Poetry, transported with the seat of religion from the mountains of Thrace to those of Phocis, lost there, as did religion, its primitive unity. Not only did each sovereign pontiff use it to spread his dogmas, but the opposed sects born of the rending of the cult, vying with each other, took possession of it. These sects, quite numerous, personified by the allegorical genius which presided over poetry, and which, as I have said, constituted its essence, were confused with the mind which animated them and were considered as a particular being. Thence, so many of the demi-gods, and the celebrated heroes, from whom the Greek tribes pretended to have descended; thence, so many of the famous poets to whom were attributed a mass of works that emanated from the same sanctuary, or were composed for the support of the same doctrine. For it is well to remember that the allegorical history of these remote times, written in a different spirit from the positive history which has succeeded it, resembled it in no way, and that it is in having confused them that so many grave errors have arisen. It is a very important observation that I again make here. This history, confided to the memory of men or preserved among the sacerdotal archives of the temples in detached fragments of poetry, considered things only from the moral side, was never occupied with individuals, but saw only the masses; that is to say, peoples, corporations, sects, doctrines, even arts and sciences, as so many particular beings that it designated by a generic name. It is not that these masses were unable to have a chief to direct their movements, but this chief, regarded as the instrument of a certain mind, was neglected by history which attached itself to the mind only. One chief succeeded another without allegorical history making the least mention of it. The adventures of all were accumulated upon the head of one alone. It was the moral thing whose course was examined, whose birth, progress, or downfall was described. The succession of things replaced that of individuals. Positive history, which ours has become, follows a method entirely different. The individuals are everything for it: it notes with scrupulous exactitude dates and facts which the other scorns. I do not pronounce upon their common merit. The moderns would mock that allegorical manner of the ancients, if they could believe it possible, as I am persuaded the ancients would have mocked the method of the moderns, had they been able to foresee its possibility in the future. How approve of what is unknown? Man approves of only what he likes; he always believes he knows all that he ought to like.
I can say, after having repeated this observation, that the poet Linus, who is regarded as the author of all the melancholy chants of the ancient world, represents nothing less than lunar poetry detached from the doctrine of Œtolinos, of which I have spoken, and considered as schismatic by the Thracians; I can also say, that the poet Amphion, whose chants were, on the contrary, so powerful and so virile, typifies the orthodox solar poetry, opposed by these same Thracians; whereas the prophet Thamyris, who, it is said, celebrated in such stately verse the creation of the world and the war of the Titans,[34] represents quite plainly the universal doctrine of Olen, re-established by his followers. The name of Amphion signifies the orthodox or national voice of Greece; that of Thamyris, the twin lights of the gods.[35] One feels, accordingly, that the evils which came to Linus and to Thamyris, one of whom was killed by Hercules,[36] and the other deprived of sight by the Muses,[37] are, in reality, only some sort of criticism or unfortunate incident sustained by the doctrines which they represented, on account of the opposition of the Thracians. What I have said concerning Linus, Amphion, and Thamyris, can be applied to the greater part of the poets who preceded Homer, and Fabricius names seventy of these[38]; one could also extend it to Orpheus, but only on a certain side; for although it may be very true, that no positive detail is possessed regarding the character of the celebrated man, founder or propagator of the doctrine which has borne this name; although it may be very true, that all that concerns his birth, his life, and his death is completely unknown, it is none the less certain that this man has existed, that he has been actually the head of a very extended sect, and that the allegorical fables which remain to us on this subject depict, more particularly than they have done with any other, the course of his thoughts and the success of his institutions.
Orpheus belongs, on the one side, to anterior times, and on the other, to times merely ancient. The epoch when he appeared is the line of demarcation between pure allegory and mixed allegory, the intelligible and the sentient. He taught how to ally the rational faculty with the imaginative faculty. The science which was a long time after called philosophy, originated with him. He laid its first basis.
One should guard against believing, following in the footsteps of certain historians deceived by the meaning of allegorical fables, that when Orpheus appeared, Greece, still barbarous, offered only the traces of a civilization hardly outlined, or that the ferocious animals, tamed by the charm of his poetry, should represent, in effect, the inhabitants of this beautiful country. Men capable of receiving a cult so brilliant as that of Orpheus, a doctrine so pure, and mysteries so profound; men who possessed a language so formed, so noble, so harmonious as that which served that inspired man to compose his hymns, were far from being ignorant and savage to this degree. It is not true, as has been said and repeated without examination, that poetry had its birth in the forests, in regions rough and wild, nor above all, that it may be the concomitant of the infancy of the nations and the first stammerings of the human mind. Poetry, on the contrary, having attained its perfection, indicates always a long existence among the peoples, a civilization very advanced and all the splendour of a virile age. The sanctuary of the temple is its true cradle. Glance over the savage world and see if the Iroquois or the Samoyeds have a poetry. Have the peoples who were found in their infancy in the isles of the Pacific shown you hymns like those of Orpheus, epic monuments like the poems of Homer? Is it not known that the Tartars who have subjugated Asia, those proud Manchus who today reign over China, have never been able to derive from their language, rebellious to all kinds of melody and rhythm, a single verse,[39] although since their conquests they have felt and appreciated the charms of this art?[40]
Bears and lions, tamed and brought nearer together by Orphic poetry, have no reference to men, but to things: they are the symbols of rival sects which, imbibing their hatred at the very foot of the altars, diffused it over all that surrounded them and filled Greece with troubles.
For a long time this country was a prey to the double scourge of religious and political anarchy. In detaching herself from the cult of the metropolis, she also detached herself from its government. Once a colony of the Phœnicians, she had thrown off their yoke, not however spontaneously and (en masse), but gradually, over and over again; so that there were twenty rival temples, twenty rival cities, twenty petty peoples divided by rite, by civil interest, and by the ambition of the priests and princes who governed them. The Thracians, remaining faithful to the ancient laws, were styled superstitious or enslaved, whereas the innovators and the insurgents were considered, by the Thracians and often by themselves, schismatics and rebels. Phœnicia had vainly wished to oppose this general desertion. Asia came to experience the most terrible shocks. India, which had long held the sceptre there, was buried for fifteen hundred years in her Kali-youg, or her age of darkness, and offered only the shadow of her ancient splendour.[41] For fifteen centuries she had lost her unity by the extinction of her imperial dynasties. Many rival kingdoms were formed,[42] whose constant quarrels had left them neither the leisure nor the possibility of watching over and supporting their colonies from afar. The gradual lowering of the Mediterranean, and the alluvial deposit of the shores of Egypt raising the Isthmus of Suez,[43] had cut off all communication between this sea and the Red Sea, and, by barriers difficult to surmount, separated the primitive Phœnicians, established upon the shores of the Indian Ocean, from those of Palestine.[44] The meridional Arabs were separated from the septentrional, and both had broken with the Indians to whom they had formerly belonged.[45] Tibet had adopted a particular cult and form of government.[46] Persia had been subject to the empire of the Assyrians.[47] At last the political ties which united all these states, and which once formed only a vast group under the domination of the Indian monarchs, had become relaxed or broken on all sides. Egypt, long subject to the Philistines, known under the name of Shepherds, came at length to drive them out, and emerging from her lethargy prepared herself to seize the influence which Asia had allowed to escape.[48] Already the most warlike of her kings, Sethos, had extended his empire over both Libya and Arabia; Phœnicia and Assyria had been subjugated; he had entered triumphant into Babylon and was seated upon the throne of Belus.[49] He would not have hesitated to attempt the conquest of Greece, if he had been able as easily to lead his army there; but it was difficult for him to create a marine force, and above all to overcome the invincible repugnance that the Egyptians had for the sea.[50] Obliged to employ the Phœnicians, his ancient enemies, he was able to draw from them only mediocre service. In spite of these obstacles and the stubborn resistance of the Greeks, he succeeded nevertheless in making some conquests and forming some partial settlements. Athens, so celebrated later, was one of the principal ones.[51]
These events, these revolutions, calamitous in appearance, were in reality to produce great benefits. Greece, already impregnated with the learning of the Phœnicians, which she had obtained and elaborated, afterward received that of the Egyptians and elaborated it still further. A man born in the heart of Thrace, but carried in his childhood into Egypt through the desire for knowledge,[52] returned to his country with one of the Egyptian colonies, to kindle there the new light. He was initiated into all the mysteries of religion and science: he surpassed, said Pausanias, all those who had preceded him, by the beauty of his verse, the sublimity of his chants, and the profoundness of his knowledge in the art of healing and of appeasing the gods.[53] This was Orpheus: he took this name from that of his doctrine[54] which aimed to cure and to save by knowledge.
I should greatly overstep the limits that I have prescribed for this discourse if I should recall in detail all that Greece owed to this celebrated man. The mythological tradition has consecrated in a brilliant allegory the efforts which he made to restore to men the truth which they had lost. His love for Eurydice, so much sung by the poets, is but the symbol of the divine science for which he longed.[55] The name of this mysterious spouse, whom he vainly wished to return to the light, signified only the doctrine of the true science, the teaching of what is beautiful and veritable, by which he tried to enrich the earth. But man cannot look upon the face of truth before attaining the intellectual light, without losing it; if he dare to contemplate it in the darkness of his reason, it vanishes. This is what the fable, which everyone knows, of Eurydice, found and lost, signifies.
Orpheus, who felt by his own experience, perhaps, the great disadvantage that he had here, of presenting the truth to men before they might be in condition to receive it, instituted the divine mysteries; an admirable school where the initiate, conducted from one degree to another, slowly prepared and tried, received the share of light in proportion to the strength of his intelligence, and gently enlightened, without risk of being dazzled, attained to virtue, wisdom, and truth. There has been but one opinion in antiquity concerning the utility of the mysteries, before dissolution had stained its precincts and corrupted its aim. All the sages, even Socrates, have praised this institution,[56] the honour of which has been constantly attributed to Orpheus.[57] It is not improbable that this sage had found the model in Egypt and that he himself had been initiated, as Moses[58] and Pythagoras[59] had been before and after him; but in this case an imitation was equivalent to a creation.
I have said that after the appearance of Orpheus, poetry had lost its unity: as divided as the cult, it had sustained its vicissitudes. Entirely theosophical in its principle, and calm as the Divinity which inspired it, it had taken in the midst of the opposed sects a passionate character which it had not had previously. The priests, who used it to uphold their opinions, had found, instead of the real inspiration, that sort of physical exaltation which results from the fire of passions, whose movement and fleeting splendour entrance the vulgar. Vying with each other they had brought forth a mass of theological systems, had multiplied the allegorical fables concerning the universe, and had drowned, as it were, the unity of the Divinity in the vain and minute distinction of its infinite faculties; and as each composed in his own dialect and in pursuance of his own caprice, each devised unceasingly new names for the same beings, according as they believed they caught a glimpse of a certain new virtue in these beings that another had not expressed, it came to pass that not only were the gods multiplied by the distinction of their faculties, but still more by the diversity of names employed in expressing them. Very soon there was not a city nor a town in Greece, that did not have, or at least believed that it had, its own particular god. If one had carefully examined this prodigious number of divinities, one would have clearly seen that they could be reduced, by elimination, to a small number and would finally end by being mingled in a sole Universal Being; but that was very difficult for people, flattered, moreover, by a system which compared the condition of the gods with theirs, and offered them thus, protectors and patrons so much the more accessible as they were less occupied and less powerful.[60] Vainly, therefore, the Egyptian colony established at Athens presented to the adoration of this people imbued with the prejudice of polytheism, the sovereign of the gods under the title of the Most-High[61]; the veneration of this people was turned wholly towards Minerva, who became its patron under the name of Athena,[62] as Juno was that of Argos,[63] Ceres, that of Eleusis, Phigalia, Methydrium,[64] etc.