Orphic Tablets and Hymns

About the Author

Although he is considered historical by the ancient Greeks, Orpheus is a legendary figure: The story of his life and deeds is fictitious. Information about him, as is most often the case with anything in the ancient world, comes from a bewildering profusion of brief references in ancient sources, the most useful ones frequently quoting fragments from older works that are now lost. The best single continuous account of Orpheus comes from the poetry of books 10 and 11 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. To briefly summarize the key points of his myth: Orpheus was not Greek but a Thracian, from a tribal culture situated to the northeast of Greece. He invented the lyre and probably music as well. His music had magical powers and could not only tame wild animals but also make trees and rocks dance and rivers reverse their courses.

Orpheus sailed on the Argo with a crew of other ancient Greek heroes under the leadership of Jason. The purpose of the voyage, whose story was already widely known through the Homeric tradition manifested in the Iliad, was to recover the magical Golden Fleece, which was tied to the legitimate succession to the throne of Iolkhos, forming a sort of backstory for the hero Achilles. According to the myth, Orpheus saved the expedition by outsinging the Sirens, nymphs whose songs drew sailors to crash on rocks and drown.

Later, Orpheus fell in love with Eurydice, who was killed by the bite of a snake on their wedding day. Overcome with grief, Orpheus descended to the underworld, the place of the dead in Greek thought, to bring her back to life. His singing cast its spell on Persephone, the queen of the dead, and she interceded with her husband, Hades, to allow Eurydice to go with Orpheus back up to the world of the living—on one condition: Orpheus had to let Eurydice follow him without looking back at her. Just as he reached the surface of the land of the living and saw the light of the sun, however, he could not help but turn to see her; tragically, she immediately went back down to the underworld.

Desolate over his loss of Eurydice for a second time, Orpheus wandered blindly through the countryside and was fallen upon by a band of maenads, female worshippers of Dionysus. In an ecstatic frenzy, the maenads mistook Orpheus for an animal and tore him apart. His head did not die, however, but gained the power to speak prophecy. It was found by nymphs and sent floating over the sea to the island of Lesbos, where, as the legend goes, it was kept as an oracle until just before historic times. The gods honored Orpheus by transforming his lyre into the constellation Lyra.

The individual texts of the gold tablets of Orpheus were part of a tradition of initiatory literature written by itinerant priests who offered initiation into mysteries of salvation in Orpheus’s name. Whatever hymns, prayers, and spells they used, of which the texts on the tablets were only a small sample, were attributed to Orpheus. The texts mention some rather obscure gods (Mise, Hipta, and Melinoe) local to Asia Minor, which suggests that the author of the Orphic hymns was living in the Greek city of Pergamum.