The Religious Thought of the Greeks, from Homer to the Triumph of Christianity

by Clifford Herschel Moore

Dionysus came also as god of wine. In the revival and elevation of the man, which the moderate use of wine gives, the Greek saw a divine mystery. Of course this use of wine is exactly parallel to the use of hashish and other narcotics for religious ends, and the ecstasy produced by music and the dance is familiar in the history of religion as a means to put individuals or whole companies into direct communication with the spirits or into union with a god.

Now it will readily be seen that this idea that the soul can be separated from the body and united with the god implies two things: first, a belief in a difference between soul and body which sets them off against each other, and secondly, a belief in the divine nature of the human soul. The former clearly established for the first time in Greek thought the concept of the dual ego, the double self, the significance of which we can hardly overestimate. We shall be concerned with it throughout the entire course of our considerations. The second made it easy for men to explain the source and destiny of the soul and to point out the means by which the soul must be set free to seek its natural destiny. The possibility that the soul, escaping from the body during the Dionysiac frenzy, might unite itself with god, might indeed become a god, so that the orgiastic devotee was given the divine name βάκχος—this showed the way by which man could secure immortality. He must loose his divine soul from the body that it might ultimately enjoy its divine life unhampered by earthly bonds and be forever with god.

According to the Dionysiac myth, which naturally varies much in details, the god was pursued by the Titans, the warring powers opposed to Zeus; in his distress Dionysus changed himself into various forms, finally into that of a bull which was torn to pieces and devoured by the Titans. But Athena saved the heart and gave it to Zeus who swallowed it. Hence sprang the new Dionysus. The Titans were ultimately destroyed by the thunderbolt of Zeus and their ashes scattered to the winds. You will at once notice the parallelism between this myth of Dionysus and those of Osiris, Attis, and Adonis. These are all gods who die and live again, and so become gods of life and death, divinities through whom man gains assurance of his own immortality. You will also notice in this myth of Dionysus how most ancient and crudest elements are united with a rather advanced attempt to wrestle with the problems of the world, and particularly with the problem of evil. Over against the beneficent divinity, or divinities, are set the Titans, powers of ill.

The myth became the basis of the spiritual belief and of the mystic ceremonial, and was made the center of that movement which we call Orphism. Who the founder, Orpheus, was, we cannot say. The ancients knew him as a Thracian, a magical musician, and also as a priest of Dionysus. In the popular tradition the musician overshadowed the priest. Yet he was regarded as the founder of the Bacchic or Dionysiac rites. The truth we can never know; but thus much is certain, that in the sixth century, possibly because of a second wave of Dionysiac religion, a movement appeared in which the religion of Dionysus was spiritualized and ennobled, and in which consecration, ceremonial holiness in this life, became the chief concern as the means of securing that immortality which would follow. The movement, however, which may have been stimulated by a feeling of dissatisfaction with the traditional religion, was only one prominent manifestation of the general mysticism which showed itself in many forms during the sixth century. Pythagoreanism was closely allied to it. Indeed some think Orphism only a collective name for the mysticism of the time.

Our information as to the beginning and earliest forms of Orphism is scanty and mostly late. But considering the influence which Orphic ideas had in the fifth century, for example on Pindar, Empedocles, and Plato, not to speak of the latter Neoplatonists, we are justified in regarding the sect as of great significance. And we have a warrant for attributing to the sixth century doctrines which are consistently set forth by our witnesses, especially by Empedocles and Plato, so that with due caution we may use also the fragmentary Orphic literature with some confidence.

We do not know where Orphism started. In Greece proper, Delphi, Thebes, and Athens were prominent centers; in greater Greece, Croton in southern Italy, Camarina and Syracuse in Sicily. Some would regard southern Italy, and specifically the city of Croton, as the home of the movement; possibly they are correct, for tradition told of three great Orphics at the court of Pisistratus. They were Zopyrus of Heraclea, Orpheus of Croton, and Onomacritus, who formed part of the commission which is said to have arranged the Homeric poems at the orders of the Athenian tyrant. Whatever the truth of the tradition in detail is, it is significant that two of the three came from southern Italy; and the name of one of the commission, Orpheus, marks him as a devotee. Yet Athens became the literary center, if I may use the term, for the diffusion of Orphism.

The Orphic religion was distinguished from the popular religions by having a body of belief and a method of life. Undoubtedly the beliefs of the sect were enlarged and modified from age to age; but the Orphics had a unity which is remotely comparable to that of Christian churches. Of the organization of the brotherhoods we know little, but probably they were loosely bound together in a manner similar to those of the religious associations known to us from later times. Nor can we tell whether the Orphics were numerous. Probably they were not; but in any case their mysteries and teachings were important and influential; they introduced new ideas which were destined to produce profound changes in Greek religious thought.

With the varied details of the grotesque Orphic theogonies we are not now concerned. They were similar to those of Hesiod and others in their main lines, but they owe their importance for us now to the fact that they exhibit a pantheism which is opposed to the common polytheistic theology of the time; they endeavor to show that deity is one and universal under whatever form or appearance. To this universal divinity they give the name now of Zeus, now of Dionysus, the greatest of the children of Zeus; at times he is called also Zagreus. Certain Orphic verses clearly express this pantheistic thought: “One Zeus, one Hades, one Sun, one Dionysus, one god in all.”[74] And again: “Zeus was the first, Zeus of the flashing lightning bolt the last; Zeus the head, Zeus the middle; from Zeus have all things been made. Zeus was the foundation of the earth and of the starry heaven; Zeus was male, Zeus was the bride immortal; Zeus the breath of all things, Zeus the rush of the flame unwearied; Zeus the source of the sea, Zeus the sun and the moon; Zeus the king, Zeus of the flashing lightning the beginning of all things. For he concealed all and again brought them forth from his sacred heart to the glad light, working wondrous things.”[75]

You will remember that in the myth of the rending of Dionysus by the Titans, these powers of evil were burned to ashes by the thunderbolt of Zeus. According to one version of the story man is formed from these ashes, which contain the element of the divine, taken in by the Titans when they devoured the god. Thus man is of a two-fold nature, his soul divine, Dionysiac, his body evil, Titanic. On an Orphic tablet found in a grave in southern Italy the soul declares: “I am a child of earth and the starry heaven, but my race is from heaven. This ye know yourselves.” Here we have a complete expression of man’s duality: his body is of the earth, but his soul is of celestial origin. The descent of the soul was due to sin; wind-borne—as Empedocles says of himself, “an exile from god and a wanderer,”[76] it entered into the body, in which prison it was condemned to live until such time as it might be delivered. Clement of Alexandria, quoting the Pythagorean Philolaus of the fifth century b.c., reports: “The ancient theologians and seers bear witness that for a punishment the soul is yoked with the body and buried in it as in a tomb.”[77] This figure of the body as the prison-house or the tomb of the soul was used by Plato, as we shall have occasion to see in a later lecture.

Man’s hope, therefore, according to the Orphic, lies in deliverance from his body, the Titan element of his nature, that the Dionysiac part, his soul, may be free and untrammelled. Yet one might not of his own motion cast off his body by a physical act, for a round is prescribed by necessity.