mantaui imantau lantou laptoumi anchômach araptoumi._ Hither, such
and such a god! Be visible to me this very day and do not appal my
eyes. Hither to me such and such a god! giving ear to my race [?].
For this is what _anchôr anchôr achachach ptoumi chancho charachôch
chaptoumê chôraharachôch aptoumi mêchôchaptou charach ptou chanchô
charachô ptenachôcheu_, a name written in a hundred letters, wishes
and commands. And do not thou, most mighty king, forget the
magicians among us; because this is the earliest name of Typhon, at
which tremble the earth, the abyss, Hades, heaven, the sun, the
moon, the place of the stars and the whole phenomenal universe. When
this name is spoken, it carries along with its force gods and
demons. It is the hundred-lettered name, the same name as last
written. And when thou hast uttered it, the god or the dead person
who hears it will appear to thee and will answer concerning the
things you ask. And when you have learned all things, dismiss the
god only with the strong name, the one of the hundred letters,
saying ‘Begone, Lord, for thus wills and commands the great god!’
Say the name and he will depart. Let this treatise, O mighty king,
be kept to thyself alone, being guarded from being heard by any
other. And this is the phylactery which you should wear. It should
be arranged on a silver plate. Write the same name with a brazen pen
and wear it attached with a strip of ass’s skin[329].”
The purpose of the charm just given is, as will be seen, to produce
apparitions in a bowl containing liquid after the fashion still common
in the near East[330]. It amply bears out the remark of Iamblichus that
the Egyptian magicians, differing therein from the Chaldaean, were
accustomed in their spells to threaten the gods[331], and many other
instances of this can be found in other passages of the magic papyri.
But it should be noticed that in this case the magician is dealing with
a power thought to be hostile alike to man and to the beneficent gods.
Typhon, who is, as Plutarch tells us, the Greek equivalent of the
Egyptian Set, was looked upon in Hellenistic times as essentially a
power of darkness and evil, who fights against the gods friendly to man
with the idea of reducing their ordered world to chaos. Yet the magician
avows himself on his side, and even speaks of his name as being able to
compel the heavenly gods, to whom he must therefore be superior.
Iamblichus tries to explain this, and to refine away the obvious meaning
of such spells, but their existence certainly justifies the accusation
of trafficking with devils brought by the early Christian Fathers
against the practisers of magic.
Another charm may be quoted for the purpose of showing the acquaintance,
superficial though it was, with the religions of all nations in the
Hellenistic world and the indifference with regard to them which the
practice of magic necessitated. It appears in the papyrus in the British
Museum last quoted from and is directed to be spoken over “the lamp”
which plays so great a part in all magical processes[332]. Of its real
or supposed author, Alleius Craeonius, nothing is known:
“A spell of Allêius Craeonius spoken over the lamp. _Ôchmarmachô_,
the _nouraï chrêmillon_ sleeping with eyes open, _nia_, Iaô
equal-numbered[333] _soumpsênis siasias_, Iaô who shakes the whole
inhabited world, come hither unto me and give answer concerning the
work [_i.e._ the matter in hand] _kototh phouphnoun nouebouê_ in the
place prepared for thy reception [?]. Take an inscription[334] with
on the obverse Sarapis seated holding the royal sceptre of Egypt and
upon the sceptre an ibis. On the reverse of the stone, carve the
name and shut it up and keep it for use. Take the ring in your left
hand, and a branch of olive and laurel in your right, shaking it
over the lamp[335], at the same time uttering the spell seven times.
And, having put it (the ring) upon the Idaean finger[336] of your
left hand, facing and turning inwards [Qy. away from the door of the
chamber?] and having fastened the stone to your left ear, lie down
to sleep returning no answer to any who may speak to you:
“‘I invoke thee who created the earth and the rocks [_lit._ the
bones] and all flesh and spirit and established the sea, and shakes
the heavens and did divide the light from the darkness, the great
ordering mind, who disposes all, the everlasting eye, Demon of
Demons, God of Gods, the Lord of Spirits, the unwandering Æon. Iao
ouêi [Jehovah?] hearken unto my voice. I invoke thee the ruler of
the gods, high-thundering Zeus, O king Zeus Adonai, O Lord Jehovah
[?]. I am he who invokes thee in the Syrian tongue as the great god
_Zaalaêr iphphou_[337] and do thou not disregard the sound in Hebrew
_ablanathanalba_[338] _abrasilôa_. For I am _silthachôouch lailam
blasalôth_ Iaô ieô _nebuth sabiothar bôth arbath iaô_ Iaôth Sabaoth
_patourê zagourê Baruch adonai elôai iabraam_[339] _barbarauô
nausiph_, lofty-minded, everliving, having the diadem of the whole
ordered world, _siepê saktietê_ of life (twice) _sphê nousi_ (twice)
_sietho_ (twice). _Chthethônirinch ôêaêêol aôê Iaô asial Sarapêolsô
ethmourêsini sem lau lou lurinch._’
“This spell loosens chains, blinds, brings dreams, causes favours,
and may be used for any purposes you wish.”
In this spell, we have Zeus and Yahweh associated with Serapis in the
apparent belief that all three were the same god. Although the magician
parades his learning by using the name of one of the Syrian Baals, and
it is possible that some of the unintelligible words of the invocation
may be much corrupted Egyptian, he is evidently well acquainted with
Hebrew, and one of the phrases used seems to be taken from some Hebrew
ritual. It is hardly likely that he would have done this unless he were
himself of Jewish blood; and we have therefore the fact that a Jewish
magician was content to address his national god as Zeus and to make use
of a “graven image” of him under the figure of the Graeco-Egyptian
Serapis in direct contravention of the most stringent clauses in the Law
of Moses. A more striking instance of the way in which magicians of the
time borrowed from all religions could hardly be imagined.
The uncertain date of the charms under discussion prevent any very
cogent argument as to their authorship being drawn from them; but there
are other grounds for supposing that the use of magic was never so
wide-spread as in the last three centuries before and the first three
centuries after the birth of Christ, and that this was mainly due to the
influx of Orientals into the West. One of the indirect effects of
Alexander’s conquests was, by substituting Greek kings for the native
rulers who had till then governed the countries lying round the Nile and
the Euphrates, to break up the priestly colleges there established, and
thus to set free a great quantity of the lower class of priests and
temple-servants who seem to have wandered through the Hellenistic world,
selling their knowledge of curious arts, and seeking from the credulity
of their fellows the toilless livelihood that they had till then enjoyed
at the expense of the state. The names given to the most famous of these
charlatans in the early Roman Empire—Petosiris, Nechepso,
Astrampsuchos[340], and Ostanes[341]—are in themselves sufficient to
show their origin; and “Chaldaicus” passed into the common language of
the time as the recognized expression for the professional exponent of
curious arts. Even in the time of Sulla there seems to have been no lack
of persons who, if not magicians, were at all events professional
diviners capable of interpreting the Dictator’s dreams[342], and the
writers of the Augustan age allude frequently to magic, such as that
taught by the papyri just quoted, as being generally the pursuit of
foreigners. The Thessalian magicians are as celebrated in the Roman
times which Apuleius describes as in those of Theocritus. The Canidia or
Gratidia of Horace had also a Thessalian who assisted her in her
incantations[343]. But these, like the Chaldaean and Egyptian sorcerers
just mentioned, were at the head of their profession, and in many cases
made large sums out of the sale of their services. The taste for magic
of the poorer classes, slaves, and freedmen, was catered for by the
crowd of itinerant magicians, among whom the Jews (and Jewesses) seem to
have been the most numerous, who used to hang about the Circus
Maximus[344]. Renan is doubtless perfectly right when he says that never
were the Mathematici, the Chaldaei, and the Goetae of all kinds so
abundant as in the Rome of Nero[345]. Their prevalence in the great
cities of the eastern provinces of the Empire may be judged from the
frequency of their mention in the New Testament[346].
It would, of course, be very easy to consider all such practices as the
result of deliberate and conscious imposture. This is the course taken
by Hippolytus in the _Philosophumena_, in which the heresiologist bishop
gives a description of the tricks of the conjurors of the IIIrd century
accompanied by rationalistic explanations which sometimes make a greater
demand on the credulity of the readers than the wonders narrated[347].
These tricks he accuses the leaders of the Gnostics of his time of
learning and imitating, and the accusation is therefore plainly dictated
by the theological habit of attempting by any means to discredit the
morals of those who dissent from the writer’s own religious
opinions[348]. But a study of the magic papyri themselves by no means
supports this theory of conscious imposture. The spells therein given
were evidently written for the use of a professional magician, and seem
to have been in constant employment. Many of them bear after them the
note written in the hand of the scribe that he has tested them and found
them efficacious. The pains, too, which the author takes to give
variations of the process recommended in them—as for example in the
quotations from a “man of Heracleopolis” in the first of the spells
given above—all show that he had a more or less honest belief in the
efficacy of the spells he is transcribing. The recording in the same
papyri of what would be now called “trade secrets” such as recipes for
the manufacture of ink all point the same way, and go to confirm the
view that the magicians who made use of them, although willing to sell
their supposed powers over the supernatural world for money, yet
believed that they really possessed them.
This is the more likely to be true because many of the phenomena which
these spells are intended to produce are what would now be called
hypnotic. The gods and demons invoked are supposed to appear sometimes
in dreams, but more generally to a virgin boy gazing fixedly either at a
lamp or at the shining surface of a liquid. This is, of course, the form
of “crystal-gazing” or divination by the ink-pool still used throughout
the East, a graphic description of which is given in Lane’s _Modern
Egyptians_[349]. In this case as in the charms for the healing of
disease—especially of epilepsy and other nervous maladies—given in the
same papyri, the active agent seems to be the power of suggestion,
consciously or unconsciously exercised by the operator or magician. A
full but popular explanation of these phenomena from the standpoint of
modern science will be found in the lectures on “Hypnotisme et
Spiritisme” delivered at Geneva by Dr Émile Yung in 1890[350], while the
subject has been treated more learnedly and at greater length by a great
number of writers, among whom may be specially mentioned M. Pierre
Janet[351], the successor and continuator of the researches of the
celebrated Charcot at the Salpêtrière.
The influence that such practices exercised upon the development of the
post-Christian sects or schools generally classed together under the
name of Gnostic is not very clearly defined. It may, indeed, be said
that the great diffusion of the magical rites that took place during the
centuries immediately preceding, as in those immediately following, the
birth of Christ, predisposed men’s minds to the search for a cosmogony
or theory of the universe which should account for its evolution as part
of an orderly and well-devised system rather than as the capricious and,
as it were, incoherent creation of the gods. That some such force was at
work may be gathered from the fact that magical beliefs and practices
seem to have crept into the religion of the whole civilized world at
this period. But that the schools calling themselves Gnostic owed their
development directly or exclusively to them is an idea that must be
repudiated. Hippolytus, as has been said, does, indeed, make some such
charge, but only in general terms and without any evidence in its
support. When later he goes through the sects _seriatim_, he only
reiterates it in the cases of Simon Magus, of his successor Menander,
and of Carpocrates of Antioch; and it is probable from the context that
in all these cases he is only referring to what seemed to him the
superstitious attention paid by the “heretics” in question to the
externals of worship, such as the use of pictures and statues, lights
and incense, which seem in many cases to have been borrowed directly
from paganism.
This attention to the details of ritual, however, did in itself contain
the germ of a danger to the survival of any organized cult in which it
was present in excess, which was to receive full illustration in the
later forms of Egyptian Gnosticism properly so-called. As will be shown
in its place, the seed of Gnosticism fell in Egypt upon soil encumbered
with the débris of many older faiths which had long since passed into
the stage of decay. Nor could the earnestness or the philosophic insight
of the great Gnostics of Hadrian’s time, who started their propaganda
from Alexandria, contend for long with the inherited preconceptions of a
degraded and stubborn peasantry who had learned for millennia to regard
all religion as sorcery. Here Gnosticism degenerated quickly into magic
of the least enlightened and basest kind, and thus lost all right to be
considered in any sense a religion[352]. The case was different in other
parts of the Roman Empire, where a better intellectual equipment and the
practical syncretism or fusion of worships offered more favourable
ground for the development of new faiths not appealing to the members of
one nationality only.
That this idea of Gnosticism or of the importance of knowledge—were it
only the knowledge of charms and spells—in dealing with the spiritual
and invisible world was bound to play a prominent part in the evolution
of the world-religions which Alexander’s conquests had rendered possible
is therefore evident. Some writers have gone further and have declared
that Christianity itself may be “only an episode—though a very important
episode—in the history of Gnosticism[353].” But to say this, as will
presently be shown, is to go too far, and Christianity, although she
obtained many converts from those Gnostic sects with which the Church of
the Apostolic and sub-Apostolic ages found itself in competition[354],
yet proved in the long run to be the most bitter enemy of Gnosticism.
From the first, the Catholic Church seems to have recognized that the
ideas which lay at the root of Gnosticism—to which word I have ventured
here to give a meaning more extended than that which it connotes in
heresiological writers—were opposed to religion altogether; and if
allowed to triumph would have had their end in the development of a
science, which, if not absolutely atheistic, would at least reduce the
necessary action of the spiritual world upon this to the vanishing
point[355]. It would indeed be quite possible to argue that such ideas
must always appear when a people of inferior culture, but of vigorous
intellect, come into frequent contact for the first time with a material
civilization higher than their own. It is sufficient for the present
purpose to have shown that they were widely spread during the centuries
which immediately preceded the appearance of Christianity, and that they
count for something in the evolution of the many heretical sects who
came to trouble most seriously the peace of the Catholic Church in the
early centuries of our era. The same causes, however, must have been at
work some time before, and it is impossible to explain some of the
features of Gnosticism in its more extended sense without going back to
an early period of Greek history. For it was in Greece that the Orphic
teaching first appeared, and it is to this that most of the
post-Christian Gnostic heresies or sects attributed, not untruly, their
own origin.
Connected in practice with, yet entirely different in origin from, this
magic was the astrology or star-lore which after the conquest of the
Euphrates valley by the Persians began to make its way westwards. It
would seem that its birthplace was the plains of Chaldaea, where the
clear air brings the starry expanse of the sky nearer, as it were, to
the observer than in the denser and more cloudy atmosphere of Europe,
while the absence of rising ground not only enables him to take in the
whole heaven at a glance, but gives him a more lively idea of the
importance of the heavenly bodies. There the careful and patient
observation of the Sumerian priests at a period which was certainly
earlier than Sargon of Akkad (_i.e._ 2750 B.C.) established the fact
that certain groups of stars appeared and disappeared at regular
intervals, that others moved more swiftly than their fellows, and that
the places of both with reference to the apparent path of the sun varied
in a way which corresponded with the recurrence of the seasons.
Primitive man, however, does not distinguish between _post hoc_ and
_propter hoc_, or rather he assumes unhesitatingly that, if any natural
phenomenon occurs with anything like regularity after another, the first
is the cause of the second. Hence the swifter stars soon came to be
clothed in the minds of the early astronomers with attributes varying
with the phenomena of which they were supposed to be the cause. Thus,
the planet or “wandering” star which we call Jupiter came to be known as
the “god of good winds,” the Hyades and Pleiades were looked upon as the
bringers of rain, and the stars whose appearance ushered in the cold and
darkness of winter were considered as hostile to man[356]. As time
progressed, however, these observations accumulated—largely, one would
think, because of the imperishable material on which they were
recorded—and it then began to be perceived that the movement of the
heavenly bodies were not due to their individual caprice or will, but
were dictated by an inexorable and unchangeable law. In the drawing of
this conclusion, the patient and logical mind of the Mongoloid
inhabitants of Sumer, ever mindful at once of the past and the future of
the race, no doubt played its full part.
The effect of this change in the mental attitude of man towards the
universe was to introduce an entirely new conception into religion. At
first the Babylonians, pushing, as man generally does, the application
of their last discovery further than the facts would warrant, declared
that all events happened in a regular and prearranged order; and that
man could therefore predict the happening of any event directly he knew
its place in the series. Thus in the “astrological” tablets preserved in
the palace of Assur-banipal at Nineveh, some of which certainly go back
to the reign of Sargon of Akkad[357], we read:
“In the month of Nisan 2nd day, Venus appeared at sunrise. There
will be distress in the land.... An eclipse happening on the 15th
day, the king of Dilmun is slain, and someone seizes his throne....
An eclipse happening on the 15th day of the month Ab the king dies,
and rains descend from heaven, and floods fill the canals.... An
eclipse happening on the 20th day, the king of the Hittites in
person seizes the throne.... For the 5th month an eclipse on the
14th day portends rains and the flooding of canals. The crops will
be good, and king will send peace to king. An eclipse on the 15th
day portends destructive war. The land will be filled with corpses.
An eclipse on the 16th day indicates that pregnant women will be
happily delivered of their offspring. An eclipse on the 20th day
portends that lions will cause terror and that reptiles will appear;
an eclipse on the 21st day that destruction will overtake the riches
of the sea[358].”
These events are evidently predicted from a knowledge of what happened
immediately after the occurrence of former eclipses and other celestial
phenomena, and it is perhaps characteristic of the lot of man that most
of them are unfavourable and that the disasters greatly outnumber the
good things. But it is plain that as time went on, the observers of the
stars would begin to perceive that even such unusual celestial phenomena
as eclipses occurred at intervals which, although long compared with the
lifetime of a man, could yet be estimated, and that the element of
chance or caprice could therefore be in great measure eliminated from
their calculation. Then came about the construction of the calendar, and
the formation of tables extending over a long series of years, by which
the recurrence of eclipses and the like could be predicted a long time
in advance. All this tended to the formation of different ideas of the
laws which, it was now seen, governed man’s life, and the shape which
these now took were equally erroneous, although at first sight more
rational than those held by the first observers.
This new idea was in effect that system of “correspondences” which
occupied a prominent place in nearly all religious systems from the time
of Assyria’s apogee to the triumph of Christianity, and which through
the mediaeval Cabala may be said to retain to the present day some
shadow of its former power over the minds of the superstitious. This was
the notion that the earth in effect is only a copy of the heavens, and
that the events which happen here below are nothing but a copy of those
which are taking place above[359]. If any great catastrophe such as the
fall of an empire like that of Assyria or the sudden death of a man
distinguished above his fellows like Alexander occurs, it is because of
some conjunction or meeting of hostile stars; and if some great and
unexpected benefit such as universal peace or an abundant harvest smiles
upon mankind, it is because those stars most generally favourable to him
have recovered temporary sway. The result was a sort of mapping-out of
the heavens into regions corresponding to those of the earth, and the
assigning of a terrestrial “sphere of influence” to each[360]. But as
the predictions made from these alone would have been too speedily and
too evidently falsified in most cases by the march of events, it became
necessary to attribute a predominant influence to the planets, whose
swifter and more irregular movements introduced new factors into the
situation. These planets were decided to be seven in number, Uranus and
Neptune not having yet been discovered, and the Sun and Moon being
included in the list because they were thought like the others to move
round the earth. Hence all terrestrial things were assumed to be divided
into seven categories corresponding to the seven planets, the Moon,
Mercury, Venus, Mars, the Sun, Jupiter, and Saturn, and to be in an
especial way under the influence of the heavenly bodies of which they
were the earthly representatives.
Into the details of the so-called science of astrology thus founded, it
is not our purpose to enter. To do so would occupy a greater space than
is at our disposal, and would involve besides the discussion of a great
many documents only just beginning to come to light, and the exact
meaning of which is still uncertain[361]. But it may be mentioned here
that astrology entirely changed its character when it came into contact
with the dawning science of mathematics, which is perhaps the most
enduring monument which bears witness to the fertility and inventiveness
of the Greek mind. So soon as the observations of the Babylonians were
placed at their disposal, the Greek mathematicians set to work in real
earnest to discover the laws of the universe and established the science
of astronomy pretty much on the basis on which it stands at the present
day. The discovery of the Metonic cycle, of the trigonometrical method
of measuring the celestial sphere, and of the precession of the
equinoxes all followed in succession, and the prediction of eclipses,
conjunctions of stars, and other celestial phenomena which had before
been more or less a matter of guesswork, now became a matter of
calculation presenting no mystery to anyone versed in mathematics. The
heavens were mapped out, the stars catalogued, and tables were produced
which enabled the place of any particular star to be found at a given
moment without the actual inspection of the heavens[362].
The result of this improved state of things was not long in reacting
both upon religion, and its congener, magic. On the first of these, the
effect was much the same as that produced by the discoveries of
Copernicus in the XVIth century and those of Darwin in the XIXth. We do
not know enough of the history of thought at the time to be aware if the
Greek additions to the ascertained laws of Nature aroused the same
resentment in priestly minds as did those of the Prussian and the
English philosophers; but it is evident that if they did so, the quarrel
was speedily made up. Every religion in the Graeco-Roman world which
sought the popular favour after the discoveries of Hipparchus, took note
of the seven planetary spheres which the geocentric theory of the
universe supposed to surround the earth, and even those known before his
time, like Zoroastrianism and Judaism, hastened to adopt the same view
of the universe, and to modify the details of their teaching to accord
with it. The seven stoles of Isis are as significant in this respect as
the seven-stepped ladder or the seven altars in the mysteries of
Mithras, while the seven Amshaspands of the Avesta and the attention
paid to the seven days of the week by the Jews go to show how even the
most firmly held national traditions had to bow before it. As for magic,
the sevenfold division of things which implied that each planet had its
own special metal, precious stone, animal, and plant, placed at the
disposal of the magicians an entirely new mode of compulsion which lent
itself to endless combinations; while, for the same reason, special
conjurations were supposed, as we have seen, only to exercise their full
influence under certain positions of the stars. Perhaps the climax of
this state of things is reached in one of the Gnostic documents
described later, where the salvation of Christian souls in the next
world is said to be determined by the entry of one of the beneficent
planets into one or other of the signs of the Zodiac[363].
One of the most important results of this impulse was the sudden
importance thus given to the worship of the material sun, which
henceforth forms the centre of adoration in all non-Christian religions.
As we have seen, in the worship of Isis, the newly-made initiate was
made to personify the daystar in the public, as no doubt he had done in
the secret, ceremonies of the cult. All the post-Alexandrian legends of
the gods were turned the same way, and Serapis, Mithras, Attis were all
identified with the sun, whom philosophers like Pliny and Macrobius
declared to be the one supreme god concealed behind the innumerable
lesser deities of the Graeco-Roman pantheon[364]. Even the Christians
could not long hold out against the flood, and the marks of the
compromise to which the Catholic Church came in the matter may perhaps
be seen in the coincidence of the Lord’s Day with Sunday and the
Church’s adoption of the 25th day of December, the birthday of the
Unconquered Sun-God, as the anniversary of the birth of Christ[365]. It
is certainly by no accident that the emperors whose reigns immediately
preceded the establishment of Christianity all turned towards the
worship of the sun-god who was looked upon as the peculiar divinity of
the family to which Constantine belonged[366].
To Gnosticism, whether we use the word in the sense in which it has been
used in this chapter, or in its more restricted connotation as the
generic name of the earlier heresies which afflicted the nascent Church,
the development of astrology came as a source of new life. Henceforth to
the knowledge of the history of the personal dispositions and of the
designs of the gods, had to be added that of the laws governing the
movements of the stars. Moreover, the new theory introduced into
Gnosticism an element which had hitherto been foreign to it, which was
the idea of destiny or of predetermined fate[367]. If all things, as the
astrologers said, happened in a certain regular order of which the
movements of the stars were at once the cause and the symbol, it follows
that their course is determined beforehand, and may possibly be capable
of being ascertained by man. Hence came in all the ideas as to the
predestination of certain souls to happiness and of others to misery
both in this world and the next, which play such an important part in
the religions of the centuries under consideration, and the influence of
which is by no means extinct at the present day. It is true that, as M.
Cumont has recently pointed out, man is never rigidly true to his
beliefs, and has generally invented some compromise by which either the
favour of the gods or his own conduct is supposed to free him from the
worst effects of a predetermined fate. Such compromises appear furtively
here and there in Christian Gnosticism, but without sufficient
prominence to take away the effect of the general notion that man’s fate
in the next world is determined before his birth in this.
The general effect of these considerations is, it is thought, that the
Gnosticism which came to trouble the peace of the Christian Church
during its infancy and adolescence had its roots, first in the decay of
the earlier faith, which showed itself in the popular taste for
cosmogonical and other myths, until then wholly or partly absent from
the ideas of the more civilized nations of the Persian Empire. On the
top of this, came the great spread of ceremonial magic which seems to
have followed the first introduction of something like upright and just
government by the Aryan conquerors of the East; and then the idea of a
universe ruled not by the unchecked will of capricious gods, but by the
regular and ordered movement of the stars. The predestinarian view of
the fate of the individual which naturally follows from this last
conception, as has just been said, was subject to exceptions and
compromises, but yet appears as a kind of background or framework to all
the religions (orthodox Christianity excepted) which came into
prominence during the six centuries to which our survey is limited. But
before dealing with those hitherto unnoticed, it is necessary that we
should glance at those pre-Christian forms of Gnosticism, the earliest
of which was perhaps that which appeared simultaneously in most parts of
the Greek world at the beginning of the Vth century before Christ and is
generally known as Orphism.
Footnote 287:
Thus an Orphic verse, preserved by a commentator on Plato, says that
Dionysos “releases whom he wills from travail and suffering.” See
Abel’s _Orphica_, Fr. 208, p. 237. Servius in his commentary on
Virgil’s First Georgic, after declaring that Dionysos or “Liber Pater”
is identical with the Osiris torn in pieces by Typhon, says that he is
called Liber because he liberates. Cf. fragment and page quoted.
Footnote 288:
Lubbock, _Origin of Civilisation_, 5th ed., pp. 332, 333, and 349.
Footnote 289:
_The Golden Bough_, 3rd ed. pt I. vol. I. p. 226, n. 2. Cf. Hubert and
Mauss, _Esquisse d’une Théorie générale de la Magie_, Paris, 1904, p.
8. Goblet d’Alviella, reviewing Dr Frazer’s 2nd edition, _Rev. Hist.
Rel._ t. XLVIII. (July-Aug. 1903), pp. 70, 79 rebuts his theory. Mr E.
S. Hartland, at the British Association’s Meeting in 1906, propounded
the view that both magic and religion were based on the conception of
a transmissible personality or _mana_. Cf. _id._ _Ritual and Belief_,
1914, pp. 49 _sqq._
Footnote 290:
Hubert and Mauss, _op. cit._ p. 7.
Footnote 291:
Thus the German Reformation, which (whatever be its merits) was
certainly accompanied by a general questioning of ideas till then
considered the very basis of all religion, was followed by the
terrible outbreak known as the Witch Mania of the XVIth century. See
Mackay, _Extraordinary Popular Delusions_, 1869, pp. 101-191. Other
authorities are quoted in “Witchcraft in Scotland,” _Scottish Review_,
1891, pp. 257-288.
Footnote 292:
_Histoire des Religions et Méthode Comparative_, Paris, 1912, pp.
21-61.
Footnote 293:
See note 4 on p. 91, _supra_. Cf. also the great increase of magical
practices which followed the attempted overthrow of religion by the
philosophers after Alexander.
Footnote 294:
Some instances, such as “hocus-pocus” (_hoc est corpus meum_), are
given in _P.S.B.A._ XX. (1898), p. 149. An excellent example is found
in a spell to cause invisibility in a magic papyrus at Berlin where
the magician is directed to say among other words _anok peusire penta
set tako_ “I am that Osiris whom Set murdered”—evidently a phrase from
some Egyptian ritual extinct centuries before the papyrus was written.
See Parthey, _Zwei griechische Zauberpapyri_, 1866, p. 127, l. 252.
Cf. Erman, “Die Ägyptischer Beschwörungen” in _Ägyptische
Zeitschrift_, 1883, p. 109, n. 1.
Footnote 295:
Tylor, _Primitive Culture_, 1871, I. pp. 102-104. Cf. Crookes,
_Popular Religion and Folklore of Northern India_, 1896, II. p. 283;
Hubert and Mauss, _op. cit._ pp. 26, 27; A. Réville, _Religion des
Peuples non-civilisés_, 1883, II. p. 173.
Footnote 296:
Crookes, _op. cit._ II. p. 261, says that witchcraft in Northern India
is at present almost specialized among the Dravidian, or aboriginal
people—of which fact Mr Rudyard Kipling makes great use in his
charming story “Letting in the Jungle.”
Footnote 297:
W. W. Skeat, _Malay Magic_, 1900, pp. 533 _sqq._
Footnote 298:
Chabas, _Le Papyrus Magique Harris_, 1860, pp. 151, 162 _sq._ Erman,
_Life in Ancient Egypt_, Eng. ed. p. 355, while admitting that the
Egyptians thought the words in question belonged to a foreign tongue,
says that they were “pure inventions.” He is certainly wrong, for some
of them can be identified.
Footnote 299:
Leemans, _Papyri Graeci Mus. Antiq. Lugduni-Batavi_; Wessely,
_Griechische Zauberpapyrus von Paris und London_, and _Neue
Griechische Zauberpapyri_, Wien, 1893, _passim_. Cf. Kenyon, _Greek
Papyri in the British Museum_, p. 62. So in mediaeval magic, the words
in the spells unintelligible to the magician are generally Greek. See
Reginald Scot, _Discovery of Witchcraft_ (1651), p. 168.
Footnote 300:
Réville, _Rel. des Peuples non-civilisés_, II. p. 164.
Footnote 301:
Scott in the _Heart of Midlothian_ quotes the first story, I think,
from Peter Walker, but I have not been able to find the passage. For
Ignatius Loyola, see Böhmer, _Les Jésuites_, French ed. 1910, p. 10.
Cf. Alphandéry, _R.H.R._ 1911, p. 110.
Footnote 302:
_Asiatic Studies_, 1882, p. 77.
Footnote 303:
_E.g._ well-fed dogs who worry sheep, and cats who steal fish and
other delicacies rather than have them given to them. The actions of
the animals show in both cases that they know that what they are doing
is displeasing to their owners.
Footnote 304:
Sayce, _Gifford Lectures_, pp. 420 _sqq._ For these penitential psalms
generally, see Jastrow, _The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria_,
Boston, 1898, chap. XVIII.
Footnote 305:
_Il._ III. ll. 280 _sqq._ (Lang, Leaf, and Myers trans. p. 57).
Footnote 306:
_Odyss._ III. ll. 373 _sqq._ (Butcher and Lang trans. p. 43).
Footnote 307:
According to Maspero, _Ét. Égyptol._ I. p. 163, this was always the
case in Egypt, at least in historic times. “Prayer,” he says, “was a
formula of which the terms had an imperative value, and the exact
enunciation of which obliged the god to concede what was asked of
him.”
Footnote 308:
Maury, _Religions de la Grèce Antique_, II. pp. 97 _sqq._
Footnote 309:
_Il._ X. l. 292; _Odyss._ XI. l. 30, and where before quoted.
Footnote 310:
Perhaps it is to this last view that we should attribute the
well-known indifference of the Semitic peoples to mythology and
science.
Footnote 311:
_E.g._ the Rainbow in Genesis ix. 12-16. Erman, in his _History of
Egyptian Religion_, p. 31, points out that Egyptian mythology is found
only in magical books.
Footnote 312:
Frazer, _Golden Bough_, 3rd ed. pt I. vol. I. p. 52.
Footnote 313:
The principal collections of these are indicated in note 3 on p. 93,
_supra_. Cf. “The Names of Demons in the Magic Papyri,” _P.S.B.A._
1901.
Footnote 314:
Kenyon, _Gk. Pap. in Brit. Mus._ p. 77. This is the date of the MS.
The spells themselves are probably much older.
Footnote 315:
_Philosophumena_, Bk IV. c. 28. Hippolytus is probably wrong in
thinking this a conscious imposture. The magician, like his clients,
does not connect cause and effect in such cases. Sir Alfred Lyall told
Lord Avebury that he had often seen Indian sorcerers openly mixing
croton oil with the ink in which their charms were written so as to
produce a purgative effect when the ink was washed off and swallowed.
See Lubbock, _Origin of Civilization_, p. 24.
Footnote 316:
_P.S.B.A._ XXII. (1900), pp. 121 _sqq._ An explanation of the name is
attempted by Giraud, _Ophitae_, Paris, 1884, p. 91, n. 5.
Footnote 317:
Daremberg and Saglio, _Dict. des Antiq._ _s.v._ Baubo. The name Ortho
perhaps suggests that of the very ancient goddess later called Artemis
Orthia, whose original name seems to have been Orthia only. Cf. M. S.
Thompson’s paper “The Asiatic or Winged Artemis” in _J.H.S._ vol.
XXIX. (1909), pp. 286 _sqq._, esp. p. 307.
Footnote 318:
_P.S.B.A._ XXII. (1900), p. 121, and see Griffith and Thompson,
_Demotic Magical Papyrus of London and Leiden_, p. 61 and note.
Footnote 319:
Probably, however, it refers to the number of letters in the name in
some more or less fantastic spelling or cryptogram. When Hippolytus
speaks of the Demiurge Ialdabaoth as “a fiery God, a fourth number”
(_Philosophumena_, Bk V. c. 7, p. 153, Cruice), there can be little
doubt that he is referring to the Tetragrammaton or four-lettered name
of Jehovah. Cf. the “hundred-lettered” name of Typhon, p. 104,
_infra_.
Footnote 320:
_Griechische Zauberpapyri von Paris und London_, pp. 24-26.
Footnote 321:
The use of ointment for magical purposes is well known, and it was the
incautious use of an ointment of this kind which changed Lucius, the
hero of Apuleius’ romance, into an ass. The use of ointments which had
the property of translating the user to the Witches’ Sabbath
frequently occurs in the witch-trials of the Renaissance, and it has
been suggested that drugs producing hallucinations were thus applied.
The word κοινή often found in these spells seems to point to some
ointment or preparation used in _all_ the magic ceremonies described.
Footnote 322:
_Aber-amenti_: “Lord (lit. Bull) or Conqueror of Amenti,” the Egyptian
Hades. The name is of frequent occurrence in all these spells. Jesus,
in one of the later documents of the _Pistis Sophia_, is called
_Aberamenthô_, in circumstances that would make the title peculiarly
appropriate.
Footnote 323:
A palindrome containing the same word or sentence written both
forwards and backwards. The phrase here given (_aemonaebarôth_) is
probably Hebrew, which the scribe may have known was written the
reverse way to most European languages. It is noteworthy that a
mistake in transcription is made when the phrase is written backwards.
Footnote 324:
This sentence was probably once Egyptian from the frequent recurrence
of _p_ and _t_ as the initial letters of words. They are the masculine
and feminine forms of the definite article in Coptic.
Footnote 325:
These “boneless strings of vowels,” as C. W. King calls them in his
_Gnostics and their Remains_, 1887, p. 320, are thought by him to
cover the name of Jehovah. Another theory is that they are a musical
notation giving the tone in which the spell is to be pronounced.
Footnote 326:
Σύστασις. The text gives the most usual meaning of the word: but it
may here mean something like the “materialization” spoken of by
spiritualists.
Footnote 327:
The word used (πλάσμα) properly means image. But no image or idol has
been mentioned. It is curious that in the Mithraic mysteries, we hear
of the initiates, apparently during the reception of a candidate,
“striking [him?] with birds’ wings.” Cf. the text attributed
(doubtfully) to St Augustine in Cumont, _Textes et Monuments relatifs
aux Mystères de Mithra_, Bruxelles, 1896, t. II. p. 8.
Footnote 328:
Some word like οἰκονομία seems to have been omitted by the scribe.
Footnote 329:
Because the ass was considered a Typhonic animal.
Footnote 330:
The form of hypnotism known as crystal-gazing. A full description is
given in Lane’s _Modern Egyptians_, 1896, pp. 276 _sqq._ Cf.
“Divination in the XVIIth Century,” _National Review_, 1899, pp.
93-104, for its practice in England.
Footnote 331:
See the letter of Porphyry to Anebo quoting Chaeremon. That this
practice was peculiar to the Egyptian magicians is stated by
Iamblichus, _de Mysteriis_, Bk IV. c. 7. A good instance is given by
Maspero, “Sur deux Tabellae Devotionis” in _Ét. Égyptol._ 1893, t. II.
p. 297, where a magician threatens, if his prayer be not granted, to
go down into the secret places of Osiris and destroy his shroud.
Footnote 332:
Kenyon, _Greek Papyri in the British Museum_, pp. 79-81.
Footnote 333:
Or isopsephic, _i.e._ composed of letters having an equal numerical
value. One of the many forms of juggling with words and letters
current in the early Christian centuries. The “number of the beast” in
Revelation xiii. 18, where, as is now generally admitted, 666 covers
the name of Nero Caesar which has that numerical value in Hebrew, is
the most familiar instance. Other instances can be found in the
Epistle of Barnabas, c. 9, Hilgenfeld, _N.T. extra Canonem receptum_,
Lips. 1884, and Hippolytus, _Philosophumena_, Bk VI. c. 48, p. 318,
Cruice.
Footnote 334:
The context shows that a scarab set in a ring is indicated.
Footnote 335:
A rude drawing representing the magician in this attitude often
appears in the margin of papyri such as that quoted in the text. See
Wessely, _Griech. Zauberp._ p. 118.
Footnote 336:
Doubtless the index, because the Idaean Dactyli were said to be the
_first_ of men.
Footnote 337:
This seems to be a corruption of some name like Baal-zephon. The
confusion of ζ for β in these papyri is very common.
Footnote 338:
A Hebrew name meaning “Thou art our father.” It was thought especially
valuable because it could be read either way.
Footnote 339:
Of these words, _Iaoth Sabaoth_ is “Jehovah of hosts”; _patoure
zagoure_, “who openeth and shutteth” (cf. Revelation i. 8); _Baruch
adonai eloai iabraam_, “Blessed be the Lord God of Abraham.” All are
fairly good Hebrew not very much corrupted.
Footnote 340:
Astrampsuchos appears, oddly enough, as the name of one of the
celestial guardians of a heaven in one of the documents of the
Bodleian Bruce Papyrus which is described in Chap. X, _infra_. See
Amélineau, _Le Papyrus Gnostique Bruce_, Paris, p. 109, who
transcribes it Etrempsuchos, while Schmidt (_Koptisch-gnostische
Schriften_, Leipzig, 1905, Bd. I. p. 345) writes Strempsuchos.
Hippolytus gives the name as that of one of the Powers worshipped by
the Peratae, _v. Philosophumena_, Bk V. c. 14, p. 196, Cruice.
Footnote 341:
M. Maspero contends that this name is a corruption of an epithet of
Thoth. See _Ét. Égyptol._ V. p. 259.
Footnote 342:
See Plutarch, _Sulla_, _passim_, especially cc. IX. XXVIII. and
XXXVII. from which last it appears that he consulted “the Chaldaeans.”
Footnote 343:
Horace, _Epode_, V.
Footnote 344:
Juvenal, _Sat._ VI.
Footnote 345:
Renan, _L’Antéchrist_, Paris, 1873, p. 28, n. 4, for authorities.
Footnote 346:
Acts xiii. 8; _ibid._ xix. 13-19. Cf. Renan, _op. cit._ p. 421.
Footnote 347:
Book IV. c. 4, _passim_, especially the device for making sheep cut
off their own heads by rubbing their necks against a sword, or for
producing an earthquake by burning upon coals the dung of an ichneumon
mixed with magnetic ore (pp. 99, 111, Cruice). Tertullian, _de
Praescript._ c. 43, accuses the Gnostics of frequenting magicians and
astrologers.
Footnote 348:
_Philosophumena_, Bk IV. c. 15, pp. 112, 113, Cruice.
Footnote 349:
Paisley, 1896, pp. 277-284.
Footnote 350:
_Hypnotisme et Spiritisme_, Genève, 1890, _passim_.
Footnote 351:
_L’Automatisme Psychologique_, Paris, 1899, _passim_.
Footnote 352:
This is treated more fully in Chap. X, _infra_.
Footnote 353:
Cf. “Cerinthus and the Gnostics” in the _London Quarterly_, Oct. 1886,
p. 132.
Footnote 354:
Thus Epiphanius had been a Nicolaitan, St Ambrose of Milan a
Valentinian, and St Augustine a Manichaean before joining the Catholic
Church.
Footnote 355:
So Hippolytus objects not only to the astrology of his time, but to
the arithmetical calculations on which it was professedly based. The
estimates attributed to Archimedes of the relative distances of the
earth from the sun, moon and planets are marked out by him for special
condemnation. Cf. _Philosophumena_, Bk IV. c. 1, pp. 67-76, Cruice.
Footnote 356:
P. Jensen, _Die Kosmologie der Babylonier_, Strassburg, 1890, pp. 140
_sqq._ and especially p. 295.
Footnote 357:
See the tablets made for this king and published by Sir Henry
Rawlinson in the _Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia_, vol. III.
Many of these are translated by Sayce in “The Astronomy and Astrology
of the Babylonians,” _Trans. Soc. Bibl. Arch._ vol. III. (1874), pp.
145-339. I have taken the lowest date for Sargon, on the authority of
Mr King, _Chronicles of Early Babylonian Kings_, 1907, I. p. 17,
although the well-known text of Nabonidus would make him a thousand
years earlier. The origin of Babylonian astronomy is discussed by
Jastrow, _Religion of Babylonia and Assyria_, chap. XXIII. The immense
antiquity attributed to the Babylonian observations by the classical
authorities quoted in Sayce’s paper may be considerably reduced if we
substitute lunar for solar years; yet there seems little doubt that
the star worship which arose from them went back to the “oldest period
of Babylonia.” Cf. Sayce, _Gifford Lectures_, 1902, p. 480.
Footnote 358:
Jastrow, _op. cit._ pp. 365 _sqq._
Footnote 359:
Among modern German archaeologists Winckler and Jeremias have pushed
the effect of this “astral theory” of the universe beyond all limits.
Their position is at once exposed and refuted by Rogers in _The
Religion of Babylonia and Assyria_, 1908, pp. 212 to end. Yet such a
view of the universe as is given in the text was undoubtedly held by
many during the six centuries here treated of, and can be seen as it
were underlying most of the religions of the time. That it had its
origin in Babylonia seems most probable. See Cumont, _Astrology and
Religion among the Greeks and Romans_, 1912, pp. 1-26, and authorities
there quoted.
Footnote 360:
Cumont (work last quoted), p. 18. The idea appears plainly enough in
astrological works like Ptolemy’s _Tetrabiblos_. It was not confined
to Babylonia, for the Egyptians thought the earthly Nile corresponded
to a heavenly one.
Footnote 361:
Cumont’s _Catalogus Codicum Astrologorum Graecorum_ of which 10
volumes have been published will be of great use in this respect. See
also Kroll’s _Vettii Valentis Anthologiarum Libri_, 1908.
Footnote 362:
Cumont, _Astrology and Rel._ pp. 12, 13. Cf. Theon of Alexandria’s
_Commentary on the IIIrd book of the Almagest_ (Abbé Halma’s ed.),
1813, t. I. p. 1.
Footnote 363:
In the _Pistis Sophia_ (for which see Chapter X, _infra_) the soul of
a sinless man who has not found the mysteries has to wait until the
planets Jupiter and Venus come into a certain aspect with the sun,
“Saturn and Mars being behind them.” It is then reincarnated and wins
for itself life eternal, pp. 387, 389 (Copt.).
Footnote 364:
Pliny, _N.H._ Bk II. c. 4. Macrobius, _Saturnalia_, Bk I. cc. 18-23.
Footnote 365:
Goblet d’Alviella in _Rev. Hist. Rel._ LXV. (May-June, 1912), p. 381.
Footnote 366:
Aurelian and Diocletian each instituted a worship of the sun-god, the
deity of the second Flavian family.
Footnote 367:
Cumont, _Astrology and Rel._ pp. 28, 29. He is probably right when he
points out that irregular phenomena like comets and shooting stars
gave a loophole for the opponents of a rigid predestinarianism of
which they were not slow to avail themselves.
CHAPTER IV
PRE-CHRISTIAN GNOSTICS: THE ORPHICI
All scholars seem now agreed that the legendary Orpheus never really
existed[368], and that the many verses and poems attributed to him were
the work of various hands, one of the earliest of their authors being
Onomacritos of Athens, who fled with the Pisistratids to the court of
Darius at Susa in the first decade of the Vth century B.C.[369] Yet
there is little doubt that the peculiar myths alluded to in these poems
were known at an early date in Crete, whence they probably found their
way into Athens with Epimenides, the Cretan wizard or wise man who was
sent for to purify the city from the guilt incurred by the murder of
Cylon[370]. This event evidently marks a turning on the part of the
Greeks towards purifications and other magical rites unknown in Homer’s
time[371]; but the tendency, to whomever due in the first instance,
undoubtedly received a great impulse from the break-up of the
Pythagorean school in Italy about 500 B.C.[372] This event, which in its
effects may be compared to the dispersion of the priestly corporations
of Babylon and Egypt which followed Alexander’s conquests, sent
wandering a great number of speculative philosophers trained in the
formation of associations for political and other purposes, and they
probably joined forces with a previously existing Orphic sect, nearly
all the early Orphic poems being ascribed, with more or less likelihood,
to Pythagoreans[373]. There are certain features in these poems which,
if we met with them after the reform of the Zoroastrian religion by the
Sassanian kings, we should certainly attribute to Persian influence; but
this can hardly be done so long as we remain ignorant of what the
Persian religion was in the time of the Achaemenides. The most probable
account of the matter is that the religious teaching attributed to
Orpheus was of Asiatic and particularly of Phrygian provenance, that it
had long been current in Crete and the other islands of the
Mediterranean, that a part of it came into Greece through Thrace in the
time of the Pisistratids, and that it was finally put into an organized
and consistent shape by those Pythagorean philosophers who made their
way back to Greece after the overthrow of their political power in Magna
Graecia[374]. It found in Pindar a warm adherent, and was well known to
and spoken of with reverence by the three great tragic poets Aeschylus,
Sophocles, and Euripides[375]. Its greatest influence, however, was
probably exerted through the Eleusinian and other mysteries which it
captured and transformed. It continued to dominate them from before the
time of Herodotus down to the prohibition of these secret rites by the
Christian emperors, and Orpheus was thus said by everyone to be their
founder[376].
The whole of this teaching centred round the legend of Dionysos who is
described by Herodotus as the youngest—that is to say the
last-adopted—of the great gods of Greece[377]. This Orphic Dionysos was
the Cretan form of the god worshipped all round the Mediterranean, who
was always represented in human form, and as suffering a violent death
and then rising again from the dead. But to this nucleus, the Orphic
poets added at different times and by degrees a great quantity of other
myths which together formed a complete body of doctrine setting forth
the origin of the world, and of man, and his life after death. First,
they said, existed Chronos or Time “who grows not old,” from whom sprang
Aether and the formless Chaos. From these was formed a silver egg which,
bursting in due time, disclosed Eros, or Phanes the first born, a
shining god, with wings upon his shoulders, at once male and female, and
having within himself the seeds of all creatures. Phanes creates the Sun
and Moon and also Night, and from Night begets Uranos and Gaea (Heaven
and Earth). These two give birth to the Titans, among whom is Kronos,
who emasculates his father Uranos and succeeds to his throne. He is in
turn deposed by Zeus, who swallows Phanes, and thus becomes the father
of gods and men[378].
This part of the Orphic story comes to us almost entirely from
Neo-Platonic sources, and possesses several variants. It is so
manifestly an attempt to reconcile the popular theology of Greece found
in Homer and Hesiod with different Oriental ideas of the origin of the
world that we might consider it to have been concocted in post-Christian
times, were it not that Aristophanes had evidently heard about Chaos and
the mundane egg, and its production of Eros and Night, which confused
genealogy he burlesques in _The Birds_[379]. It is probable also, as
Alfred Maury pointed out, that this legend was first taken by the
Orphics from the philosophers of Ionia, and especially from that
Pherecydes of Syros who is said to have been Pythagoras’ master[380].
Attempts have been made to derive it from Indian, Egyptian, Chaldaean,
and even Jewish sources; but its resemblances to parallel beliefs among
some or all of these nations are too few and sparse for any useful
conclusion to be drawn from them. One of its most marked features is its
succession of divine rulers of the universe, which the Orphics made use
of to exalt their own god Dionysos to the highest rank. The story they
told of this Dionysos was that he was originally the Phanes whom Zeus
swallowed, but that at his second birth he became the offspring of Zeus
by Persephone, the daughter whom Zeus had himself begotten on one of the
earth-goddesses who is sometimes called Rhea, sometimes Cybele, and
sometimes Demeter. Persephone, described by the Orphics as the
“especial” or “single” daughter of Zeus[381], was seduced by her father
in the form of a serpent, and in due course brought to light Dionysos,
sometimes called Zagreus or “the Hunter.” This god, who had the horns of
a bull[382], became the darling of his father, who destined him for his
successor and allowed him, while yet a child, to sit on his throne and
to wield the thunder-bolts[383]. But the Titans, the monstrous sons of
Earth, either spurred on by jealousy at the child being given the
sovereignty of the world, or incited thereto by Hera, laid a plot for
his destruction. Beguiling him with childish toys such as a top, a hoop,
and a mirror, they stole upon him unawares with blackened faces, and, in
spite of his struggles and his transformation into many shapes, tore him
limb from limb, cooked his several members in a cauldron, and ate them.
The heart, however, was saved from them by Pallas Athene, who bore it to
Zeus, who swallowed it, and it thus passed into the Theban Dionysos, son
of Zeus and Semele, who was in turn Zagreus re-born. Zeus also blasted
the Titans with his lightning, while he ordered Apollo to collect the
uneaten members of the little god and to bury them at Delphi. A variant
or perhaps a continuation of the story makes Demeter, having, as the
earth goddess, received the members of the little god, put them together
and revivify them, and join herself in marriage with the resuscitated
corpse, whence the infant Iacchos is born[384].
In this part of the story, also, the desire of the authors to fit it in
with the existing mythology is manifest. At Eleusis from very early
times there had been worshipped with mysterious rites a divine couple
who were known only as “the God” and “the Goddess[385].” This pair were,
as we may guess from an allusion in Hesiod, otherwise called Zeus
Chthonios or the infernal Zeus, god of the underworld, and Demeter[386],
the ancient earth-goddess, who was worshipped with her lover under the
various names of Ma, Cybele, Astarte, Rhea and Isis throughout Asia
Minor, Syria, Phoenicia and Egypt. As the lover of the earth-goddess in
all these cases suffered death and resurrection, the Orphics had to work
these episodes into the history of their Dionysos Zagreus. But they
carried the idea further than any of their predecessors by connecting
this death and re-birth with the origin of man and his survival after
death[387]. Man, they said, was made out of the ashes of the Titans, and
was therefore born to sorrow, his soul being buried in his body as in a
charnel-house[388]. But he also had within him a spark of the life of
Zagreus, the infant ruler of the universe[389], and this enables him to
purify himself from the guilt of the earthborn Titans, and so to leave
the circle of existence and cease from wickedness. For that the soul of
man after leaving his body went, unless purified, to inhabit the bodies
of other men and even animals, passing from one to the other as in a
wheel or endless chain, was a dogma which the Orphics had taken over
from the Pythagoreans[390]. How now was this purification to be
obtained?
The answer that the earlier Orphics gave to this question must have
astonished the pleasure-loving and artistic Greeks. The true Orphic,
they were told, must make his whole earthly life a preparation for the
next. He must partake at least once of a mystic sacrifice, in which a
living animal was, in memory of the fate of Zagreus, torn in pieces and
eaten raw; but thereafter he must never again eat any food that has had
life nor even eggs, and he must observe perfect chastity[391], and wear
only linen garments even at his burial, nor must he go near a sepulchre.
“We aim at a holy life, whence I am become a mystes of Idaean
[_i.e._ Cretan] Zeus,” says the Orphic in a surviving fragment of
Euripides’ _Cretenses_, “and having completed the life of
night-wandering Zagreus and the raw flesh-devouring feasts, I
uplifted the torches of the mountain mother, and having been
purified by expiatory offerings, I was hailed as Bacchus by the
Curetes.... But now clothed in white garments, I fly the generation
of mortals, and to a corpse I draw not nigh, and I shun the eating
of things which have had life[392].”
The meaning of this is fairly plain and is in everything a great deal
more magical than religious. By a well-known rule common to nearly all
people in a low state of culture, the victim sacrificed to a god becomes
a god himself[393]; and, as the eating of the victim makes him part of
the eater, it has the same effect on the votary as the swallowing of
Phanes by Zeus had upon this last, the Dionysiac soul in the participant
of the sacrifice is thereby strengthened, and he becomes so far
identified with the god as to bear his name. Henceforth, however, he
must have no further dealings with Titanic matter, and in particular
must shun the corpse which represents the Titanic part of man without
the Dionysiac, and must do nothing which can start another being on “the
ceaseless round of changing existences[394].” If he were successful in
observing these austerities to the end, he might hope that, when his
soul was released from its prison house, it would be reunited to
Dionysos, and rest for ever free from the stains of matter. This was in
effect the formal teaching of Pythagoras with regard to the
transmigration of souls, and depended on the view that the soul, or
incorporeal part of man, had once formed part of the soul of the
universe diffused throughout Nature. “I have heard,” says Cicero, “that
Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans ... never doubted but that we possess
minds plucked from the universal divine mind”; a phrase that he explains
in discussing the nature of the gods by saying that Pythagoras “thought
there was a mind spread through and pervading the whole nature of things
whence our minds are plucked[395].” A similar doctrine of transmigration
appears clearly in Pindar[396], who was one of the first to give voice
to the Orphic teaching, which his lays did much to diffuse. The addition
that the Orphic poets made to the doctrine was doubtless the attribution
to Dionysos and the Eleusinian goddess of the task of presiding over and
arranging these rebirths.
Yet the austerities prescribed by the Orphic life, however fitted to a
philosophic school, could hardly be practised by people engaged in the
business of the world. It was impossible, as the Pythagoreans had
probably found, for people to devote themselves entirely to the welfare
of their souls, and yet to live among their fellows. Hence some other
means by which man could be assured a happy lot after death had to be
devised, and there seems no doubt that the post-Pythagorean Orphics
taught that this was to be found in participation in the mysteries or
secret rites already in existence in Greece before the commencement of
their teaching. Whether the Eleusinian Mysteries were in their inception
anything more than the worship of the Chthonian or infernal deities, as
the gods presiding over agriculture and vegetation considered as a
symbol of generation and death, is still undecided[397]; but there can
be no doubt that under Orphic influence they underwent a complete
change. Dionysos, identified with Hades or Zeus Chthonios, begins, after
the break-up of the Pythagorean school, to take part in them by the side
of Demeter and Persephone, and the story of his mysterious birth from
the goddess, and his identification as Zagreus with Iacchos, the
child-god leading the procession, seems from this period onwards to have
been told in them[398]. But the mode in which the Mysteries were
regarded by the Greeks in general materially altered after the
introduction of the Orphic teaching, and this also can hardly be
attributed to anything else than the direct influence of its professors.
We are told on all sides that no religious teaching formed part of the
Mysteries of Eleusis, and that on the contrary the initiates were simply
shown certain scenes and objects, and heard certain mysterious words on
which they were left to put their own interpretation[399]. But the
Orphics discovered in them a sacramental or purifying grace which was
thought to have a kind of magical effect on the lot alike in this life
and after death of those who took part in them. It was enough to have
_seen_ these mysteries, as the poets aver[400], for man’s place in the
next world to be changed for the better, and thus it is the knowledge
thus obtained, and not conduct or favour, which is thought to influence
his destiny. The doctrine thus baldly stated moved to indignation
Diogenes the Cynic, who pointed out that Patecion the brigand, who had
been initiated, had earned for himself by this one act happiness after
death, while Epaminondas, best of patriots, by the fact that he had not
been initiated, was condemned to be plunged in mud and to undergo other
tortures[401].
The very important part in Orphic practice played by this belief in the
magical power of initiation has lately been put beyond doubt by the
discovery of certain inscriptions in the tombs of worshippers of the
Orphic deities at places so far apart as Petelia in Magna Graecia,
Calabria, Eleutherna in Crete, Naples, and Rome. On palaeographic
grounds their dates are said to range over at least three centuries, the
earliest having apparently been made in the IVth or IIIrd century B.C.,
and the latest in the Ist or IInd century of our era. They are all
engraved on thin gold plates, are in Greek hexameter verse, and in the
opinion of scholars are all taken from the same ritual, and therefore
afford evidence of the permanence and fixity as well as of the wide
spread of the Orphic teaching[402]. They contain instructions to the
dead as to the things to be done and avoided by him or her in the next
world and also the formulas to be repeated to the powers there met with,
which will have the effect of magically procuring for the deceased an
exalted rank among its inhabitants. One of the earliest in date, found
at Petelia and now in the British Museum, runs thus:
“Thou shalt find to the left of the House of Hades a well-spring
And by the side thereof standing a white cypress.
To the 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[403]
But my race is of Heaven (above). This you 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[404].
And of themselves they will give me to drink from the Holy
Well-Spring.”
Another set of plates from tombs at Eleutherna, now in the National
Museum at Athens, is to this effect:
“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 the son of Earth and of Starry Heaven.”
The magical and gnostical purport of this is plain. As in the Egyptian
_Book of the Dead_, to which these plates bear a great resemblance,
their aim was to give the deceased person in whose tomb the inscription
was buried[405], the _knowledge_ of the infernal or subterranean regions
which was to make his entry into them safe and profitable. That his soul
or immaterial part was a part of Dionysos, the descendant of Uranos and
Gê[406], and more directly the offspring of Demeter the earth-goddess by
Zeus, the god of the sky, had already been shown to the dead on his
initiation. But it was necessary that he should prove to the gods of
death and generation that he _knew_ this, when they would have no
alternative but to admit him to all the privileges attached to his high
descent and the rank he had attained in the scale of being by
initiation. This is made plainer still by the statements put into the
mouth of the dead by the gold plates from Naples, now in the Naples
Museum, which read thus:
“Out of the Pure I come, Pure Queen of those Below,
And Eukles and Eubouleus[407] and other Gods and Demons;
For I also avow that I am of blessed race.
And I have paid the penalty for deeds unrighteous
Whether it is that Fate laid me low, or the Gods Immortal,
Or [that Zeus has struck me?] with star-flung 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 Despoena[408], Queen of the
Underworld
I have passed with eager feet to [_or_ from] the Circle desired;
And now I come a suppliant to Holy Persephone
That of her grace she receive me to the seats of the Hallowed.”
Then comes Persephone’s answer
“Happy and Blessed One, Thou shalt be God instead of Mortal,”
while a prose formula “A kid I have fallen into milk” which seems to
have been a password among the Orphics is written in the midst of the
verses and appears upon this and several of the other plates[409].
In the Naples plate, we have the teaching, more or less dimly indicated
in the quotations from the Orphic poems which occur in classical and
patristic writers, brought to a focus. The dead has during his earthly
life taken part in the mystic rites which have told him whence life
comes and whither it is tending. He now has the right to demand from the
deities who preside over the death and rebirth of mortals that he be
relieved from the endless round of incarnations; and he backs up this
request by proof of the knowledge he possesses of their nature and his
own origin, at the same time uttering passwords which he has received on
his initiation. The effect of this, although out of reverence
represented as an act of grace on the part of the divinities addressed,
is in fact magical or automatic. The powers addressed perforce grant the
request of the dead and he becomes like them a god[410], freed from the
necessity for any further deaths and rebirths. The same idea is
traceable throughout the whole of the Egyptian _Book of the Dead_ from
which it may have been directly derived[411], and also in other
religions with which it would seem the Orphic teaching can have had no
connection[412]. But the point to remember at present is that it appears
henceforward in all the cults or sects to which we have given the
generic name of Gnostic[413].
How this idea was propagated in Greece and her colonies is a question
over which still hangs a great deal of obscurity. There exist a great
number of quotations from poems attributed to Orpheus, which were
clearly the composition of the Orphic school, and all these are, like
the gold plates, in hexameter verse. These, as Damascius implies, were
recited by professional declaimers called Rhapsodists[414] at the
different games and festivals held in honour of the gods, as were once
the so-called Homeric Hymns and the poems of Pindar, which they perhaps
succeeded and displaced. In this way they doubtless became familiar to
many thousands who would otherwise never have heard of the Orphic
teaching, and our conviction on this point is strengthened when we see
how very numerous the festivals in which the Chthonian gods were
celebrated really were. Besides Eleusis, we hear of the worship of
Dionysos, Demeter and Persephone as infernal deities in Achaea, in the
Argolid, in Arcadia, in Messenia, in Sparta, and in other parts of the
Peloponnesus[415]. It also spread through Boeotia, where the national
cult of Dionysos no doubt ensured it a good reception, and thence early
passed into the islands of the Aegean. Crete had, as we have seen,
practised it even before it came to Athens; and Demeter and Persephone
were not only worshipped in Sicily, but were taken to be the tutelary
gods of the island. The Ionian colonists also took the worship of the
Eleusinian triad with them into Asia and they were adored in parts of
Asia Minor as far distant from Greece as Cyzicus[416]. At all, or nearly
all, these places, mysteries were celebrated having more or less
likeness to those of Eleusis, and were followed by games and festivals
like the Eleusinia, at which the songs of the Rhapsodists would be
heard[417]. The frequent Dionysia, or festivals of Dionysos, scattered
all over the Greek-speaking world, but especially in its Northern or
Balkan provinces, no doubt offered an even better opportunity for making
known these poems.
The Orphic poets, also, by no means confined their songs to the worship
of the deities adored at Eleusis. The Thracians, including in that name
the inhabitants of Macedonia and Thessaly, always had extraordinary
ideas about the future life, and Herodotus describes how they used to
gather weeping round the new-born child, bewailing his entry into this
miserable world, while they rejoiced over the death of any of their
fellows, declaring that he had thus obtained a happy deliverance from
his troubles[418]. These, however, were the very doctrines of the
Orphics, who declared that the body was the grave of the soul, and that
the life of the world to come was the only one worth living. Hence the
mythical Orpheus was said to have been a Thracian, and the worship of
Bacchus or the Theban Dionysos as the god of wine to have come into
Attica from Thrace by way of Boeotia, a theory which derives some colour
from the orgiastic dances and ravings of the Maenads and Bacchanals, who
seem therein to have reproduced the rites of the savage Thracians[419].
When the Phrygian divinities—Cybele the Mother of the Gods, and her
consort Attis—were brought into Greece, the Orphics seized hold of their
legends also, and so transformed them that it is now impossible for us
to tell how much of them is Asiatic, and how much is the result of
Orphic interpolation[420]. The same thing may be said of the worship of
the Syrian Adonis, whose mystic death turned him into the spouse of
Persephone, and enabled the Orphics to identify him with Eubuleus or the
infernal Zeus or Dionysos, and of that of the Thracian moon-goddess
Bendis, early worshipped in Athens, whom an Orphic verse preserved by
Proclus declares to be Persephone herself[421].
The foreign god, however, in whose worship the Orphic doctrine is most
plainly visible was Sabazius, who also seems originally to have come
from Phrygia. He is described in an early Greek inscription as “Lord of
all[422]” and said later to be the son of Cybele. The Greeks, however,
quickly identified him with Dionysos Zagreus[423], and an orgiastic
worship of him penetrated into Athens some time before Alexander’s
conquests. This seems to have been well known to Aristophanes, who
declaims in the _Lysistrata_ against the “wantonness” of the Athenian
women, who gave themselves up to the pursuit of this god and the Syrian
Adonis[424]. But the associations formed for the worship of these
divinities seem to have been recruited almost entirely from among the
courtezans of the Piraeus and the trades dependent on them, and more
than one of its priestesses were put to death for “impiety” or
interference with the religion of the State. The low estimation in which
it was generally held may be judged from the invective of Demosthenes
against his rival Aeschines, whose mother Glaucothea was a priestess of
Sabazius, and who had himself in his youth assisted her in her
duties[425]:
“When you became a man, you knew by heart the books of your mother
and helped her to make up others; and you nightly gave the initiated
the _nebride_ (fawn-skin) and baptized them and purified them,
wiping off the clay and bran, and raising them after the
purifications, teaching them to say ‘I have shunned evil. I have
found good.’... By day you led fine _thiasi_ (confraternities)
through the streets crowned with leaves of fennel and poplar, you
heading the procession and squeezing the broad-jawed serpents,
waving them above your head while you shouted _Evoe Saboï_ and
danced _Hyes Attis, Attis Hyes_; and the old women hailed you as
leader of the dance, and chief, and chest-bearer, and sieve-bearer,
and with such like titles; while you received from them as your pay
sops and twisted loaves and cakes. Who would not think himself lucky
with such a life!”
The whole of this tirade may be explained by reference to the Orphic
teaching about Dionysos Zagreus. The fawn-skin or _nebride_ was worn, as
appears on thousands of vases, in the Dionysiac rites as in those
relating to the burial of Osiris. The clay and bran are thought to refer
to the disguise which the Titans assumed when stealing upon the infant
god, and the speech about shunning evil apparently denotes the putting
away of the Titanic nature and the resolution in future to cultivate the
Dionysiac soul. The serpents are explained by a custom peculiar to the
Sabazian rites of putting a live serpent into the bosom of the
initiate’s garment and taking it out at the foot in memory of the shape
in which Zeus begot Dionysos on his daughter Persephone. The mystic cry
of “Evoe” is a well known feature of the orgiastic worship of Dionysos;
while “Saboï” seems to cover some name or epithet of Sabazius[426], and
the phrase “Hyes Attis” shows the connection with Attis, whose identity
with Dionysos forms the subject of more than one Orphic Hymn[427]. In
all this also it may be noticed that there is no pretence of considering
conduct as influencing the destiny of the initiate or even of
conciliating the divinity invoked. The whole of the rites described are
entirely magical, and owe all their efficacy to the knowledge of the
right means to be used to compel the spiritual world to perform the
votaries’ will. It is obvious that people with such ideas will be in no
great hurry to extend the advantage of their discoveries to others less
lucky than themselves and will on the contrary do much to keep them a
secret confined to a few[428].
Did the Orphics, however, at any time form themselves into a church or
brotherhood pledged to mutual support and the propagation of the faith?
Some writers of authority have thought so[429]; but there seems to be no
evidence available to warrant the supposition. Although the worshippers
of Cybele, Attis, Adonis, Dionysos, the Eleusinian deities, and
Sabazius, were by no means averse from announcing the nature of their
faith on their tombstones, we nowhere find any funeral inscriptions
declaring the dead to have belonged to any body of worshippers calling
themselves Orphici. A more likely theory is that the Orphics were banded
together in the small independent associations known as Thiasi, Erani,
or Orgeones[430], like those which we have seen founded at Athens and
elsewhere for the worship of foreign gods. It would seem probable
enough; but as yet all documentary evidence is entirely lacking.
Records, generally in the shape of stelas or tablets containing the
lists of members and the regulations of the associations, have been
found in some numbers for the _thiasi_ of nearly all the gods honoured
by the Orphic poets who were not the gods of the Greek States; but among
them no association calling itself Orphic has yet been discovered. What
we do know is, that in the days of Plato, there was a class of strolling
charlatans called Orpheotelestae who were accustomed to haunt the doors
of the rich with a heap of books said to have been written by Orpheus,
out of which they offered, in exchange for money, to perform ceremonies
of purification and initiation which they affirmed would purge from the
recipient all trace of personal or inherited guilt and assure him a
happy lot in the next world[431]. They also told fortunes, offered to
dispose of enemies, and sometimes gathered together in some numbers so
as to make a more vivid and imposing representation of the pains of the
uninitiated in Hades, and thus induce the superstitious to pay the price
of their charms[432]. They had a certain amount of success, and
Theophrastus in his _Characters_ exhibits his _Deisidaemon_ or
Superstitious Man as going to them with his wife and family to be
purified once a month[433]. Such vagabonds could hardly have made a
living had there been any organized body ready to render like services
in a regular way, and the fact of their existence and the contempt with
which they are spoken of by the writers of the period go some way to
show that no more regular Orphic brotherhood or sect was ever known in
Greece.
There have nevertheless come down to us upwards of eighty hymns
attributed to Orpheus which all bear a certain likeness to each other
and were evidently intended by the compiler for use in some religious or
magical ceremony[434]. They are, like all the fragments of Orphic poems
that we have, in hexameter verse, and most of them conclude with an
invocation to the divinity to whom they are addressed to be present or
to aid in the accomplishment of some “work,” while this invocation often
alludes to “mysteries” and “initiates.” More than one text of these
hymns exist, and the differences between them are so small that it is
plain that their contents must for a long time have been known and
settled. Much variety of opinion exists among the learned as to their
date, the theory of their first modern commentator being that they were
the actual hymns used in the Eleusinian Mysteries[435], while Petersen
thought that they were composed in the Ist or IInd century of our era,
although he admitted that some eight or nine of them were probably
older[436]. One of the latest and best opinions seems to be that of
Prof. Albrecht Dieterich, who thinks that the collection dates from the
period between 200 B.C. and the birth of Christ, and that it was
probably made on the sea-coast of Asia Minor and that of Egypt near
Alexandria[437]. That the hymns were brought together for some religious
or magical use associated with the Orphic teaching, is evident from the
Preface, which purports to be an address to Musaeus, the legendary son
of Orpheus, although it is really an invocation to all the gods
worshipped by the Orphics, including several who are not specially
addressed in the hymns which follow. Of the 87 or 88 hymns common to
most of the codices, all but nine bear after their titles a
specification of the particular perfume—frankincense, myrrh, spices and
the like—to be burnt while they are sung or recited. Most of the texts
bear also an endorsement in another hand reading “Comrade! use [it] with
good fortune!” and this has induced Prof. Dieterich and others to
conclude that the collection was made for the liturgic use of some
confraternity or _thiasus_ professing Orphic doctrines[438]. The
following Hymn to Persephone will perhaps give a fair notion of the
lines upon which these hymns are framed:
HYMN TO PERSEPHONE[439].
“Persephone, daughter of great Zeus, come, thou beloved one,
Only-begotten[440] goddess, accept the offerings well pleasing to
thee.
Much-honoured consort of Pluto, dear giver of life,
Praxidice, decked with love-locks, chaste offspring of Deo.
Giver of birth to the Eumenides, queen of those below the earth,
Virgin whom Zeus begot in unspeakable nuptials[441]
Mother of the loud-shouting, many-formed Eubuleus[442].
Playfellow of the Hours, light-bringer of glorious form,
Dread ruler of all, virgin teeming with fruit
Brilliant-rayed, horned-one, the sole desire of mortals.
Vernal one, who rejoicest in the breath of the meadows
Who dost bring to light the sacred shape of green fruit buds.
Who in autumn time wast wedded in a ravished bed:
Who art alone the life and death of much-enduring mortals.
Persephone! For thou dost ever nourish and slay all things.
Hear, blessed goddess, and send up fruits from the earth
Granting us in abundance peace and gentle-handed health
And a life of happiness, such as leads old age untroubled
To thy realm, O queen, and to dread Pluto.”
By the side of this we may perhaps put the Hymn to Dionysos in the same
collection. It is probably later than the other in date, the syncretism
which equates Persephone with Aphrodite, Cybele, and Isis pointing to a
post-Alexandrian origin.
[HYMN] OF MISE—PERFUME: STORAX[443].
“I invoke the law-giving, rod-bearing, Dionysos
The never-to-be-forgotten seed, Eubuleus of many names
Who art[444] sacred and sacrosanct Mise, ineffable queen!
Male and female, of double nature, the redeemer [_or_
curse-loosing][445] Iacchos
Whether thou art delighting in the sweet-smelling temple of Eleusis
Or art solemnizing mysteries with the Mother in Phrygia,
Or art rejoicing in Cyprus with the fair-crowned Cytherea,
Or dost exult in the pure wheat-bearing plains
With thy mother divine, black-robed, august Isis
And thy busy nurses[446] near the Egyptian stream,
Be gracious and come thou benevolent to accomplish our tasks.”
Whatever date be assigned to these hymns, it is at least admitted by all
commentators that they were composed for the use of persons professing
Orphic doctrines, and we shall be on safe grounds if we assume that they
represent the later state of the Orphic teaching. Collating them with
the fragments of Orphic verses preserved in the quotations of writers
during the late Pagan and early Christian centuries, we are able to
reconstitute the whole Orphic creed, as it was known shortly before the
triumph of Christianity. We see from this that the Orphics attributed
the actual beginning of the universe to their god Dionysos, who first
appeared from the egg formed from Night or Chaos. In that manifestation,
he was bisexual[447], and thus mother, as well as father, of all the
gods and goddesses of the popular pantheon, the swallowing of his heart
by Zeus making him one with the Homeric “father of gods and men.” His
second birth was due to the ineffable, or mystic, union of Zeus and
Demeter, and he was in infancy torn in pieces and eaten by the Titans as
narrated above. From the ashes of these last, men were born, while
Dionysos himself became Hades, the King of the Dead, over whom he rules
with his consort Persephone, the daughter, as Dionysos is the son, of
Zeus and Demeter, and perhaps known to the initiate as only the female
form of her consort[448]. This pair preside over the life and death of
mortals, the soul or Dionysiac spark within each man or woman having to
pass repeatedly through the bodies of other human beings and animals
until finally purified, when it will be united with Dionysos and thus
become god[449]. But the process can be made easier and shorter by the
saving grace of the Mysteries, which by the knowledge they confer on the
initiate of the constitution and ramification of the divine nature, of
the geography, so to speak, of the next world, and of the magical words
and formulas to be there repeated, give him a vast advantage over his
less favoured fellows[450]. The third incarnation of Dionysos, god of
wine, begotten by the father of gods and men on Semele, daughter of
Cadmus, after the heart of the infant Zagreus had been sewn in his
thigh, must be looked upon as a concession to the popular belief in a
different mythology. To those initiated, whether in the Eleusinian or in
other mysteries, the last incarnation of Dionysos was that brought about
by the union of Zeus in serpent shape[451] with Persephone, and he must
have been the child whose mystic birth was acted in the Mysteries of
Eleusis where he was identified with Iacchos, the leader of the
procession.
The effect of this creed, the real symbol of the greatest movement which
ever took place within the religion of the pre-Christian Greeks, upon
the religions that followed its appearance, remains to be considered. In
the first place, Orphism went a great way towards weaning the minds of
men from the idea of separate gods for different nations, and towards
teaching them that all their national and local deities were but
different forms of one great Power, who was himself the source of all
being. There can be little doubt that the Orphics thus regarded their
god Dionysos, whom they made one with his father Zeus, and hailed as
being in himself female as well as male, and the common type of all
goddesses as well as of all gods. By their readiness to identify him
alike with the chthonian god of Eleusis, and with all the foreign
gods—Adonis, Attis, Sabazius, and Osiris—with whom they were brought in
contact, they showed how far they were willing to go in the path of
syncretism; and, but for the rise of Christianity and other religions,
there can be little doubt but that the whole of the Graeco-Roman deities
would eventually have merged in Dionysos[452]. Yet although in this, as
well as in their sanguine idea of the perfectibility of man’s nature,
the Orphics may seem to have done somewhat towards elevating and
purifying religion, it seems plain that their influence was on the whole
hostile to it, and had they ever aimed at and attained supreme power,
would have ended in the negation of all religion whatever. Whether the
Orphics originally demanded from their followers any moral as well as
material purification cannot now be said; but the proceedings of the
Orpheotelestae show us how very early in their teaching all such ideas
were dropped, and the magical theory of the efficacy of the Mysteries as
a means of salvation came to outweigh everything else in the eyes of
their votaries. The compulsion of the gods, however, is an idea that,
once rooted in the mind of man, is sure to bring forth most unwholesome
fruit; and Orphism seems to have brought with it from the beginning all
the worst practices of magic. The Orpheotelestae did not scruple, as has
been said, to undertake to rid their initiates of an inconvenient
adversary[453]; and although this may not at the outset have implied
anything worse than idle curses, it was at any rate murder in intention,
and in Greece, as everywhere else, early led to the calling-in of the
aid of poison. Magical rites, too, generally bring with them a more or
less pronounced worship of devils or evil beings as such, and there are
many signs that the Orphics by no means confined their invocations to
powers supposed to be friendly to man. Among the Orphic Hymns may be
found an invocation to the Titans, who were the legendary enemies of
Zeus Dionysos and all the celestial gods, and it is probable that this
instance is not a solitary one[454]. The worship of gods given up to
evil generally results in the depravation of the morals of their
votaries, and the purposes for which they are invoked are seldom
sublime. Most of this evil sorcery seems to have centred round the cult
of Hecate, herself a mystery goddess revered at Eleusis and especially
dear to the Orphics[455]. Down to the very end of paganism, and indeed,
onward through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Hecate remained the
mistress of magicians and the patron saint of sorcerers[456].
One other consequence of the Orphic teaching deserves to be noted. The
syncretistic tendency, which led the true Orphic to regard Zeus, Apollo,
Hades, and all the gods and goddesses of the popular pantheon as so many
varying forms of his own Dionysos, must have always rendered him
indifferent as to what deity received his public devotions. Secure in
the sacramental grace bestowed upon him by the mere participation in the
Mysteries, and fortified by the knowledge of the formulas which were by
themselves sufficient to ensure him a happy lot in the next world, it is
plain that he must always have held himself at liberty to adore any god
or goddess worshipped by those among whom he found himself, and that he
must have been ready to conform outwardly to any religion which seemed
to offer him any personal advantage. Knowledge, not faith, was to him
the one thing needful to the soul, and he would be as little likely to
think of enduring persecution for opinion’s sake as to approve of
inflicting it. The secret rites and the secret formulas comprised the
whole of his religion.
To sum up, then, the practical result of their speculations, the Orphics
taught that the universe had passed through several stages of evolution
since it was formed from chaos by its First God or Divine Workman. Each
of these stages was described as the reign of a fresh ruler or supreme
divinity, who was the “son” of the foregoing or, as it would seem, a new
incarnation of him. Man came into being through the mystic death and
dispersion throughout the universe of one of the last of these
incarnations, and therefore contains within himself a spark of the
Divine nature which is capable of purification from the contamination of
soulless matter. This is effected in the ordinary way by a succession of
deaths and rebirths in the course of which man’s soul would pass into
that of other animals and human beings. But the process was thought to
be shortened by participation in certain mysteries or secret rites
handed down by tradition, wherein the hidden constitution and purpose of
Nature were disclosed to the initiate, and he was equipped with
mysterious names and formulas thought to possess magical power. These,
by their mere utterance, gave him the right to demand his release from
the painful circle of rebirths which was the common lot of mankind, and
in effect turned him into a being superior to man. The possession of
this wonder-working knowledge or gnosis was not however granted
indiscriminately to all, but remained a secret confined to a favoured
few, who were pledged under sufficiently severe sanctions not to
disclose it. That all religions professed by mankind were equal and
indifferent in the eyes of the Orphic seems to follow logically from
this, as does the position that he might himself profess any of them
that seemed to him expedient. We shall find all these features present
in the many sects of post-Christian Gnostics.
Footnote 368:
Lobeck in his _Aglaophamus_, Königsberg, 1829, vol. I. pp. 233-1104,
makes this clear. It was also the opinion of Aristotle according to
Cicero (_de Nat. Deor._ Bk I. c. 38). Other authorities are collected
by Purser in his article “Orphica” in Smith’s _Dict. of Greek and
Roman Antiquities_, 1890, vol. II. who quotes with approval Preller’s
remark that Orpheus was “eine litterarische Collectivperson.” See also
Paul Monceaux in Daremberg and Saglio’s _Dict. des Antiq._ _s.v._
Orphica.
Footnote 369:
Herodotus, Bk VII. c. 6. Tatian, _adv. Graecos_, c. XLI.; Clem. Alex.
_Strom._ Bk I. c. 21; Sext. Emp. _Pyrrh. Hypotyp._ III. p. 115 B. Cf.
Purser, _art. cit._
Footnote 370:
K. O. Müller, _Hist. of the Literature of Ancient Greece_, Eng. ed.
vol. I. pp. 308, 309; and authorities quoted by O. Kern, _de Orphei,
Epimenidis Pherecydis Theogoniis_, Berlin, 1888, p. 6.
Footnote 371:
The first mention of such rites is said to have been made by Arctinus
of Miletus in his _Æthiopis_, where he describes Ulysses as purifying
Achilles for the murder of Thersites. See Grote’s _History of Greece_,
4th ed. vol. I. pp. 23, 24.
Footnote 372:
K. O. Müller, _op. cit._ I. pp. 310, 311.
Footnote 373:
Clem. Alex. _Strom._ Bk I. c. 21.
Footnote 374:
The search for its original home seems hopeless at present. It might
easily be connected with Babylonian beliefs, and the Orphic Dionysos
has too many features in common with Tammuz, the lover of Ishtar, for
the resemblance to be entirely accidental. But other elements in the
story, such as the mundane egg, are found in the Vedas, and may point
to an Indian origin. The discovery a few years ago at Boghaz Keui in
Cilicia of inscriptions showing that the Vedic gods were worshipped in
Asia Minor at least as early as 1270 B.C., makes it very difficult to
say whether the Vedic gods may not have reached India from Asia Minor
or _vice versa_. In this case, it is possible that Onomacritos may
have learned some of the legends at the Court of the Great King at
Susa.
Footnote 375:
Pindar, _Isthm._ VI. i. 3; Aeschyl. _Sisyphus Drapetes_, fr. 242 of
Didot; Sophocles, _Antigone_, ll. 1121 _sqq._; Euripides, _Rhesus_,
ll. 942 _sqq._ Cf. Döllinger, _Jud. und Heid._ Eng. ed. vol. I. p.
259.
Footnote 376:
Demosthenes, _adv. Aristog._ I. p. 773. Cf. Maury, _Rel. de la Grèce_,
II. p. 320; Daremberg and Saglio, _Dict. des Antiq._ _s.v._ Orphica
and Eleusinia, for other authorities.
Footnote 377:
Herodotus, Bk II. cc. 145, 146.
Footnote 378:
This is the “Theogony of the Rhapsodists,” which seems to have been
the most popular of all the Orphic theogonies. The different texts in
which it is preserved have been collected by Abel, _Orphica_, Lips.
1885, pp. 48-140. It is well summarized by Purser in Smith’s _Dict. of
Antiq._ where before quoted. Cf. Daremberg and Saglio, _s.v._ Orpheus.
Footnote 379:
Aristoph. _Aves_, ll. 691-706.
Footnote 380:
_Religions de la Grèce_, t. III. p. 310.
Footnote 381:
Μουνογένεια. See Orphic Hymn on p. 142, _infra_. Persephone has also
Zeus for her father in the Homeric _Hymn to Demeter_, l. 396. The
epithet cannot imply that she was his only daughter, as he had other
daughters among the Homeric gods, such as Athena and Aphrodite, but
rather that she was “unique,” or one of a kind. The mistaking of the
word Μονογενής for μονογέννητος by Christian and Jewish writers has
led to much confusion; and Renan (_L’Église Chrétienne_, Paris, 1879,
p. 200, n. 2) notes that George the Syncellus calls Bar Coziba, the
Jewish Messiah, Μονογενής. See the story of the begettal of Persephone
which Maury, _op. cit._ III. pp. 321, 322, quotes from Clement of
Alexandria and Arnobius. Both authors derive from it the name of Brimo
given to Demeter in the Mysteries. Cf. Chap. VIII, _infra_.
Footnote 382:
Orphic Hymn XXX in Abel’s _Orphica_, where he is called
“First-begotten, of a double nature, thrice-born, Bacchic king,
Hunter, Ineffable One, Hidden One, two horned, and of double form.”
Cf. his epithet “bull-faced” in Orphic Hymn XLV. So Clement of
Alexandria quotes a verse from some unnamed poet that “the bull has
begotten a serpent, the serpent a bull,” _Protrept._ c. II.
Footnote 383:
As in the statue at Megalopolis in Arcadia described by Pausanias, Bk
VIII. c. 31, where Polycleitos portrayed the young god with a cup and
a _thyrsos_, besides wearing _cothurni_, but with the eagle and the
name of Zeus Φιλίος. Ael. Aristides, _in Dionysum_, says that Dionysos
is Zeus himself, a doctrine which Justin Martyr, _Cohort._ c. XV,
attributes to Orpheus.
Footnote 384:
The story with full references to authorities is given by Maury, _Rel.
de la Grèce Antique_, t. III. pp. 342 _sqq._; Purser in Smith’s _Dict.
of Greek and Roman Antiquities_, 1890, _s.v._ Orphica; Cecil Smith,
“Orphic Myths on Attic Vases,” _J.H.S._ 1890, pp. 343-351; Dyer, _The
Gods in Greece_, 1891, p. 128; Paul Monceaux in Daremberg and Saglio’s
_Dict. des Antiq._ _s.v._ Orphica. The eating of a god or other being
in order to obtain possession of the victim’s qualities is a common
idea among primitive peoples, as is set forth at length in Frazer,
_Golden Bough_, 3rd ed. pt V, vol. II. ch. 10. It was familiar to the
Egyptians, as is seen in the Pyramid Texts of the VIth Dynasty, where
the glorified King Unas is represented as chasing, catching, cooking,
and eating the gods in the next world in order to assimilate their
powers. See Maspero, _Les Pyramides de Saqqarah_, pp. 67 _sqq._ So in
a magic papyrus now at Leyden, the magician threatens the god Set whom
he is invoking, that if he is not obedient, he will speak to “the
Great God” (Serapis?) who will tear Set “limb from limb and give his
powers to a mangy dog sitting on a dung-hill to eat.” See Leemans,
_Papyri Graeci_, vol. II. pp. 18, 19.
Footnote 385:
Foucart, _Myst. d’Él._ pp. 27, 28.
Footnote 386:
Foucart, where last quoted; Hesiod, _Works and Days_, l. 465 (p. 39,
Didot).
Footnote 387:
Such ideas may, however, have been current in the religions of the
Eastern Mediterranean long before Orphic times. Dr Budge in his book
_Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection_, I. p. 28, reiterates what he
has before stated elsewhere, _i.e._ that Osiris was to his worshippers
“the god-man, the first of those who rose from the dead,” and that his
death and resurrection were therefore supposed to be in some way
beneficial to mankind. This is very likely, but I know of no Egyptian
text that in any way connects the creation of man with the death of
Osiris. On the contrary, a text which Dr Budge has himself published
makes men and women to come into being from the tears which came forth
from the eye of the god Khepera, here probably to be identified with
Nu, the primaeval Ocean or Deep. See Budge, _The Gods of the
Egyptians_, vol. I. p. 299. The Zoroastrian religion, in the late form
in which we have it in the _Bundahish_ (see West, _S.B.E._ Oxford,
1880, _Pahlavi Texts_, pt I.), does indeed make man spring from the
death of Gayomort, the First or Primaeval Man, slain by Ahriman. If we
choose to suppose that this conception went back to the times of
Zoroaster himself, that is to say, about 700 B.C., Onomacritos might
easily have found this part of the story at the Court of Susa. Cf.
Bousset, _Hauptprobleme der Gnosis_, Göttingen, 1907, pp. 215-223. It
is significant that, according to Pausanias, Bk VIII. c. 37, it was
Onomacritos who first made the Titans evil powers, or as he says
“contributing to the sufferings of Dionysos.”
Footnote 388:
Clement of Alexandria, _Strom._ Bk III. c. 3, quotes this expression
from “Philolaos the Pythagorean.” Athenaeus, _Deipnosophistae_, Bk IV.
p. 157 C (Teubner) from “Euxitheus the Pythagoric.” It evidently went
back to the earliest Orphic teaching reduced to writing.
Footnote 389:
See Lobeck, _Aglaophamus_, I. p. 566, for authorities.
Footnote 390:
κύκλου τ’ ἀλλῦσαι καὶ ἀναψῦξαι κακότητος. The line is attributed to
Orpheus by Simplicius in his Commentary on Aristotle, _de Caelo_, II.
p. 168 (ed. Karsten). According to Proclus, _in Plat. Tim._ V. 380 A,
B, it was part of a prayer which Orphics used when being initiated in
the mysteries of “Demeter and Cora.” The Pythagorean doctrine of
transmigration and its adoption by the Orphics are well set out by
Luebbert in his _Commentatio de Pindaro dogmatis de migratione
animarum cultore_, Bonn, 1887, _q.v._
Footnote 391:
All these prohibitions persisted, and we meet with them in nearly all
the religions hereafter described including the Manichaean. The
filiation may well be direct, as such sects as the Valentinians grew
up in an atmosphere of Orphic teaching. If, however, it should appear
that the Orphic notions on this subject were derived from some Western
Asiatic source, it is plain that the Ophites and Manichaeans may have
drawn theirs from the same fount and independently.
Footnote 392:
Euripides, _Cretenses_, p. 733 (Didot). The fragment is found in
Porphyry, _de Abstinentia_, Bk IV. c. 19. Cf. Euripides, _Hippolytus_,
l. 952.
Footnote 393:
See Frazer and Maspero as quoted in note 3 p. 125, _supra_.
Footnote 394:
That this was the regular Orphic phrase is plain from the verse quoted
above, note 3 p. 127. Cf. the gold plates of Naples, p. 133, _infra_.
Footnote 395:
Cf. Luebbert, _op. cit._ p. v. The confusion in Cicero between
_animus_ and _anima_, or mind and soul, is curious. Cf. Olympiodorus,
_Comment. ad Plat. Phaed._ as given in Fr. 225 of Abel’s _Orphica_ (p.
245).
Footnote 396:
Orpheus is mentioned in the IVth Pythian ode as the “father of songs,”
and in fragments of the _Threnoi_ as “the golden-sworded son of
Oiagreus,” p. 116 (Bergk). In the VIth Isthmian ode, Dionysos is made
the temple-companion or assessor (πάρεδρος) of Demeter. The delights
of the blessed dead are set forth in fragments of the _Threnoi_ (see
Fragment X. 1, 2, 3, 4 of Teubner, pp. 95, 96, Cod. Boeckh); their
reincarnation as heroes in a fragment from the same poem: _ibid._
Frag. X. 4, p. 98, Cod. Bö.
Footnote 397:
The earlier idea espoused by Creuzer and others (see Guigniaut,
_Religions de l’Antiquité_, vol. III. _passim_, and especially pp.
1207, 1208) that the Chthonian gods were worshipped as the symbols of
generation and death seems a good deal nearer the truth than the
“Corn-spirit” theory set on foot by the _Golden Bough_ that they were
the gods of agriculture and vegetation. Of course both explanations
can be read into what we know of the Mysteries. Why these last should
have been kept secret even before the rise of Orphism is hard to see.
M. Paul Foucart’s view that they came originally from a foreign
country (according to him from Egypt) offers one explanation of this;
but see n. 2 p. 139, _infra_.
Footnote 398:
So F. Lenormant in Daremberg and Saglio’s _Dict. des Ant._ _s.v._
Eleusinia. See, too, his article on Dionysos Zagreus in the _Gazette
Archéologique_, 1879. So Purser in Smith’s _Dict. of Antiq._ as last
quoted (cf. article “Eleusinia”). Aeschylus, _Sisyphus Drapetes_,
frag. 242, p. 238, Didot, and Alcmaeonis, in _Etymologicum Magnum_,
_s.h.v._ both know of Zagreus, and Sophocles, _Antigone_, ll.
1140-1154 identifies Dionysos and Iacchos.
Footnote 399:
Synesius (Ptol. Episcop.), _Dion_ (Migne, _Script. Gr._ t. 66, pp.
1153-1156), says so plainly. Cf. Galen, _de Usu Partium_ (Kuhn’s
_Medici Graeci_, Claudius Galenus, vol. IV. pp. 702, 703), and
Plutarch, _de Defect. Orac._ p. 422 (_Moralia_, vol. I. p. 514,
Didot).
Footnote 400:
Sophocles, _Triptolemus_ (Frag. 348, Didot). Homeric _Hymn to
Demeter_, ll. 480 _sqq._ (p. 565, Didot). See also Chap. II, _supra_.
Footnote 401:
Plutarch, _de audiend._ _Poet._ IV. 76 (Reisk); Diogenes Laertius,
_Vit. Phil._ c. VI.
Footnote 402:
They have been many times described, especially by Kaibel and
Comparetti (for references see Monceaux in Daremberg and Saglio’s
_Dict. des Antiq._ _s.v._ Orphica). The translations in the text are
by Prof. Gilbert Murray and are taken from his Appendix to Miss Jane
Harrison’s _Prolegomena to Study of Greek Religion_, 1903, _q.v._
Footnote 403:
The same phrase is used in the Orphic Hymn XIII. with regard to
Kronos, Abel, _Orphica_, p. 66.
Footnote 404:
This idea reappears in one of the documents of the _Pistis Sophia_.
See Chap. X, _infra_.
Footnote 405:
So Aelius Aristides (_in Serapidem_, p. 98) speaks of the light of the
sun being restored by Serapis “to those whose tombs contain holy
books.”
Footnote 406:
As Foucart, _Culte de Dionysos_, p. 34, n. 3, has pointed out, this
cannot refer to the Titanic part of man, which he was enjoined by the
Orphics to mortify as far as possible. There is something to be said
for M. Foucart’s view that the dead is here shown as another Osiris,
son of the earth-god Geb and the sky-goddess Nut. It is curious that
this last is always portrayed on Egyptian monuments with a
star-spangled body, while I know of no Greek representation of Uranos
which connects him with the stars.
Footnote 407:
“Of good counsel.” A name of Dionysos, as appears from the Orphic
Hymns given later in this chapter.
Footnote 408:
A name of Demeter, Persephone, and some other Chthonian goddesses. See
Aristophanes, _Thesmophoriazusae_, l. 286. It probably means merely
“mistress.”
Footnote 409:
It has been suggested that this is a figure for the initiated dead
receiving all that they wish. It should be noted, however, that in the
Zoroastrian religion the flood of molten metal which is to burn the
wicked is to feel to the faithful like warm milk. So N. Söderblom, _La
Vie Future d’après la Mazdéisme_, Paris, 1901, p. 266, quoting the
_Dinkard_ and the _Bundahish_. The phrase is discussed by M. Salomon
Reinach in _Revue Archéol._ 1901, II. pp. 202-213, and _Cultes, Mythes
et Religions_, Paris, 1909, t. II. pp. 123-134. M. Alline, in _Xenia_,
Athens, 1912, connects it with the supposed Orphic idea that blessed
souls inhabit the Milky Way.
Footnote 410:
Perhaps not directly. There is some reason for thinking that the soul
of the true Orphic was supposed to pass through the intermediate
stages of hero and demon: see Hild, _Étude sur les Démons_, Paris,
1881, p. 144, where the subject is excellently treated. Cf. Pindar,
_Threnoi_, Frag. X. 4, p. 98, Cod. Bö. The deification of the dead was
also a Pythagorean doctrine, as appears in the _Aurea Carmina_, ll.
70, 71, ed. Gaisford.
Footnote 411:
This is the suggestion of Foucart, _Myst. d’Él._ p. 72. That the
Egyptian dead was supposed to become one with Osiris himself is an
idea that appears as early as the Pyramid Texts, cf. Maspero, _Les
Pyramides de Saqqarah_, _passim_, where the dead kings are each in
turn hailed as “this Osiris.”
Footnote 412:
Buddhism, for instance, which can hardly have reached the West before
the death of Onomacritos.
Footnote 413:
As in the _Pistis Sophia_, where Jesus says to his disciples, “Know ye
not that ye are all gods ...”, p. 247 (Copt.).
Footnote 414:
For Damascius, _Quaest. de primis principiis_, see Abel’s _Orphica_,
Frag. 48. Cf. as to Rhapsodists, Maury, _Rel. de la Grèce_, I. pp.
240, 345, 346.
Footnote 415:
See Maury, _op. cit._ II. pp. 370 _sqq._
Footnote 416:
Maury, _op. cit._ II. p. 374.
Footnote 417:
Such as the Mysteries of Samothrace, held in honour, according to one
account, of Pluto, Demeter, and Persephone, together with Hermes. See
Maury, _op. cit._ II. pp. 306 _sqq._ for authorities. It was at these
mysteries that Philip of Macedon was said to have first seen and loved
Olympias (Plutarch, _Alexander_, c. 2).
Footnote 418:
Herodotus, Bk V. c. 4.
Footnote 419:
See Maury, _Rel. de la Grèce_, II. p. 203, for authorities.
Footnote 420:
As in the Orphic Hymn to Mise given on p. 143, _infra_, where the
Eleusinian Dionysos, called also Eubuleus and Iacchos, is identified
with Cybele, the Cyprian Aphrodite, and the Egyptian Isis. See, too,
the Hymn “of the Great Mysteries” given in the _Philosophumena_ of
Hippolytus, where Dionysos is equated with Adonis, Osiris, the god of
Samothrace, Attis, and others. See n. 1 p. 139, and Chap. VIII,
_infra_.
Footnote 421:
See last note; Proclus, _in Plat. Polit._ p. 353 (Abel’s _Orphica_,
Frag. 184).
Footnote 422:
πανκοίρανος. _C.I.G._ t. II. No. 3791 (Bö.). Cf. the Aeschylean
description of Zagreus as the “Highest of All” (πανυπέρτατε πάντων)
quoted by Gaisford in his notes to _Etymologicum Magnum_ (see _Cycli
Fragmenta_ of Didot, _s.v._ Epigoni vel Alemaeonis).
Footnote 423:
Cf. the Σαβάζιε ... ὂς Βάκχον Διόνυσον of Hymn XLVIII. Abel’s
_Orphica_.
Footnote 424:
_Lysistrata_, ll. 386-390. Cf. Foucart, _Les Ass. Rel._ pp. 61-64, who
quotes nearly all the available authorities in his notes. See also
Monceaux in Daremberg and Saglio’s _Dict. des Antiq._ _s.v._ Sabazios.
Footnote 425:
Demosthenes, _de Corona_, pp. 259 _sqq._ Cf. Foucart, _Les Ass. Rel._
p. 67, n. 1.
Footnote 426:
In the Orphic Hymn to Hippa (Hymn XLIX. Abel’s _Orphica_, p. 84), the
mysteries of the “pure Sabos?” (ἁγνοῦ Σάβου) are alluded to in terms
which make it possible that the name was one of the epithets of the
Iacchos of Eleusis.
Footnote 427:
In a hymn preserved for us by Hippolytus (_Philosophumena_, Bk V. c.
1, p. 176, Cruice) the “multiform Attis,” who has just been declared
“in a hymn of the Great Mysteries” to be the god who is called Adonis,
Osiris, Adam (by the Samothracians), Corybas and Pappas, is thus
addressed: “I will sing Attis, son of Rhea, not with the sound of
trumpets, nor with the Idaean flutes in harmony with the songs of the
Curetes. But I will mingle with my lay Phoebus’ music of lutes. _Evoe
Evan_, since thou art Pan, since thou art Bacchus, since thou art the
shepherd of white stars.” In the address to Musaeus with which the
collection of Orphic Hymns begins, the Mother of the Gods, Attis, Men,
Aphrodite Urania, and Adonis are invoked together. See Abel’s
_Orphica_, p. 58. In Roman times Attis and Sabazius seem to be
identified, while Adonis is often confounded with them. See Maury,
_Rel. de la Grèce_, III. p. 102 and n. 4.
Footnote 428:
This is, perhaps, the only satisfactory reason that can be assigned
for the secrecy with which the Mysteries of Eleusis, of the Great
Mother, and the rest were surrounded. The notion put forward by the
Fathers that the mystic rites were kept secret because of their
obscenity has little weight when we consider the Phallophoria and the
Terms, or street statues of Hermes, which were publicly exhibited. The
existence of secret rites among primitive folk like the black races of
Africa and the native Australians can be explained in the same way.
Footnote 429:
Purser, _ubi cit._ _supra_, speaks of it as “an ascetic religious
brotherhood,” as did K. O. Müller, _Introduction to a Scientific
System of Mythology_ (Eng. ed.), p. 318, and _Litt. of Ant. Greece_,
I. p. 307. Döllinger, _Jud. und Heid._ I. p. 161, says truly that
there is no evidence that at any time there existed a regularly formed
association of Orphici in Greece. So Monceaux in Daremberg and Saglio,
_s.v._ Orpheus.
Footnote 430:
This was the opinion of Guigniaut, _Religions de l’Antiquité_, Paris,
1825, t. III. p. 1203.
Footnote 431:
Plato, _Republic_, Bk II. c. 7, is the classical passage. Cf.
Döllinger, _op. cit._ I. pp. 165-167, and references there given.
Footnote 432:
See Döllinger as in last note.
Footnote 433:
Theophrastus, _Characteres_, c. XVI.
Footnote 434:
There are 88 in the text published by Abel (_Orphica_, pp. 55-102).
This includes the Hymn to Ares generally classed among the Homeric
Hymns.
Footnote 435:
The celebrated Thomas Taylor the Platonist. Pausanias, Bk IX. cc. 27
and 30, says that the Hymns of Orpheus were short and few, and that
the Lycomidae knew and sung them in the Mysteries.
Footnote 436:
Abel, _Orphica_, p. 55, n. 1.
Footnote 437:
Dieterich, _de Hymnis Orphicis_, Marp. Catt. 1891. Otto Kern in the
_Festschrift_ presented to Prof. Carl Robert, 1910, points out that
there is no trace of the worship of the Emperor in the Hymns, and that
these must therefore all be anterior to the Christian era; also that
the Egyptian deities are so seldom named in them, that the collection
cannot have been made in Egypt. He thinks it comes from Asia Minor.
Footnote 438:
The collection may have been used as an oracle or divining-book like
any other poems written in hexameters. See a curious instance of this
in Kenyon, _Greek Papyri in British Museum_, pp. 83 _sqq._
Footnote 439:
This is numbered XXIX. in Abel’s text. This, and the hymns of Hecate,
Pluto, the Curetes, Dionysos Bassareus, the Ever-living Deliverer
(Bacchus), Aphrodite, Nemesis, Nomos, and the doubtful one to Ares are
the only hymns out of the original collection which have not the note
appended as to the perfume to be burnt.
Footnote 440:
Μουνογένεια, “Unique,” see n. 3 p. 124, _supra_.
Footnote 441:
So Clement of Alexandria, _Protrept._ c. II. speaks of “the mysteries
of Demeter, and Zeus’ wanton embraces of his mother and the wrath of
Demeter ... also the entreaties of Zeus, and the drink of gall, the
plucking-out of the hearts of sacrifices and deeds we dare not name.”
Arnobius, _adv. Gentes_, Bk V. cc. 20, 21, tells substantially the
same story.
Footnote 442:
See n. 2 p. 133, _supra_. In these hymns it is used always as an
epithet either of Bacchus or Hades with whom the mystic Bacchus was
identified.
Footnote 443:
No. XLII. in Abel’s _Orphica_. Persephone was called Mise Kore at
Pergamum (C. Radet, _Revue des Études anciennes_, January-March, 1911,
p. 77), which shows how closely she had become identified with her
consort. Otherwise the word is only known, I believe, as a name of
Dionysos.
Footnote 444:
τε ... τε.
Footnote 445:
Λύσειος.
Footnote 446:
Doubtless the bees, who throughout Asia Minor were said to be the
attendants of the Great Goddess. The priestesses of the Ephesian
Artemis were called Μέλισσαι or Bees, and there were Μέλισσαι at
Eleusis. See Foucart, _Grds. Myst._ pp. 66, 67. Cf. Aristophanes,
_Frogs_, l. 1274. So were those of Cybele: cf. Lactantius, _Div.
Inst._ Bk I. c. 22. Cf. also, A. B. Cook, “The Bee in Greek Mythology”
in _J.H.S._ XV. (1895), pp. 17 _sqq._
Footnote 447:
διφυῆ. See Orphic Hymn VI. in Abel’s _Orphica_.
Footnote 448:
As in the Orphic Hymn to Mise quoted above. Cf. Dyer, _op. cit._ pp.
178, 179.
Footnote 449:
That this may have been thought to be the result of the mystic union
of the initiate with Dionysos seems possible from the statement of
Plutarch, that this last was born as a man, but by his merit was
translated from this earthly and suffering body, _Life of Pelopidas_,
c. XVI. Cf. Budge, _Pseudo-Callisthenes’ Life of Alexander the Great_,
p. 135.
Footnote 450:
A sort of echo of this is perhaps to be found in the idea prevalent in
the primitive Church that martyrs for the faith passed direct to a
state of blessedness without waiting like the rest of the faithful for
the Last Judgment. Cf. Revelation vi. 9-11; Neander, _Ch. Hist._ I. p.
463.
Footnote 451:
Zeus Chthonios or the Zeus below the earth. The serpent was always to
the Orphic poets a symbol or pictorial representation of earth.
Footnote 452:
This seems to be the upshot of the remarks in Pseudo-Callisthenes
(Budge, _op. cit._ _supra_), pp. 8, 12, 40-48, 127, 135. The same idea
is specially marked in the writings of Proclus and other
Neo-Platonists and by them attributed to Orpheus. Cf. Abel’s
_Orphica_, _s.v._ Teletai, _passim_.
Footnote 453:
Plato, _Republ._ Bk II. c. 7.
Footnote 454:
No. XXXVII. in Abel’s _Orphica_, p. 78.
Footnote 455:
See Maury, _La Magie et L’Astrologie dans l’Antiquité et en Moyen
Âge_, Paris, 1860, pp. 54, 55, for authorities. The Orphic Hymns above
quoted begin with an invocation to Hecate.
Footnote 456:
As in Shakespeare’s _Macbeth_.
CHAPTER V
PRE-CHRISTIAN GNOSTICS: THE ESSENES
It comes as rather a wrench to leave the graceful, if vain, speculations
of the Greeks, with their joyous and free life and their passionate
worship of beauty, which saw in every shifting aspect of nature the
revelation of some Being more perfect and glorious than man, for the
gloomy and misanthropic monotheism of the Palestinian Jews. Nor is the
change made more pleasant when we consider the contrast between the
ideas of the two nations as to the perfectibility of man’s nature and
his lot after death. While the Greeks under Orphic influence had come to
look upon their gods as usually well-disposed to mankind[457] and even
willing to share their power and place with, at any rate, a few
highly-gifted or fortunate men, the fanatics among the Jews who returned
from the Babylonian Captivity seem to have seen in their national Deity
a jealous and uncompromising tyrant, possessed with a hatred for
humanity in general, and only extending a modified favouritism to one
small nation not distinguished by any specially attractive
qualities[458]. To this nation, Yahweh had, according to their own
traditions, promised exclusive temporal advantages; but in spite of this
promise they had become in turn the slaves or tributaries of the
Egyptians, the Philistines, the Assyrians, Chaldaeans, and Persians, and
had been more than once forcibly removed by their masters from the land
that they looked upon as their God-given inheritance. Moreover, the
grace, such as it was, of the Deity they worshipped was held by them to
extend to this life only, after which they thought they would either
perish like the beasts or would lead at the best a shadowy and
colourless existence in Sheol or Hades, like that which called forth the
complaints of the Achilles of the _Odyssey_[459]. Hence the soil of
Judaea at the coming of Alexander might have seemed to anyone to be as
unlikely a field for the propagation of ideas resembling those of the
Orphics as could well be imagined. But the Jews, with all their
pragmatism and narrowness of ideal, have always shown a power of
assimilating the ideas of others and of adapting themselves to the
usages of the peoples among whom they are cast by a sort of protective
mimicry like that to which the preservation of certain insect types is
said to be due. This quality had already stood them in good stead during
their different periods of captivity in Egypt and Chaldaea, where before
Alexander’s conquests they had contrived to get a good deal of the
financial management of their captors’ affairs into their own hands, and
where they doubtless acted as spies and guides to the armies of the
Great Conqueror[460]. For these services Alexander after his fashion
royally rewarded them; but the real crisis of the nation’s fate
approached when Alexander’s work was done, and when the different
nationalities which he had forced, as it were, into the melting-pot,
became tired of acting as pieces in the war game played by his generals
and successors, and began to look favourably upon the security offered
by the Roman government. In this new order of the world, Palestine,
which had hitherto owed its autonomous existence to the fact that it
formed a useful buffer state or neutral ground separating the two great
powers Egypt and Syria and was not vehemently desired by any other
nation, saw the reason for her _quasi_-independence vanishing. Ptolemy
Soter, with his usual prescience, had early seen the advantage of
getting this borderland into his own custody, and had captured
Jerusalem, it is said, one Sabbath morning, when the superstition of the
inhabitants deterred them from defending it effectually[461]. The story,
as thus told, probably owes something to the necessity for flattering
the national vanity; but it is evident that the politic Lagides knew how
to reconcile the Jews to the easy yoke of their suzerainty, and under
the early Ptolemies the Jews remained generally faithful to Egypt. When
Egypt’s sway became enfeebled after the reign of Ptolemy IV Philopator,
Antiochus the Great seized upon Palestine, probably with the connivance
of a part of its inhabitants[462]; and although it remained fairly
contented with its new masters until Antiochus’ death, in the reign of
his successor, Antiochus Epiphanes, the Jews found themselves confronted
with a very disagreeable dilemma. For Antiochus Epiphanes, after his
successful attack upon Egypt had been frustrated by the Romans, saw
plainly enough that only an empire united and homogeneous in faith and
culture could resist for long the new power rising in the West[463], and
resolved to force on the complete Hellenization of the Jews at all
hazards. How he failed is told in the Books of the Maccabees, although
his failure brought little good to his rebellious subjects, who soon
passed with the rest of his empire into the hands of the victorious
Romans.
To this end, the splitting-up of the chosen people into warring sects
materially contributed. Josephus, writing somewhere about the year 70
A.D., tells us that there existed in his day three “philosophic” sects
among the Jews[464]. The first two of these were the Pharisees and
Sadducees familiar to everybody through their mention in the New
Testament, and the third was the “Essenes.” These Essenes—a name which
by some has been thought to mean “the Pure[465]”—he describes as a small
sect numbering not more than 4000 in all, and scattered throughout the
villages of Palestine. They lived entirely by manual labour, such as
agriculture, and were extraordinarily hospitable to other members of the
same sect, so that an Essene never found it necessary to take anything
with him on a journey, but could always obtain what he wanted from his
fellow-sectaries, even though personally unknown to them. As to their
doctrines, he tells us that though “Jews by birth” they abjured
marriage[466], and only recruited their ranks by adoption. They
practised, on the same authority, the fullest community of goods, and
forbade conversation on worldly matters before the rising of the sun, at
which they repeated certain traditional prayers, “as if they made
supplication for his rising.” Their meals were always eaten in common
and in a sacramental manner, purification in cold water and the donning
of white garments being a necessary preliminary[467]. Sobriety and
restraint in speech were, he says, among their most marked
characteristics, and they avoided the taking of judicial oaths, averring
that “he who cannot be believed without swearing by God is already
condemned.” Initiation into the sect was both long and difficult. The
novice on his first reception was presented with a hatchet, a girdle and
a white garment, but was not allowed to associate with the rest of the
order, it being held that they would be defiled if he did so. In spite
of this, he was forced to observe the austerities of the order for a
year before being allowed “the waters of purification,” and for two
years further before being admitted to full association with the other
members and the common meal[468]. After this probation, he was sworn on
“the most tremendous oaths to be just towards all men and faithful
to the order, not discovering any of their doctrines to others, no,
not though he should be compelled to do so at the risk of his life.”
Moreover, he had to swear
“to communicate their doctrines to no one in any other manner than
that in which he had received them himself; to abstain from
robbery[469] and that he would equally preserve the books belonging
to the sect and the names of the angels.”
Their doctrine concerning the future life was:
“That bodies are corruptible and that the matter of which they are
made is not permanent; but that souls are immortal, and continue for
ever; and that they come out of the most subtle air, and are united
to their bodies as in prisons, into which they are drawn by a
certain natural enticement[470]; but that when they are set free
from the bonds of the flesh, they then, as released from a long
bondage, rejoice and mount upward[471].”
Finally, Josephus tells us that the Essenes take great pains in
“studying the writings of the ancients and choose out of them what is
most for the advantage of their soul and body,” that they were much
given to the practice of medicine, and had those among them “who
undertake to foretell things to come by reading the holy books and using
several sorts of purifications, and being perpetually conversant in the
discourses of the prophets,”—a statement which is explained by another
passage[472] wherein he tells us that they believed “fate forms all
things and nothing befalls men but according to it.” From yet another
passage[473] we learn that they were excluded from the Temple worship
and offered their sacrifices for themselves instead of through the
regular Jewish priesthood[474].
That Josephus’ account of the Essenes is fairly accurate and well
informed appears from the fact that Philo of Alexandria, writing some
fifty years earlier than he, also asserts that they numbered “in his
opinion about 4000,” and explains their abstention from the Temple
worship as being due to their objection to sacrificing living
animals[475]. Philo further tells us that there were among them no
makers of warlike weapons, that they refrained from trade and had no
slaves; but that their principal study was that of the Jewish Law and
the “enquiry into the being of God and the creation of the universe.”
According to him, on the seventh or holy day when no work was done, they
were accustomed to meet together, when one
“takes up the holy volume and reads it, and another of the men of
the greatest experience [among them] comes forward and explains what
is not very intelligible, for a great many precepts are delivered in
enigmatical modes of expression and allegorically.”
He at the same time confirms Josephus’ statement as to their having all
goods in common.