But the depths restore the soul at last to the light, for its lasting habitation is not below; it stays there only for the interval which separates death from its next rebirth. For the reprobate this is a time of punishment and purgation—the Orphics could not distress their hearers with the awful and intolerable idea of the perpetual punishment of the damned in Hell; many times over the soul rises again to the light and in continually renewed bodies fulfils the cycle of births. For the deeds of its past life it is recompensed in the next life that it lives, and each man must now suffer exactly what he has done to another.[71] So he pays the penalty for ancient guilt: the “thrice-ancient law”—what thou hast done thou shalt suffer—is thus fulfilled for him in far livelier fashion than it could be in any torments of the shadow-world. So surely also shall the pure be rewarded in future lives by ever-increasing happiness. How exactly the Orphic fancy filled out the [345] individual gradations in the scale of happiness is beyond our knowledge.[72]
But the soul is immortal, and even sinners and the unredeemed cannot perish entirely. Hades and the life on earth holds them in their perpetual round, and this is their punishment. For the soul of the blessed, however, neither Hades nor earthly life can offer the highest crown of happiness. If it has been made pure and spotless in the Orphic mysteries and the Orphic manner of life, it is freed from the necessity of rebirth and withdrawn from the cycle of becoming and perishing. The “purification” ends in a final redemption. The soul mounts upwards from the base level of earthly life, not to become nothing in a final death, for it is now that it first truly begins to live; hitherto it has lain imprisoned in the body like the corpse in the grave.[73] It was death for the soul when it entered into life—now it is free and will no more suffer death; it lives for ever like God, for it comes from God and is itself divine. We do not know whether these theosophists went so far as to lose themselves in detailed picturing and contemplation of the blissful heights of the divine life.[74] In the remains of their poems we read of stars and the moon as other worlds,[75] perhaps as the dwelling-place of illuminated spirits.[76] But perhaps also the poet allowed the soul to flee from its last contact with mortality without himself desiring to follow it into the unbroken radiance of divinity that no earthly eye can abide.
§ 5
This, then, is the keystone that completes the arch of Orphic religion—the belief in the divine, immortal, and abiding life of the soul for whom union with the body and its desires is a thwarting hindrance and repression—a punishment from which its one desire, as soon as it is awakened to a full knowledge of itself is to escape in order that it may belong entirely to itself in full enjoyment of its powers. The contrast between these ideas and those of the Homeric world is complete; there, the soul released from the body was credited only with a poor, shadowy, half-conscious existence, so that an eternity of godlike being in the full enjoyment of life and its powers was only thinkable if the body and the soul, the twofold self of man, were translated in undissolved communion out of the world of mortality. The Orphic legends about the origin of the human race do not tell us the real source and derivation of the very different beliefs about the soul held by the Orphics; those legends only give expression to the [346] way—and only one of many ways[77]—in which the already established confidence in the divinity of the soul was deducible from what might be considered the oldest historical story of mankind, and how it might be brought into connexion with the Orphic legend of the gods. This persuasion, the belief that a god was living in man and a god that could not be free until he had broken through the prison of the body, was deeply rooted in the worship of Dionysos and the ecstasies belonging to that worship; we cannot be in much doubt that it was taken over ready-made, together with the “enthusiastic” cult of the divinity, and further developed by the Orphic believers. We have already met with traces of this belief even in the Thracian home of the Dionysiac cult; and in what we know of the Thracian form of the religion, traces are not absolutely wanting of an ascetic tendency of living that would easily and naturally arise from such a belief.[78] Even in those Northern countries we found the belief in the transmigration of souls bound up with the religion of Dionysos, and that belief, when it is naively held, has as its essential presupposition the idea that the soul, in order to have a complete life, and one that can survive bodily death, must of necessity be united to another body. Even this idea is, however, quite foreign to Orphism. The Orphics retained, in spite of everything, the doctrine of transmigration, and combined it in a strange alliance with their own belief in the divinity of the soul and its vocation to a life of perfect liberty. It is evidently improbable that they invented that doctrine entirely on their own account; the first principles of their creed by no means led necessarily to it. Herodotos[79] asserts distinctly that the doctrine of transmigration came to the Greeks from Egypt; and as a consequence, that it was from Egyptian tradition that the Orphics received it. This assertion has no more to recommend it than any other of Herodotos’ many pronouncements as to the Egyptian origin of Greek opinions and legends, and it is even less likely to mislead us in view of the fact that it is by no means certain and not even probable that a belief in transmigration ever really existed in Egypt.[80] This belief has arisen independently in many places on the surface of the earth, without the need of transmission from one place to another;[81] it might easily arise in a country where the belief prevailed that there existed only a limited number of souls of which each one—in order that no earthly body might be without its spiritual guest—must inhabit many perishable life-tenements, and not be bound to any one of them by a real inner necessity. This, [347] however, is a conception common to popular psychology all over the world.[82] If it is still considered more probable that the idea of a migration of the soul through many temporary bodies was not spontaneously evolved by the Orphics, but was received by them from the hands of others, there is yet no reason to reject the most natural assumption—namely, that this also was one of the beliefs that the Orphics took over with the cult of Dionysos from Thrace. Like other mystics,[83] the Orphics took over the belief in transmigration from popular tradition and turned it into a serviceable member of their own body of doctrine.[84] It served them by giving a striking and physical expression to their own conception of the inevitable connexion between guilt and penance, pollution and the refining power of punishment, piety and future blessedness upon which all their religious ethic depended. It was with an exactly similar purpose that they also retained and developed the old Greek idea of a place of the souls in the depths below the earth.
But if they believed in the transmigration of souls, that belief did not with them hold the highest place. There is a realm where the ever free and divine souls have their being, a realm to which the series of lives in earthly bodies is only transitional, and the way to it was pointed out by the saving doctrine of the Orphic mysteries, by the purification and salvation afforded by Orphic asceticism.
NOTES TO CHAPTER X
[1] . . . ὅς ποτε καὶ τελετὰς μυστηρίδας εὕρετο Βάκχου, AP. vii, 9, 5 (Damagetos). διὸ καὶ τὰς ὑπὸ τοῦ Διονύσου γενομένας τελετὰς Ὀρφικὰς προσαγορευθῆναι, D.S. 3, 65, 6. εὗρε δὲ Ὀρφεὺς τὰ Διονύσον μυστήρια [Apollod.] 1, 3, 2, 3. (Dionysum) Iove et Luna (natum), cui sacra Orphica putantur confici: Cic., ND. iii, 58; cf. Lyd., Mens. 4, 51, p. 107 W. Βακχικά an Orphic poem: Suid. Ὀρφεύς (cf. Hiller, Hermes, 21, 364 f.), whence fr. 3 (Abel); and perhaps frr. 152, 167, 169, 168. τὰ Ὀρφικὰ καλούμενα καὶ τὰ Βακχικά are already reckoned as a single class by Hdt. ii, 81.
[2] This is seen in the decree of the Council and people of Athens dealing with the ἔμποροι Κιτιεῖς and their temple of “Aphrodite”—CIA. ii, 168 (333/2 B.C.).—That on the other hand such foreign mystery-cults were not always so tolerated (or not without resistance) is shown by the case of Ninos: Dem., FL. (19) 281 with Sch.; cf. D.H., Dinarch. 11.
[3] θεοὶ ξενικοί, Hsch., see Lob., Agl. 627 ff. A nameless θεὸς ξενικός occurs in CIA. i, 273 f., 18.—The foundation of such θίασοι for foreign deities (or deities at least not officially worshipped by the city in question) is almost invariably the work of foreigners (many exx. from Rhodos in BCH. 1889, p. 364). They are all foreigners, e.g. whose names occur in the decree of the θιασῶται of the Karian Zeus Labraundos, CIA. ii, 613 (298/7 B.C.); cf. ib. 614; SIG. 726. Merchants from Kition found a cult of their Aphrodite (Astarte) in Athens, just as some Egyptians had a little while before put up τὸ τῆς Ἴσιδος ἱερόν there: CIA. ii, 168. The names of foreigners (in addition to Athenians) are very numerous among the ὄνοματα τῶν ἐρανιστῶν of a collegium of Σαβαζιασταί in the Peiraeus (second century B.C.): Ἐφ. Ἀρχ. 1883, p. 245 f. The foreign worship would then begin to receive the support of natives of the host-city (most of them being at first of the poorer classes), and in this way the new religion would gain a footing in its adopted home. (Pure Athenian citizens compose the society of the Dionysiastai in the Peiraeus, second century B.C., Ath. Mitt. ix, 288 = CIA. iv, 2, 623 d.)
[4] The Bendideia early became a state festival in Athens (even fifth century, CIA. i, 210, fr. K, p. 93). An allusion in Plato (Rp. 327 A), however, shows that the Thracians (who must have introduced the cult of Bendis into Athens, or at least into the Peiraeus, the home of most θίασοι) still kept up a special worship of their goddess in their own manner, side by side with the Hellenized cult. It appears at least as if the worship in its remodelled Greek form seemed to them no longer the right one. (Bendis, too, like Dionysos, is a divinity of both this world and the next: see Hsch. δίλογχον.)