This abstract speculation, however, reached its climax in a religious narrative of the first importance for the beliefs and cult of the sect. At the end of the series of genealogically connected deities came the son of Zeus and Persephone, Dionysos, who was also given the name of the underworld deity Zagreus.[27] To him, even in infancy, was entrusted the rule of the world by Zeus. But the wicked Titans, urged on by Hera, approached him by a stratagem. They were the enemies of Zeus, and had already been overthrown by Ouranos,[28] but had, it seems, been let loose again by Zeus from Tartaros. They made Dionysos trust them by giving him presents, and while he was looking at his own image in a mirror[29] that they had given him, they fell upon him. He tried to escape them by repeated transformations of shape; finally, in the form of a bull,[30] he was at last overcome and his body torn to pieces which his savage foes thereupon devoured. The heart alone [341] was rescued by Athene, and she brought it to Zeus who swallowed it. From Zeus there sprang the “new Dionysos”, the son of Zeus and Semele, in whom Zagreus came to life again.
The myth of the dismemberment of Zagreus by the Titans was already put into verse by Onomakritos;[31] it continued to be the culminating point of the doctrinal poetry of the Orphics. It occurred not only in the Rhapsodies,[32] but in other versions of the Orphic legend composed in complete independence of these.[33] It is a religious myth in the stricter sense; its ætioloqical character is most marked;[34] its purpose is to explain the religious implication of the ritual dismemberment of the bull-god at the Bacchic nocturnal festivals, and to derive that feature from the legendary sufferings of Dionysos-Zagreus.
But though the legend thus has its roots in the primitive sacrificial ritual of ancient Thrace,[35] in its extended form it belongs entirely to the region of Hellenic thought; and in this combination of the two elements it becomes truly Orphic. The wicked Titans belong entirely to strictly Greek mythology.[36] In this case, as the murderers of the god, they represent the primeval power of evil.[37] They dismember the One into Many parts; by their impiety the One divine being is dispersed into the multiplicity of the things of this world.[38] It is reborn as One in the new Dionysos sprung from Zeus. The Titans—so the legend goes on to relate—who had devoured the limbs of the god were destroyed by Zeus with his lightning flash. From their ashes sprang the race of men in whom, in conformity with their origin, the good derived from Dionysos-Zagreus is mixed with a wicked Titanic element.[39]
With the rule of the new-born Dionysos and the origin of mankind, the series of mythological events in the Orphic poetry came to an end.[40] With the entry of mankind into Creation[41] the existing period of the world begins; the period of world-revolutions is over. The poems now turn to the subject of man and the revelation of his fate, his duty and his purpose in the world.
§ 4
The mixture of the elements that make up the totality of his being in itself prescribes for man the direction that his effort shall take. He must free himself from the Titanic element and, thus purified, return to the god, a fragment of whom is living in him.[42] The distinction between the Titanic and Dionysiac elements in man is an allegorical expression of the popular [342] distinction between body and soul; it also corresponds to a profoundly felt estimate of the relative value of these two sides of man’s being. According to Orphic doctrine man’s duty is to free himself from the chains of the body in which the soul lies fast bound like the prisoner in his cell.[43] The soul has a long way, however, to go before it can find its freedom; it may not by an act of violence tear its bonds asunder for itself.[44] The death of the body only frees it for a short while; for the soul must once more suffer imprisonment in a body. After leaving its old body, it flutters free in the wind, but a breath of air sends it into a new body again.[45] So it continues its journey, perpetually alternating between an unfettered separate existence, and an ever-renewed incarnation—traversing the great “Circle of Necessity” in which it becomes the life-companion of many bodies both of men and beasts. Thus, the “Wheel of Birth”[46] seems to return ever upon itself in hopeless repetition: in Orphic poetry (and there perhaps for the first time) occurs the despairing thought of the exact repetition of the past; events which have already been lived through once returning again with the convergence of the same attendant circumstances.[47] Thus, Nature, ever reverting to its own beginnings, draws men with it in its senseless revolution round itself.
But the soul has a way open for escape from this perpetual recurrence of all things that threatens to close in upon it; it may hope “to escape from the circle and have a respite from misery”.[48] It is formed for blessed freedom, and can at last detach itself from the condition of being it has to endure upon earth—a condition unworthy of it. A “release” is possible; but man in his blindness and thoughtlessness cannot help himself, cannot even, when salvation is at hand, turn himself towards it.[49]
Salvation comes from Orpheus and his Bacchic mysteries; Dionysos himself will loose his worshipper from Evil and the unending way of misery. Not his own power, but the grace of the “releasing gods” is to be the cause of man’s liberation.[50] The self-reliance of the older Greece is breaking down; in humility of heart the pious man looks elsewhere for help; he needs the revelation and mediation of “Orpheus the Ruler”[51] in order to find the way of salvation; he must follow his ordinances of salvation with perfect obedience if he is to continue in that way.
It is not only the sacred mysteries themselves, in the form in which Orpheus has ordained them, which prepare for the release; a complete “Orphic life”[52] must be developed out [343] of them. Asceticism is the prime condition of the pious life. This does not mean the practice of the respectable bourgeois virtues, nor the discipline and moral reformation of a man’s character; the height of morality is in this case the turning again towards god,[53] and the turning away not merely from the weaknesses and errors of earthly being but from the whole of earthly life itself; renunciation of all that ties man to mortality and the life of the body. The fierce determination with which the Indian penitent tears away his will from life, to which every organ in his body clings desperately—for this, indeed, there was no place among the Greeks, the lovers of life—not even among the world-denying ascetics. Abstention from the eating of flesh was the strongest and most striking species of self-denial practised by the Orphic ascetics.[54] Apart from this, they kept themselves in all essentials uncontaminated by certain things and situations which rather suggested to a religious symbolism than actually indicated in themselves attachment to the world of death and transitoriness. The long-standing ordinances of the priestly ritual of purification were taken up and added to;[55] but they were also raised to a higher plane. They are no longer intended to free men from the effects of daimonic contacts; the soul itself is made pure by them[56]—pure from the body and its polluting association, pure from death and its loathsome mastery. In expiation of “guilt” the soul is confined within the body,[57] the wages of sin is in this case that life upon earth which for the soul is death. The whole multiplicity of the universe, emptied of its innocent and natural sequence of cause and effect, appears to these zealots under the uniform aspect of a correlation between crime and punishment, between pollution and purification. Thus, mysticism enters into the closest alliance with kathartic practices. The soul which comes from the divine and strives to return thither, has no other purpose to fulfil upon earth (and therefore no other moral law to obey); it must be free from life itself and be pure from all that is earthly.
The Orphics, moreover, were the only people who could venture among themselves or before strangers to greet each other with the special name of the “Pure”.[58] The first reward of his piety was received by the initiate of the Orphic mysteries in that intermediate region whither men must go after their earthly death. When a man dies, Hermes leads the “deathless soul” into the underworld.[59] Special poems of the Orphic community announced the terrors and delights of the underworld kingdom.[60] What the Orphic [344] mystery-priests vouchsafed to their public upon these hidden matters—outdoing the promises made in the Eleusinian mysteries in coarse appeal to the senses—may have been the most popular, but was certainly not the most original feature of Orphic teaching.[61] In Hades a judgment awaited the soul—it was no instinctive fancy of the people, but the “sacred doctrine”[62] of these sectaries which first introduced and elaborated the idea of compensatory justice in the world of the dead. The impious suffer punishment and purgation in the depths of Tartaros;[63] those who have not been made pure by the Orphic mysteries lie in the miry Pool;[64] “dreadful things[65] await” the disdainer of the sacred worship. By a conception that is quite unique in ancient religion, participation in the Orphic ceremonial enables the descendant to obtain from the gods “pardon and purification” for his departed ancestors who may be paying the penalty in the next world for the misdeeds of the past.[66] But for the initiate of the Orphic mysteries himself who has not merely borne the narthex but has been a true Bakchos,[67] his reward is that he shall obtain a “milder fate” in the kingdom of the underworld deities whom he has revered on earth, and dwell “in the fair meadows of deep-running Acheron”.[68] The blessed home of refuge no longer lies like the Homeric Elysium upon earth, but below in the world of the Souls, for only the released soul reaches there. There, the initiated and purified will live in communion with the gods of the nether world[69]—we feel that we are listening to Thracian and not Greek conceptions of the ideal when we hear of the “Banquet of the Pure” and the uninterrupted intoxication which they enjoy there.[70]