THEORPHICS
Then there was the much debated tradition of the Orphics. Writing in the fifth century BCE, Herodotus (2.53) doubted the then current opinion that Orpheus and Musaeus preceded Homer and Hesiod.4 Modern philologists and historians of religion in most of the former century have also been reluctant to attribute too much significance to the so-called “Orphic tradition” for the obvious reason that reliable ancient sources were scarce.
However, new findings of gold plates (lamellae)5 and of the Derveni papyrus (unearthed in the outskirts of Thessaloniki in 1962) began to change this reservation towards the end of the century.6 Today leading scholars agree that a tradition of esoteric “initiations” (teletai) referring to the authority of Orpheus was actually quite widespread and perhaps even relatively organized as far back as in the fifth century BCE.7 If we agree that Orphic poems passed through Pisistratus’s editorial board,8 this could take us back another century or so, but this still seems to confirm that Herodotus was correct.Associated with the practice of mystic and soteriological rites, the teletai, Plato (cf. Republic 364e) refers to “an abundance of books” (biblon homados), Euripides (Hippolytus 954) to “many writings” (polla grammatci), and Herodotus (Histories 2.81; likewise Plato Epinomis 335a) to “sacred texts” (hieroi logoi). Apart from the intriguing finds mentioned above, and the fact that an Orphic text corpus was generally known in classical times, most of the actual sources (which comprise Otto Kern’s authoritative compilation, Orphicorum Fragmenta et Testimonial stem from Christian authors writing in the Roman era and thus must be used with caution (inasmuch as the scholarly aim is to grasp the meaning and function of Orphism in early antiquity).
Whereas the terminus ante quern for a loosely organized tradition of Orphism, understood as an interrelated complex of Orphic cosmogonies and ritual initiations, seems to be the sixth century BCE, the terminus post quern remains uncertain.
That the Orphics themselves presented Orpheus as predating Homer cannot, of course, be taken at face value. Yet it indicates a polemic which should not be overlooked. Thus, instead of trying to reconstruct a “religious” world-view common to all Greeks, as has been the effort of scholars as prominent as M. P. Nilsson (1955), U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf (1959) and W. Jaeger (1954-5), we should rather appreciate the agnostic attitude which seems to be characteristic of the ancient Greeks.10 Given this agnostic attitude, it should not surprise us that narratives associated with the names of Homer and Orpheus were circulated at the same time. At a minimum, we owe much of our knowledge about the content of Orphic themes to Onomacritus, one of the four members of the Pisistratean editorial board.Orphism - comprising the “books” and rites of purification undertaken in the name of Orpheus, Musaeus and Linus (the two latter being successors to Orpheus) - was also intimately associated, though not identical, with myths and rites concerning Bacchus, more commonly known as Dionysus (see, for instance, Guettel Cole 1993). Among other things, Dionysus, a god who ambiguously incorporates opposites such as masculine/feminine, life/death, salvation/destruction and youth/adulthood, played a very important role in the Orphic cosmogonies as “the first-born”, Protogonos, or the god of light and primordial appearance, Phanes. He even seemed to be interchangeable with Zeus, his father, in so far as they were, in some contexts, presented as two aspects, father and son, of the same divine being.11 Similarly, Demeter and her daughter (kore) were presented as the two principal aspects of the “female being” (Kerenyi 1967).
Dionysus was also known as the “redeemer” (lysios) and together with Kore - in her chthonian appearance as Persephone - he played a leading role in Orphic salvation (cf. Albinus 2000: 141-52). On the whole, Orphic discourse, or rather the soteriological complex of initiation and cosmogony authorized by the name of Orpheus, can be seen as the major counterweight to the poetic authority of Homer and Hesiod, the difference being differing eschatological expectations. Whereas the fate of the Homeric individual generally amounted to an epic representation at best, that is, the “reputation” (kleos) of song, the fate of the initiated Orphic individual was the prospect of apotheosis.