept his promise, but

added the torment of the imminent stone. It is clear that in some fashion

Tantalos, the old hero-king, tried to make himself the equal of the new

Olympians. The insatiable lust is added as a later justification of the

vengeance. Tantalos is a real king, with a real grave. Pausanias[1498]

says, ‘In my country there are still signs left that Pelops and Tantalos

once dwelt there. There is a famous grave of Tantalos, and there is

a lake called by his name.’ The grave, he says elsewhere[1499], he

had himself seen in Mount Sipylos, and ‘well worth seeing it was.’ He

mentions no cult, but a grave so noteworthy would not be left untended.

* * * * *

The legend of Sisyphos, if more obscure than that of Tantalos, is not

less instructive. The _Iliad_ knows of Sisyphos as an ancient king. When

Glaukos would tell his lineage to Diomede he says[1500]:

‘A city Ephyre there was in Argos’ midmost glen

Horse-rearing, there dwelt Sisyphos the craftiest of all men,

Sisyphos son of Aiolos, and Glaukos was his son,

And Glaukos had for offspring blameless Bellerophon.’

Ephyre is the ancient name of Corinth, and on Corinth Pausanias[1501] in

his discussion of the district has a highly significant note. He says, ‘I

do not know that anyone save the majority of the Corinthians themselves

has ever seriously asserted that Corinthos was the son of Zeus.’ He

goes on to say that according to Eumelus (circ. B.C. 750), the ‘first

inhabitant of the land was Ephyra, daughter of Okeanos.’ The meaning is

transparent. An ancient pre-Achaean city, with an eponymous hero, a later

attempt—discredited of all but the interested inhabitants—to affiliate

the indigenous stock to the immigrant conquerors by a new eponymous

hero, a son of Zeus.

The epithet ‘craftiest,’ κέρδιστος, is, as Eustathius[1502] observes, a

‘mid-way expression,’ i.e. for better for worse. ‘Glaukos,’ he says in

his observant way, ‘does not wish to speak evil of his ancestor.’ The

word he uses means very clever (συνετώτατος), very ready and versatile

(εὐτρεχέστατος). It is in fact no more an epithet of blame than

πολύμητις, ‘of many wiles,’ the stock epithet of Odysseus. Eustathius

goes on to explain the meaning of the name Sisyphos. Sisyphos, he says,

was among the ancients a word of the same significance as θεόσοφος,

divinely wise, σιός being among the Peloponnesians a form of θεός. He

cites the oath used by comic poets, ναὶ τὼ σιώ for νὴ τοὺς θεούς, ‘by

the gods.’ Whether Eustathius is right, and Sisyphos means ‘divinely

wise,’ or whether we adopt the current etymology[1503] and make Sisyphos

a reduplicated form of σοφός, i.e. the ‘Very Very Wise One,’ thus much is

clear. The title was traditionally understood as of praise rather than

blame, and it is not rash to see in it one of the cultus epithets of the

old religion like ‘The Blameless One.’

It is as a benefactor that Sisyphos appears in local legend. It was

Sisyphos, Pausanias[1504] says, who found the child Melicertes, buried

him, and instituted in his honour the Isthmian games. It was to Sisyphos

that Asopos[1505] gave the fountain behind the temple of Aphrodite, and

for a reason most significant. ‘Sisyphos,’ the story says, ‘knew that it

was Zeus who had carried off Aegina, the daughter of Asopos, but he would

not tell till the spring on Acrocorinthus was given him. Asopos gave it

him, and then he gave information, and for that information he, if you

like to believe it, paid the penalty in Hades.’ Pausanias is manifestly

sceptical, but his story touches the real truth. Sisyphos is the ally

of the indigenous river Asopos. Zeus carries off the daughter of the

neighbouring land; Sisyphos, hostile to the conqueror, gave information,

and for that hostility he suffers in Hades. But though he points a moral

in Olympian eschatology, he remains a great local power. The stronghold

of the lower city bore his name, the Sisypheion. Diodorus[1506] relates

how it was besieged by Demetrius, and when it was taken the garrison

surrendered. It must have been a place of the old type, half fortress

half sanctuary. Strabo[1507] notes that in his day extensive ruins of

white marble remained, and he is in doubt whether to call it temple or

palace.

As to the particular punishment selected for Sisyphos, a word remains

to be said. It bears no relation to his supposed offence, whether that

offence be the cheating of Death or the betrayal of Zeus. His doom is

ceaselessly to upheave a stone. Reluctant though I am to resort to

sun-myths, it seems that here the sun counts for something. The sun

was regarded by the sceptical as a large red-hot stone: its rising and

setting might very fitly be represented as the heaving of such a stone

up the steep of heaven, whence it eternally rolls back. The worship of

Helios was established at Corinth[1508]; whether it was due to Oriental

immigration or to some pre-Hellenic stratum of population cannot here be

determined. Sisyphos was a real king, the place of his sepulture on the

Isthmus was known only to a few. It may have been kept secret like that

of Neleus[1509] for prophylactic purposes. But a real king may and often

does take on some of the features and functions of a nature god[1510].

* * * * *

On the ‘Canosa’ vase, immediately above Tantalos, is a group of three

Judges, carrying sceptres. On the Altamura vase are also three Judges,

occupying the same place in the composition, and happily they are

inscribed—Triptolemos, Aiakos, and Rhadamanthys. Two of the three,

Triptolemos and Aiakos, certainly belong to the earlier stratum.

Triptolemos had never even the shadowiest connection with any Olympian

system; there is no attempt to affiliate him; he ends as he began, the

foster-child of Demeter and Kore, and by virtue of his connection with

the ‘Two Goddesses’ of the underworld he reigns below. Demeter and Kore,

the ancient Mother and Maid, were strong enough to withstand, nay to

out-top, any number of Olympian divinities. To tamper with the genealogy

of their local hero was felt to be useless and never attempted.

In striking contrast to Triptolemos, Aiakos seems at first sight entirely

of the later stratum. He is father of the great Homeric heroes, Telamon

and Peleus, and when a drought afflicts Greece it is he who by sacrifice

and prayer to Pan-Hellenian Zeus procures the needful rain. Recent

investigation[1511] has, however, clearly shown that Aiakos is but one of

the countless heroes taken over, affiliated by the new religion, and his

cult, though overshadowed, was never quite extinguished. One fact alone

suffices to prove this. Pausanias[1512] saw and described a sanctuary

in Aegina known as the Aiakeion. ‘It stood in the most conspicuous part

of the city, and consisted of a quadrangular precinct of white marble.

Within the precinct grew ancient olives, and there was there also an

altar rising only a little way from the ground, and it was said, as a

secret not to be divulged, that this altar was the tomb of Aiakos.’ The

altar-tomb was probably of the form already discussed (p. 63) and seen in

fig. 9. Such a tomb, as altar, presupposes the cult of a hero.

Minos does not appear on these Lower Italy vases. In his place is

Rhadamanthys, his brother and like him a Cretan. The reason of the

substitution is perhaps not far to seek. Eustathius[1513] notes that

some authorities held that Minos was a pirate and others that he was

just and a lawgiver. It is not hard to see to which school of thinkers

the Athenians would be apt to belong, and the Lower Italy vases are

manifestly under Attic influence. If the old Cretan tradition had to

be embodied, Rhadamanthys was a safe non-committal figure. He is most

at home in the Elysian fields, a conception that was foreign to the

old order. As brother of Minos, Rhadamanthys must have belonged to

the old Pelasgian dark-haired stock, but we find with some surprise

that he is in the _Odyssey_ ‘golden-haired’ (ξανθός), like any other

Achaean. Eustathius hits the mark when he says[1514], ‘Rhadamanthys is

golden-haired, out of compliment to Menelaos, for Menelaos had golden

hair.’

Herakles and Theseus remain, and need not long detain us. Herakles is

obviously no permanent denizen of Hades; he is triumphant, not tortured;

he hales Cerberus to the upper air, and that there may be no mistake

Hermes points the way. It has already been seen (p. 55) that Herakles was

a hero, _the_ hero well worth Olympianizing though he never became quite

Olympianized. In the _Nekuia_, when the poet is describing Herakles, he

is caught on the horns of a dilemma between the old and the new faith,

and instinctively he betrays his predicament. Odysseus[1515] says:

‘Next Herakles’ great strength I looked upon,

His shadow, for the man himself is gone

To join him with the gods immortal; there

He feasts and hath for bride Hebe the fair.’

The case of Theseus is different. In the Hades of Vergil[1516] he is a

criminal condemned for ever:

‘There sits, and to eternity shall sit,

Unhappy Theseus.’

But on these Lower Italy vases we have again to reckon with Athenian

influence. Theseus is of the old order, son of Poseidon, but Athens was

never fully Olympianized, and she will not have her hero in disgrace.

Had he not a sanctuary at Athens, an ancient asylum[1517]? Were not his

bones brought in solemn pomp from Skyros[1518]? So the matter is adjusted

with considerable tact. Theseus, never accounted as guilty as Peirithoös,

is suffered to return to the upper air, Peirithoös has to remain below;

and this satisfies Justice, Dike, the woman seated by his side. That

the woman holding the sword is none other than Dike herself is happily

certain, for she appears inscribed on the fragment of another and similar

amphora in the Museum at Carlsruhe[1519]. Near her on this fragment is

Peirithoös, also inscribed.

So far in our consideration of the criminals of Hades it might seem as

though they owed their existence purely to theological _animus_. They

are, we have seen, figures of the old religion degraded by the new.

But to suppose that this was the sole clue to their presence would

be a grave mistake. The notion of punishment, and especially eternal

punishment, cannot be fairly charged to the account of Homer and the

Olympian religion he represents. This religion was too easy-going, too

essentially aristocratic to provide an eternity even of torture for the

religious figures it degraded and despised. Enough for it if they were

carelessly banished to their own proper kingdom, the underworld. It is,

alas, to the Orphics, not to the Achaeans, that religion owes the dark

disgrace of a doctrine of eternal punishment. The Orphics were concerned,

as has fully been seen, with two things, immortality and purification;

the two notions to them were inseparable, but by an easy descent the

pains that were for purification became for vengeance. The germ of such a

doctrine is already in the line:

‘I have paid the penalty for deeds unrighteous.’

The lower kind of Orphic could not rid of vengeance the Hades he made in

his own vindictive image. We have seen (p. 507) the heights to which Dike

could rise as Heavenly Justice, as Purity; here in Hades she descends to

another and more human level.

[Illustration: FIG. 165.]

The figure of Dike in art was not invented by the artist of the Lower

Italy vases. She is quaintly figured in the design in fig. 165, from an

amphora in the Museum at Vienna[1520]. Dike, with uplifted mallet, is

about to pound the head of an ugly speckled woman, Adikia, Injustice.

The vase, though not signed by Nikosthenes, is manifestly of his school,

and therefore dates about the turn of the 6th and 5th centuries B.C.

The figure of Dike smiting with the mallet or club was familiar to

literature. Theseus, when he learns the death of Hippolytos, asks:

‘How then did Justice smite him with her club,

My son who shamed me?’

The Hades, then, of the Lower Italy vases is a popular blend of Orphism

and of Olympian theology, or rather of ancient Pelasgian figures viewed

through the medium of Olympianism. The old stratum provides the material,

the new stratum degrades it, and Orphism moralises it.

THE DANAIDES.

We have left to the end the figures of the ‘Danaides,’ the maiden-figures

carrying water-jars, who on the Altamura vase[1521] stand in the lowest

row on the right hand. The ‘Danaides’ have been reserved advisedly,

because in their case we have positive evidence of the blend between new

and old.

When mention is made of the water-carriers in Hades, maidens who carry

water in a leaky vessel, to the modern mind the name ‘Danaides’ instantly

occurs:

‘O Danaides, O sieve.’

The association is real and valid, but its cause and origin have been

misunderstood, and thereby much confusion has arisen.

The water-carriers of Hades are familiar to us mainly through the famous

attack made by Plato[1522] in the _Republic_ on Orphic eschatology.

Seizing, according to his fashion, on the lower side of Orphism, Plato

complains that it is riddled through and through with other-worldliness.

Homer and Hesiod promise to the just man good in this life, ‘bees’ and

‘woolly sheep,’ and ‘trees laden with fruit,’ and ‘wealthy marriages’

and ‘high offices.’ That in Plato’s eyes is bad enough, but religious

poets, among them Orpheus, do worse. ‘Still more lusty are the blessings

that Musaeus and his son give on behalf of the gods to the just, for on

their showing they take them down into Hades and set them on couches and

prepare a Banquet of the Blest; they crown them with garlands and make

them spend their whole time being drunk, accounting eternal drunkenness

to be the fairest reward of virtue; and others lengthen out still longer

the recompense given by the gods, saying that there shall be children’s

children and a posterity of the blessed and those who keep faith. In

such and the like fashion do they sing the praise of justice. But the

impious and unjust they bury in a kind of mud in Hades, and compel them

to carry water in a sieve.’

The ‘immortal drunkenness’ promised as guerdon to the blessed was of

course conceived of by the higher sort of Orphic as a spiritual ecstasy,

by the lower Orphic as merely eternal banqueting. The notion was easily

popularized, for the germ of it existed in the ‘Hero-feast’ already

discussed (p. 350), and these ‘Hero-feasts,’ we have seen, were taken

over by Dionysos.

* * * * *

The mud and the sieve to which the impious were condemned remain to be

considered. They can only be understood in relation to Orphic ritual,

and in this relation are instantly clear. Daubing with mud was, we have

seen (p. 492), an integral rite in certain Orphic mysteries. The rite

neglected on earth by the impious must be performed for ever in Hades.

The like notion lies at the bottom of the water-carrying. He who did not

purify himself on earth by initiation must for ever purify himself in

Hades. But the vindictive instinct, always alive in man, adds, it is too

late, he carries water in a pierced vessel, a sieve, and carries it for

ever.

It is often said by modern commentators who have made no trial of eternal

burning that fruitless labour is the greatest of all punishments. Goethe

was the first offender. ‘The ancients,’ he says, ‘rightly considered

fruitless labour as the greatest of all torments, and the punishments

which Tantalos, Sisyphos, the Danaides and the Uninitiated undergo in

Hades bear witness to this.’ But it is not in this reflective fashion

that primitive mythology and eschatology are made.

The word used by Plato for those who carry the water in the sieve

is noteworthy, it is ἀνόσιοι, which perhaps is best translated

‘unconsecrated ones.’ The word ὅσιοι we have already seen denoted

complete initiation, the full and final stage; ἀνόσιοι is almost, though

not quite, ‘uninitiated.’ In the _Phaedo_, Plato does not mention the

water-carriers, but he says explicitly what he here implies, that those

who lie in mud are those uninitiated in the mysteries. ‘I think,’ says

Socrates, ‘that those who founded our mysteries were not altogether

foolish, but from old had a hidden meaning when they said that whoso goes

to Hades uninitiated (ἀμύητος), and not having finally accomplished the

rites (ἀτέλεστος), will lie in mud.’

Again, when in the _Gorgias_ Plato[1523] notes the moralization of

the notion of the water-carrying, he quite clearly states that the

water-carriers are the uninitiated. Socrates is refuting the notion

propounded by Callicles that the full satisfaction of the passions is

virtue. ‘You make of life a fearful thing,’ he says, and I think perhaps

Euripides was right when he said:

‘Life may be death, death life—who knows?’

‘A certain philosopher,’ he goes on, ‘has said we are dead, and that the

body (σῶμα) is a tomb (σῆμα).’ This doctrine, it will be remembered, was

fathered in the _Cratylus_ on the Orphics. Then with the notion of the

tomb-body (σῶμα σῆμα) still in his mind, Socrates continues: ‘A certain

ingenious man, probably an Italian or a Sicilian, playing on the word,

invented a myth in which he called that part of the soul which is the

seat of the desires a _pithos_, because it was _bid_able (πιθανὸν) and

persuadable, and he called the ignorant “unshutting” (ἀμυήτους) ...

and he declared that of the souls in Hades the uninitiated were most

miserable, for they carry water into a _pithos_ which is pierced, with a

sieve that is pierced in like manner.’ Whether the ‘ingenious man’ was

Empedocles or Pythagoras is not for our purpose important; both held

Orphic doctrines, and one of these doctrines was that the uninitiated

carried water in Hades. It has not, I think, been noticed that the tomb

(σῆμα) as a symbol of the body evidently suggests the _pithos_ or jar

as symbol of the seat of the desires. We have seen in discussing the

Anthesteria (p. 43) that the souls rise from a grave-_pithos_.

So far it must be distinctly noted that Plato nowhere calls the

water-carriers in Hades _Danaides_. The first literary source for the

Danaides _as water-carriers in Hades_ is the pseudo-Platonic dialogue

the _Axiochus_[1524]. In Hades, we are there told, is the region of the

unholy (χῶρος ἀσεβῶν) and the ‘unaccomplished water-carryings of the

Danaides’ (Δαναΐδων ὑδρεῖαι ἀτελεῖς). The word ἀτελεῖς, ‘unaccomplished,’

means also uninitiated, and we are left in doubt—a doubt probably

intentional, as to which meaning is here proposed. The whole purport

of the _Axiochus_ is to prepare a coward to face death decently, and

the dialogue is full of mysticism. We have as the meed of the blessed

‘flowery meadows,’ streams of ‘pure water,’ ‘drinking feasts with songs,’

and the like. Moreover and most significant of all, the uninitiated have

‘some sort of _proedria_’ or right of the first place, and even in Hades

they ‘_go on performing their pure and sanctified rites_.’ It is the very

mirror of the heaven where

‘Congregations ne’er break up and Sabbaths have no end.’

To Plato, then, the water-carriers of Hades are ‘uninitiated’; by the

time of the _Axiochus_ they are Danaides: what is the connecting link?

The answer must wait till the evidence of art has been examined.

[Illustration: FIG. 166.]

The evidence of vase-painting is of high importance, because we possess

two black-figured vases which antedate Plato by more than a century.

The design in fig. 166 is from an amphora in the old Pinakothek[1525]

in Munich. The scene is laid in the underworld; of that we are sure

from the figure of Sisyphos. On the reverse of the vase (not figured

here) Herakles is represented with Cerberus. On the obverse (fig.

166), four little winged _eidola_ (ghosts) are climbing carefully up a

huge _pithos_, and into it they pour water from their water-jars. The

_pithos_, it should be noted, is sunk deep into the earth; it is in

intent the mouth of a well. Such _pithoi_ are still to be found sunk in

the earth at Athens, and served the Turks for cisterns. The upper part

of the _pithos_ is intact, so are the water-jars, but it is possible and

indeed almost certain that the _pithos_ is thought of as pierced at the

bottom so that the water poured in flows away into the ground:

‘inane lymphae

dolium fundo pereuntis _imo_.’

The vase in fig. 166 is usually figured as an illustration of the

‘Danaid’ myth, but there is not the faintest adducible evidence that the

winged _eidola_ are Danaides.

[Illustration: FIG. 167.]

The design in fig. 167, from a black-figured lekythos in the museum at

Palermo[1526], allows us to go a step further. The water-carriers are

emphatically _not_ Danaides. Of the six figures who rush in grotesque

hurry to fill the _pithos_, three are men, three women. If we give them

a name, it must be not Danaides but ‘Uninitiated.’ They are burlesqued,

in the spirit of Aristophanes; the uninitiated soul pauses to refresh

his mind by pulling the donkey’s tail. The donkey, it may be noted, is

further evidence that the vase-painter has the mysteries in his mind.

He has fallen on his knees, and his burden has dropped from his back.

The seated old man gazes at it helplessly. There seems a reminiscence

of the ‘ass who carried the mysteries,’ and in this topsy-turvy Hades,

as in Aristophanes, he turns and will carry them no more. The ass and

the old man, sometimes called Oknos, are stock figures in the comic

Hades, and they are variously moralized. The closest literary analogy to

our picture is offered centuries later by Apuleius[1527]. Psyche, when

about to descend into the lower world, is warned that when she has gone

some distance on the ‘deadly way’ she will come upon a lame ass and a

lame ass-driver. The driver will ask her to pick up for him some of the

bundles that have fallen from the ass’s pack. She is to remain silent and

pass on.

It is of course matter for regret that neither of the black-figured vases

that we possess is inscribed. It would have been most instructive to

learn what that echo of popular tradition, the vase-painter, actually

_called_ the water-carriers. Happily we have, not indeed a work of art

itself, but the literary record of such a work in which an inscription

_did_ occur—the painting by Polygnotus of the descent of Odysseus into

Hades, frescoed on the wall of the Lesche of Delphi, and minutely

described by Pausanias.

‘Above the figure of Penthesilea,’ Pausanias[1528] says, ‘are women

carrying water in broken earthen sherds.’ The vessels are here described

as broken, not pierced, and Pausanias says nothing about whether the

vessel into which they pour is pierced or not. ‘One of the women is

represented as in the flower of her youth, the other of advanced years.’

There were certainly no _old_ Danaides. There is no separate inscription

over each woman, but there is an inscription common to both which says

they are ‘of those who have not been initiated.’ Pausanias then goes on

to describe some other mythological figures unconnected with these women,

among them Sisyphos, who is ‘struggling to push a rock up a precipice.’

He then adds, ‘There is also in the picture a _pithos_ and an elderly

man, a boy and two women, one just below the rock, who is young, and

near to the old man a woman of similar age. The others are going on

carrying water, but the old woman seems to have broken her hydria, but

what is left in the potsherd she is pouring into the _pithos_.’ As in

the black-figured vase-paintings it is a hydrophoria into a _pithos_,

but the hydriae are in some cases at least broken. How many figures in

all Pausanias saw is not clear, owing to his disjointed account, nor

does it matter, the essential thing is that they are of both sexes and

any age—they are nowise Danaides. Nor did Pausanias, charged though he

was with later mythological associations, suppose them to be so—that the

inscription forbade. He concludes his account thus: ‘We inferred that

these also (i.e. the last group mentioned by him) were persons who held

the rites at Eleusis to be of no account. For the Greeks of early days

held initiation at Eleusis to be of as much more account than any other

matter as the gods are compared to the heroes.’

Polygnotus and Plato certainly, the black-figured vase-painter probably,

regarded the water-carriers of Hades not as mythical Danaides, but

as real human persons uninitiated. By the date of the _Axiochus_ the

fruitless water-carriers are Danaides. The question still remains to

be answered, Why are the Danaides selected as typically Uninitiate? It

was, it must be noted, perfectly natural that popular theology, when it

made of the Uninitiate water-carriers in Hades, should seek a mythical

prototype, but why were the Danaides selected? The reason is primarily

simple and obvious, though later it became curiously complex.

The Danaides of mythology were _well-nymphs_. One of the sisterhood was

called Amymone: she gave her name to the spring near Lerna, still called

in Strabo’s time Amymone. Strabo[1529] preserves for us a line from an

epic poet,

‘Argos, waterless once, the Danai made well-watered.’

Long before the tragedy about their husbands, the Danaides were at work

watering, fertilizing thirsty Argos. The Danaides, _as merely Danaides_,

might fitly be represented as filling a great well-_pithos_.

But, it must next be observed, the Danaides belong to the old stratum of

the population, the same stratum as Tantalos, as Sisyphos, as Tityos:

they are of the old matriarchal order, their prayer persistently iterated

is:

‘We, the great seed of a Holy Mother, ah me!

Grant us that we

Unwed, unsubdued, from marriage of men may flee[1530].’

In the _Suppliants_ of Aeschylus it is from a marriage they deem lawless

that the Danaides flee, and their act is justified. Behind the legend we

seem to discern, though dimly, the reflection of some shift of old to

new, some transition from matriarchal freedom to patriarchal marriage

enactments. In any case, in the late orthodox form of the myth, we meet

the Danaides as criminals, and their crime is clearly not only that of

murder, but of rejection of marriage. What was justified by the old order

was criminal in the new. Here was an opportunity for the moralist. Of old

the Danaides carried water because they were well-nymphs; the new order

has made them criminals, and it makes of their fruitful water-carrying a

fruitless punishment—an atonement for murder[1531].

It will readily be seen that the well-nymphs, regarded by the new order

as guilty maidens seeking purification, offered just the mythological

prototype needed for the uninitiated water-carriers. Once the analogy was

seized, many further traits of resemblance would eagerly be added. At

the lake of Lerna, near which was the spring known as Amymone, expiatory

purifications were, Strabo[1532] tells us, actually performed. Hence,

he says, arose the expression ‘a Lerna of ills.’ It was the custom no

doubt at Lerna as in many another swamp and lake to bury ‘purifications’

(καθάρματα). Such rites of the old order were the ‘mysteries’ of

primitive religion. Herodotus[1533] expressly tells us that it was the

Danaides who taught to the Pelasgian women the sacred rites of Demeter,

which the Greeks called Thesmophoria, and of which Herodotus dares not

disclose the full details. The Danaides, who later became types of the

Uninitiated, were, it would seem, the prime Initiators. So does theology

shift.

* * * * *

Another ritual fact helped out the fusion and confusion. To the Roman

Church marriage is a sacrament, to the Anglican still ‘an excellent

mystery.’ In like fashion to the Greeks marriage was conceived of as a

rite of initiation, and through initiation of consummation; the word

τέλη in its plural form was used of all mysteries, the singular form

was expressly applied to marriage. Pollux[1534], in discussing wedding

ceremonies, says, ‘and marriage is called τέλος, i.e. a rite that

completes, and those who have been married are called complete, and on

this account the Hera of marriage is called Teleia, the Complete One.’

It has already been seen (p. 533) that one special rite of purification,

the _Liknophoria_, was common to marriage and the mysteries. The same is

true of the _Loutrophoria_, carrying of the bath. Is it surprising that

in the figures of the well-nymphs some ingenious person saw the Danaides

as ἀτελεῖς γάμου, ‘uninitiated in marriage,’ and therefore condemned

to carry for ever in vain the water for their bridal bath in Hades?

The more so as, if we may trust Eustathius[1535], it was the custom

to place ‘on the grave of those who died unmarried a water jar called

_Loutrophoros_[1536] in token that the dead had died unbathed and without

offspring.’ Probably these vases, as Dr Frazer[1537] suggests, were at

first placed on the graves of the unmarried with the kindly intent of

helping the desolate unmarried ghost to accomplish his wedding in the

world below. But once the custom fixed, it might easily be interpreted as

the symbol of an underworld punishment.

Some versions of the story say that the water was carried in a sieve

(κοσκίνῳ). This notion may have arisen from another ritual practice. It

is noticeable that the sieves of the stone age seem to have been simply

pierced jars. Sieve and _pithos_ were one and the same. Carrying water in

a sieve was an ancient test of virginity. Pliny[1538] tells us that the

test of the sieve was applied to the Vestal Tuccia. If the water-carrying

of the Danaides was conceived as a virginity test, the forty-nine sisters

married before the murder would fail at the test, and Hypermnestra alone

would carry the water in the leaky sieve:

‘Splendide mendax et in omne _virgo_

Nobilis aevum[1539].’

Finally, it will be remembered (p. 575) that the Orphics had their Well

of Memory, which was in effect a Well of Life. It would not escape a

mystic who saw the figures of the water-carriers that these were drawing

water for ever but in vain from the Well of Life. So the scholiast[1540]

to Aristides in quaint fashion interprets the myth: ‘the pierced _pithos_

of the Danaides,’ he says, ‘signifies that the Danaides after the murder

of their dearest can never obtain from another man the grace of the

living water of marriage.’ The notion of a ‘Water of Life’ haunts him,

but he knows the real gist of the symbolism, for he adds: they have

‘become suspected on account of their pollution.’ Of the making of such

mysticism there is clearly no end.

* * * * *

The symbolism of marriage, of virginity tests, of living water might,

doubtless did, gather about the figures of the Danaides, but the primary

notion that fitted them to be mythical prototypes of the ‘Uninitiated’

was that they were polluted, uncleansed. They are Choephoroi, but in

vain; the libations that they pour into the grave-_pithoi_ of their

husbands are a χάρις ἄχαρις, an attempted offscouring, ἀπόνιμμα, but no

real purification. Of such a vain Choephoria performed by Clytaemnestra

Electra[1541] says:

‘It is not right or meet

By law of gods or men that from a hateful wife

Grave-dues and washings should be brought my father.

Give them the winds, or in the deep dug earth

Go hide them.’

The water-carriers in Hades have been discussed at some length[1542],

because they afford an instance typical of the methods of Orphic

procedure. In discussing the mysteries it has been repeatedly seen

that Orphism did not invent new rites, but mysticized and moralized

old ones. In like fashion when Orphism developes eschatology, it takes

for its material the mythology of the older stratum[1543], invents

no new figures but gives to the old ones an intensified and moralized

significance.

The Orphic tablets showed us the heights to which Orphism could rise. If

we are inclined to estimate over highly the general level of the Orphic

faith, the Lower Italy vases may correct the error. They mirror Orphism

as it seemed to the many. In the matter of doctrine, instead of or at

best in addition to purification, we have vindictive punishment; in the

matter of theology, in place of what was practically monotheism on the

tablets, the vases restore the old popular polytheism.

* * * * *

It is natural to ask, Is this the end? Did Orphism create no new figure,

make no new god in its own purified image? The answer to this question

will be found in our concluding enquiry as to the nature of Orphic

Cosmogony.