Orphic Tablets and Hymns

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

The readings presented here come from two discrete fields of Orphic literature. The Orphic gold tablets are texts that were buried in the graves of initiates in Italy and the eastern Mediterranean region between the fourth and first centuries BCE. The Orphic hymns come from a later period but recall the earliest Orphic literature, which is otherwise lost.

Orphic Tablets

The Orphic tablets are very mysterious objects, unlike anything that exists in the modern world. They are small pieces of gold foil about the size of a large Post-it Note, written on by using a stylus to dent the surface of the thin metal. The tablets were unearthed from graves and so were buried with the dead, seemingly offering instructions for what the soul of the deceased should do upon reaching the next world. The tablet from Rome, for instance, makes it clear that the soul is being reminded of something it learned in life: “And I have this gift of Memory prized by men.” The Orphic tablets warn the soul of a trap that awaits at the entrance to the underworld, where gatekeepers will try to direct it to drink from a spring on the right next to a white cypress tree. This is what most souls, lacking the golden ticket, will do. If they drink from the spring, such souls will forget everything about their lives and then be punished (if they had been particularly wicked) or else reincarnated into a new body.

The tablet from Eleutherna actually gives a script of the conversation the soul must have with the gatekeeper in order to avoid this common fate: “A I am dry with thirst and am perishing. / B Come, drink, I pray, from the ever-flowing spring on the right, where the cypress is. Who are you, and whence? / A I am the son of Earth and starry Heaven.” The soul must resist the impulse to drink, and instead tell the gatekeeper that it is a god, born of the same parents as the gods: Heaven and Earth. One of the tablets from Thurii assures the soul that it will be accepted as the guardians reply: “Happy and blessed one, you shall be a god instead of a mortal.” The soul will go on to the same eternal paradise that Greek belief normally reserved for heroes (human beings favored by the gods with a blessed afterlife): “the holy meadow and groves of Persephone.”

The tablets evoke a number of underworld deities. Persephone is the wife of Hades, the ruler of the underworld. As described in the Homeric “Hymn to Demeter,” Persephone—the daughter of Demeter, the goddess of agriculture—was kidnapped by and married to her uncle Hades. Zeus reconciles Hades and Demeter over the marriage, so that Persephone dwells in the underworld half the year and, during the growing season, on the earth’s surface with her mother. On one of the tablets from Thurii, Demeter is referred to by the name of her barbarian counterpart, Cybele. The same group of tablets mentions Euboleus. Originally a god of plowing (his name means the “good glebe,” glebe being a term for cultivated land), in the Homeric hymn he becomes a swineherd who witnesses Persephone’s abduction. His role may be connected to the piglets sacrificed by initiates. The common name Eucles may have been chosen merely because it sounds well with Euboleus.

The tablet from Rome gives the name of the person for whom it was written, Caecillia Secundina. She is otherwise unknown but was probably aristocratic, as she was interested in Greek culture and able to pay for initiation. The Roman name could conceal Greek ancestry, however.

The gold tablets acted as reminders to the souls of the deceased, telling the souls to recall what they had learned when they were alive and initiated into the mysteries that Plato speaks of. There is some reason to think that the actual performance of the mysteries for the initiate may have been a dramatic “run-through” of the scene expected to come in the underworld. The oldest Orphic poetry (of which barely a trace survives quoted by later writers) describes the relationship of the soul to the body, as well as what the other world is like and what the soul has to do there. Legend tells us that Orpheus and the Orphic priests knew these secrets because they had been to that world when, as shamans, they sent their own souls forth from their bodies. Modern-day readers are fortunate the gold tablets waited patiently in the ground for two millennia to initiate us into their forgotten world.

Orphic Hymns

The closest thing mainstream Greek religion had to a scriptural text was Hesiod’s poetry, namely his poems the Theogony (“Generation of the Gods”) and the Works and Days. These works tell the story of the successive generations of the divine family from the first gods Uranus and Gê (sky and earth); their children the Titans, including Cronus and Rhea; and finally the Olympian gods ruled by Zeus. They move on to the creation of human beings and describe the character of their lives. This story incorporates much that was traditional within Greek culture but also much mythology from the Near East that had the authority and glamor of more ancient civilizations. The priests of Orpheus wrote their own poems, which treated precisely the same subject matter as Hesiod but in myths that were different in detail. Almost nothing of these poems remains to be read today, but it seems that the author of the Orphic hymns was able to read at least some of them and incorporated myths and ideas from them into his own work.

Each hymn addresses a god or group of gods and praises them by telling their myths. The texts of the hymns suggest that they functioned in a cultic setting, since each one begins with instructions on what fumigation, or burnt offering, to make to the god. The Orphic myths are referred to allusively, so it is not always clear what the text means. Another problem is that there was more than one Orphic theogony (account of the origin of the gods), each one different from the others. It is obvious that the Orphic myths stay to a degree within a Hesiodic framework. In the gold tablets, for instance, the divine soul of the initiate identifies itself as a child of the earth and sky, just as the gods were in Hesiod. But the Orphic theogonies are much more elaborate and call on more, or at least other, Near Eastern myths as their points of reference. The hymn “To Protogonus, or the First-born” mentions Protogonus and Phanes, obscure representatives of two generations of an Orphic theogony. Phanes, who is addressed by the still-more obscure title Ericapaeus, may be a sort of Orphic creator. The Protogonus (the name may be a metaphorical reference to Dionysus) is said to have been born from an egg, which is a reference to the myths taught at the Egyptian city of Hermopolis. This hymn also addresses Priapus, who stands for the divine power of generation. So the Orphic myths, just like Hesiod’s, drew on material from the Near East, equating wisdom with what was unfamiliar to most Greeks.

The hymn “To Rhea” fits this familiar goddess into the Orphic framework. To Hesiod, Rhea, like the other Titans, was a child of Gê and Uranus. In Hesiod she is the wife of Cronus (Saturn in Latin). But the Orphics change the genealogy. Rhea is the daughter of the mysterious Protogonus and is herself called the mother of earth and heaven. The mention of the frenzied music of her worshippers shows that Rhea is being identified with the Phrygian goddess Cybele, whose cult title was Mother of the Gods. Both goddess are for all intents and purposes merely other names for Demeter in this context.

“To Thundering Jove” (that is, Zeus) treats its subject in a highly allegorical manner. It is true that Zeus is present as an anthropomorphic personality as in Homer or Hesiod, but he is also an “all-devouring force, entire and strong, / Horrid, untam’d.” This is a force or nature or cosmic principle that goes far beyond any anthropomorphic conception. It is not hard to recognize this description as an allegory of the element of fire, which Greek philosophers considered the first and most perfect of the four elements, the other three being air, earth, and water. Undoubtedly, the author of the hymns has in mind here ideas about fire derived from the Hellenistic philosophy of Stoicism, namely, that it is a pure creative force. But the Stoic conception of fire, in turn, originated in Orphic speculation, as the philosophical text in the Derveni papyrus makes clear.

“To Proserpine” (that is, Persephone) addresses the queen of the underworld, the wife of Pluto (that is, Hades), whom Orpheus’s spells enchanted, allowing the return of the dead Eurydice to life (or almost to life). The hymn alludes to the fact that the Orphic initiates could hope for a blissful afterlife. It names Persephone as the mother of Dionysus (in “To Bacchus”), something quite contrary to the normal run of Greek myth, which makes him the son of the mortal woman Semele. The epithet “thrice-begotten” might say something about his complex genealogy in Orphic myth. Dionysus, or Bacchus, the god of wine and festivity, is the most important god of Orphic myth. He is perhaps to be identified with the firstborn principle of creation and is ultimately responsible for saving human souls (he has influence with his mother, Persephone). The story of his birth is also associated with perhaps the most important Orphic myth, the one that explains why souls need saving at all.

When Dionysus was an infant, he was protected by the Curetes (whom the translator of the hymns, Taylor, glosses as Corybantes and Salians, dancing religious orders he hoped his readers would find familiar), who danced and shouted to cover the noise of his crying. But the Titans, the older gods who see the younger Olympians as a threat, nevertheless kidnapped him, luring him away with toys. They killed, butchered, cooked, and ate him in the manner of a sacrificial animal. Only his heart was saved by the goddess Athena, and Zeus used it either to reassemble or to recreate his body, resurrecting him (there are elements here of the Egyptian myth of Isis and Osiris). Zeus punished the Titans by blasting them with his thunderbolt, reducing them to ashes. Zeus then proceeded to create the first human beings from those ashes. So, in “To the Titans,” it is they “from whom began / Th’ afflicted, miserable, race of man.” The souls of human beings are in need of salvation because they have inherited the evil nature of the Titans, and Dionysus is the only one who can save them because only he can forgive them for their inherited crime. This myth, too, has its origins in the Near East. In the Babylonian national epic, Enuma Elish, the god Marduk makes human beings out of the blood of an executed rebel god, and for that reason they are doomed to a life of toil and suffering in service to the gods.

This Bacchic myth, perhaps because of its Near Eastern origin, is similar to Christian myth. The idea of salvation perhaps attracted early Christians to use Orpheus as a symbol of their own faith. In addition, it most certainly attracted defenders of Greek culture—such as the author of the hymns and the later Neoplatonist philosophers—to Orpheus as the foundation for a religion of salvation that could be opposed to Christianity, however ultimately unsuccessful their efforts were.