Orphic Tablets and Hymns

Context

In the archaic period, between about 750 and 550 BCE, Greek civilization underwent a period of dynamic economic and cultural expansion. Small farming villages were organized into cities, national institutions were created, and overseas trade brought the benefit of contact with older, more civilized cultures. Besides integrating many new features of life in Greece—among them, the use of money and the development of writing—the forces consolidating the urban centers had to choose which parts of tradition to keep and which to abandon, or at least try to abandon. This went on in religion as well as every other aspect of life. The new cities kept what was useful for the common good. The centers of places like Athens and Corinth were crowded with temples to the patron divinities of the cities (such as Athena at Athens), the ancestors of Greece (Heracles), the gods who made it rain (Zeus) so that crops could grow (Demeter), and the other familiar Olympians who made the new industry (Hephaestus) and commerce (Poseidon) of the cities possible. The gods communicated their will through great oracular shrines, such as the ancient sanctuaries at Delphi and Dodona, which were acknowledged by the whole Greek world, and Greek unity was celebrated with festivals at Olympia and Isthmia. All of the apparatus of this new state religion concerned what was good for cities and what was good for Greece. The notion of doing what was good for a single Greek, perhaps at the expense of other Greeks, was something the cities wanted to leave behind. But not everyone in Greece felt this way, even if Plato and other philosophers were anxious to legitimize their new discipline by joining forces with civic institutions.

Thus, private religion was left to another world, one outside the official world of the city. The private priests who practiced older kinds of rituals forgotten by the cities took Orpheus as their patron, a representative of the kind of religious and magical powers that they claimed for themselves. Their beliefs and practices went far back into Greek as well as Indo-European antiquity. The magical practice of Orpheus and his priests were shamanic. The shamans of traditional cultures the world over are believed to enter a trance state that releases their souls from their bodies to wander throughout this world and the next, empowering their words to become real. This is why Orpheus’s spells were thought to reverse nature, even going so far as saving the dead from the underworld. The belief in reincarnation, a central part of Orphic practice, also stretches far back into the early history of the Indo-European peoples. These primitive and mysterious beliefs compose the religious current that flows through the figure of Orpheus. But shamanic magic, by its very nature, cannot be constrained by an ordered society, so it had to be excluded from the Greek world, dismissed as magic and superstition. In Plato’s view (as put forward in his dialogue on justice, the Republic), the Orphic priests were frauds and magicians who manipulated their clients with fear and lies and did not represent legitimate religious tradition; accordingly, Orphism became a tradition rejected by the civic and intellectual guardians of Greek culture.

Each Orphic work has its own context in the particular place and time in which it was created. The oldest Orphic poetry (virtually all Orphic writing is in verse) was created in the archaic and classical periods (before 400 BCE) by itinerant priests who offered initiations into the worship of the Greek god of wine and festivity, Dionysus, in the name of Orpheus. Very little of this survives. An important document related to this literature, however, is the Derveni papyrus, which was discovered in the grave of a nobleman in Hellenistic Macedonia. A commentary on an old Orphic poem, the text of the Derveni papyrus attempts to find philosophical doctrines in Orphic poems by allegorical interpretation (reading religious language as if it had a philosophical or even scientific meaning). Interestingly, the scroll on which the text was written was burned at the time the tomb was sealed, though the fire went out before any irreparable damage was done. This might suggest that the manuscript was supposed to accompany its owner into the next world, as the gold tablets of Orpheus were intended to do. The gold tablets that are examined here originated throughout the Greek world in locations extending from the Black Sea to Sicily and come from a later time, between 400 and 1 BCE; still, they reflect an initiatory practice, since they are, as it were, tokens of earlier imitations buried with the initiates. After the turn of the Common Era, such initiations seem to lapse, and no more tablets are found.

The cultural height of the Roman Empire after 100 CE produced a new Orphic literature. Two collections of poems are known from this time: One remains lost but was extensively quoted by Neoplatonic philosophers between 300 and 500 CE, and the other—the extant collection of Orphic hymns—are thought never to have been quoted by another ancient author. Nothing whatsoever is known about the context of the Orphic hymns, but a great deal can be surmised. They were most likely written between 200 and 300. There can be little question that the hymns belong to the culture movement called the Second Sophistic, by which Greeks living in the eastern half of the Roman Empire in the second and third centuries tried to redefine their identity; the term Sophist refers to a class of experts in Greek culture who in philosophical matters sometimes used deceptive reasoning.

The overwhelmingly Homeric style of the hymns and their many references to Greek philosophy, without taking the limited position of a single school, point to the Second Sophistic. The Second Sophistic was especially concerned with defending the superiority of Greek culture over various rivals, such as the dominant Roman political establishment and emerging Christianity, and so would naturally turn to ancient traditions like those of Orpheus for their subject matter (though many of the eighty-eight hymns have very little that is distinctly Orphic). The hymns clearly are meant to help establish an identity based on Greek tradition. They also indulge in the typically Sophistic delight in obscure subject matter and esoteric meanings. In the same time period, Orpheus was certainly used as an emblem of Greek culture, as can be seen from the frequent appearance of Orpheus himself in the mosaic floors of aristocratic houses from Antioch to Britain. But any solid evidence for the actual practice of Orphic initiations or mysteries in the later period, after the gold tablets ceased to be buried, is completely lacking. Ultimately, it is impossible to determine whether the Orphic hymns were composed entirely as a literary exercise or actually functioned in a religious setting, as the texts themselves claim.