This gathering-together in the name of Orpheus for the purpose of offering a special worship to Dionysos was, then, the work of sects who, in private association, practised a cult which the public and official worship of the state either did not know of or disdained. There were many such associations, and of very varied character, which kept themselves aloof from the organized religion of the community, and were tolerated by the state.[2] As a rule, they were “foreign gods”[3] who were thus worshipped; and generally by foreigners who thus kept up the special worship of their own homes, though they did not always exclude natives of their adopted country. Now, Dionysos, the god of the Orphic sects, had for a long time ceased to be a foreigner in Greek countries; since his arrival from Thrace he had been refined and matured under the humanizing sun of Greece, until he had become a Greek god, and a worthy associate of the Greek Olympos. It is possible, however, that in this process, the old Thracian god may have seemed to his original worshippers to have lost his real [336] character, and they may on that account have joined together to offer, in separation from the official worship, a special cult in which all the old ideas of the national religion should be preserved unaltered. A secondary wave of influence thus broke upon the long-since-Hellenized god, the Thracian Dionysos in Greece, and this wave the official worship either had not the power or lacked the will to assimilate. It was therefore left to special sects who honoured the god after their own private laws. Whether indeed they were Thracians who, as in the similar case of the unmodified worship of Bendis,[4] or Kotytto, thus reinstituted their ancient and national worship of Dionysos in Greek countries, we cannot with certainty tell; but this special cult would certainly not have achieved the importance it did in Greek life if it had not been joined by Greek adherents brought up in the native conceptions of Greek piety, who under the name of “Orphics” once more adapted the Thracian god to Greek modes of thought—though this new adaptation differed from the previous assimilation of the god by the official worship of the state. We have no reason for believing that Orphic sects were formed in Greek states before the second half of the sixth century,[5] that critical age of transition when in so many places primitive and mythological modes of thought were developing into a theosophy, which in its turn was making an effort to become a philosophy. The Orphic religious poetry is itself clearly marked by this effort—for in Orphism it never became more than an effort and never succeeded in reaching its goal.

The exact point of origin of this combined movement of religion and theosophy, the various steps and manner of its development remain hidden from us. Athens was a centre of Orphism; it does not therefore follow that Orphism had its origin there, any more than had the multifarious tendencies and activities in art, poetry, and science that at about the same period flowed together, and as though driven by an unseen intellectual current, found their meeting place at Athens. Onomakritos, we are told, the giver of oracles in the court of Peisistratos “founded the secret worship of Dionysos”.[6] This appears to refer to the first founding of an Orphic sect at Athens; and we meet with the name of Onomakritos among the authors of Orphic poems. But the real authorship of these poems is far more often ascribed to certain men of Southern Italy and Sicily, who can be more or less clearly connected[7] with the Pythagorean societies which were flourishing in those districts about the last decades of the sixth and the first of the fifth centuries. [337]

It seems certain that in Southern Italy at that time, Orphic societies were already in existence—for whom else can these writers have intended their “Orphic” poems? In any case we must take it as certain that the correspondence of Orphic and Pythagorean doctrine on the subject of the soul is not purely accidental. Did Pythagoras when he came to Italy (about 532) find Orphic societies already settled in Kroton and Metapontum, and did he associate himself with their ideas? Or did the “Orphic” sectaries (as Herodotos imagined[8]) owe their inspiration to Pythagoras and his disciples? The various cross-currents of reciprocal influence can no longer be disentangled by us, but if the Pythagoreans were the sole creditors in the bargain we should undoubtedly find the whole body of Orphic doctrine thoroughly permeated with conceptions that belong exclusively to the Pythagorean school. In the wreckage of the Orphic poems, however, except for a few negligible traces of the Pythagorean mystic theory of numbers,[9] we find nothing that must necessarily have been derived by the Orphics from Pythagorean sources.[10] Least of all did they need to derive the doctrine of the migration of souls and its application from this source. It is possible, therefore, that it was the independently developed Orphic doctrine which exerted an influence upon Pythogoras and his adherents in Southern Italy; just as it was a ready-made Orphic teaching (and that, too, perhaps, brought from Southern Italy) with which Onomakritos, the founder of the Orphic sects at Athens, associated himself—about the same time as Pythagoras’ similar action in Kroton. It is hardly possible to interpret in any other way the various relations of the Orphics with each other when we learn that at the court of the Peisistratids, in addition to Onomakritos, two other men who had arrived from Southern Italy were active and were counted among the earliest writers of Orphic poems.[11]

§ 2

The Orphics wherever we meet with them in Greek countries always appear as members of a private cult-society who are held together by a specially organized and individual mode of worship. The old Thracian worship of Dionysos in its straining after the infinite conducted its revels under the open sky of night, seeking out deserted mountain-sides and forests where it was farthest from civilization and closest to unspoiled and untrammelled nature. How this cult may have accommodated itself to the narrow limitations of ordinary [338] city-life, it is hard to imagine;[12] though it is natural to suppose that much of the extravagance that was literal and actual enough in the old northern festival of night was represented in the milder worship of Greece by mere symbol. We have less difficulty in discovering the side of their religious activity which the Orphics, apart from the private worship of the conventicle, revealed to the outer world of the profane. Orpheus himself in the tradition had been not merely the inspired singer but the seer, the magically endowed physician and purification-priest as well,[13] and the Orphics, as his followers, were active, too, in all these directions.[14] In the composition of Greek Orphism the kathartic ideas which had been evolved on Greek soil were combined in a not unnatural alliance with the old Thracian worship of Dionysos. The Orphic priests of purification were preferred to others of their kind by many religious people.[15] But among the inner circles of Orphism the sacerdotal activities of purification and the removal of daimonic hindrances, which were by no means given up, tended rather to produce deeper and broader ideas of purity and of release from the earthly and the transitory. In some such way was evolved that asceticism which in close combination with the Thracian worship of Dionysos gave the peculiar tone to the faith and temperament of the sectaries and gave to their lives their special direction.

The Orphic sect had a fixed and definite set of doctrines; this alone sufficed to distinguish it both from the official worships of the state, and from all other cult-associations of the time. The reduction of belief to distinct doctrinal formulæ may have done more than anything else to make Orphism a society of believers—none of the other theologi of the time, Epimenides, Pherekydes, etc., accomplished as much. Without its fundamental religious doctrine Orphism in Greece is inconceivable; according to Aristotle the “doctrines” of Orpheus were put into poetical form by the founder of the Orphic sect in Athens, Onomakritos.[16] The uncertain accounts given us by the later authorities do not allow us to make out quite clearly[17] what was the extent of Onomakritos’ work in the formation or collection of Orphic doctrinal poetry. What is important is the fact that he is distinctly named as the author of the poem called “Initiations”.[18] This poem must have been one of the basic, and in the strictest sense “religious”, writings of the sect; a poem of this character may very well have had for its central incident the dismemberment of the god at the hands of the Titans—a story which Onomakritos is said to have put into verse.[19] [339]

The religious beliefs and worship of the sect were founded upon the detailed instructions of certain very numerous writings dealing with matters of ritual and theology. These claimed the authority of religious inspiration,[20] and were as a whole supposed to be the work of the primitive Thracian bard, Orpheus, himself. The anonymity which concealed the identity of the real authors of these poems was not, however, very thoroughly preserved; even towards the end of the fourth century there were those who claimed to be able to give with certainty the names of the original authors of the various poems. Strictly canonical authority, such as would at once have reduced to silence every conflicting view or statement, never seems to have belonged to any of these writings. In particular, there were several “Theogonies”[21]—poems which attempted to give expression to the fundamental ideas of Orphic speculation on religious subjects—and in spite of much harmony in general effect they differed considerably from each other in particular mode of expression. They represented ever-renewed and increasingly elaborate attempts to construct a connected doctrinal system for Orphism. With unmistakable allusion to the oldest Greek theological system—that which had been committed to writing in the Hesiodic poem—these Orphic Theogonies described the origin and development of the world from obscure primordial impulses to the clear and distinct variety-in-unity of the organized kosmos, and it described it as the history of a long series of divine powers and figures which issue from each other (each new one overcoming the last) and succeed each other in the task of building and organizing the world until they have absorbed the whole universe into themselves in order to bring it forth anew, animated with one spirit and, with all its infinite variety, a unity. These gods are certainly no longer deities of the familiar Greek type. Not merely the new gods evolved by the creative fancy of Orphism—creatures which had almost entirely lost all distinct and sensible outline under the accumulation of symbolical meaning—but even the figures actually borrowed from the Greek world of divinities are turned into little more than mere personified abstractions. Who would recognize the Zeus of Homer in the Orphic Zeus who after he has devoured the World-God and “taken unto himself the power of Erikapaios”,[22] has become himself the Universe and the Whole? “Zeus the Beginning, Zeus the Middle, in Zeus all things are completed.”[23] The concept here so stretches the personality that it threatens to break it down altogether; the outlines of the individual figures are [340] lost and are merged into an intentional “confusion of deities”.[24]

Still, the mythical envelope was never quite given up; these poets could not do without it altogether. Their gods did indeed strive to become pure abstractions but they were never quite successful in throwing off all traces of individuality and the limitations of form and matter: the concept never quite broke through the veil of mythology. The poets of the Orphic Theogonies vied with one another in their attempts to make the half-seen and half-conceived accessible alike to the imagination and the reason; and in succession gave varying expression to the same fundamental conceptions until finality was reached as it seems in a poem whose contents are better known to us than the others from quotations made from it by Neoplatonic writers—the Theogonical poem of the four-and-twenty Rhapsodies. Into this poem was poured all the traditional material of mythological and symbolical doctrine, and in it such doctrine achieved its final expression.[25]

§ 3

This combination of religion and quasi-philosophical speculation was a distinguishing feature of the Orphics and of Orphic literature. Religion only entered into their Theogonical poetry in so far as the ethical personalities of the divinities therein described had not entirely faded away into transparent allegories.[26] It was abstract speculation alone which really prevailed there, little respect being paid to religion; and as a result a much greater licence was given to speculative construction.