Orphic Tablets and Hymns

Impact

The Orphic gold tablets have been at the heart of scholarly controversy since they began to be discovered by archaeologists in the 1870s. On the one hand, some scholars wanted to show that Orphism was a flourishing ancient religion that was tremendously influential in the formation of Christianity. At a time when rationalism and secularism conflicted with a resurgent Catholic Church in Europe, historicizing Christianity as something that might have developed from Orphism would weaken the Church’s claim to be a legitimate social authority. To this day, an argument for Orphic influence on Christianity has to be treated with caution, although a great deal of suggestive evidence exists, for example the frequent use of scenes of Orpheus charming the beasts in Christian burial places (most famously the Catacomb of Domatilla, a woman executed as a Christian by the first-century emperor Domitian despite being a relative of his). This perception naturally led to a reaction among later scholars such as Germany’s Günther Zuntz, who wished to minimize Orphism into anything but a religion. Only in the last generation, after new archaeological finds have clearly linked the tablets to wider Orphic literature, have scholars come to a more balanced view of the historical extent to which Orphic cults were an important and widespread phenomenon in the Greek world. The tablets should be viewed, therefore, as only one element of Orphic tradition, without amounting to an organized religion in any modern sense. It remains necessary to speak of Orphic cults and Orphic texts, rather than a single monolithic Orphism.

The Orphic hymns are part of the revival of Orphic literature in the Roman Empire. Eventually, this revival led the Neoplatonist philosophers of late antiquity to try to create an Orphic religion out of older Orphic texts and practices. There can be little doubt that this phenomenon came about in reaction to the pressure of Christianity. The leaders of the Greek cultural world tried to compete directly with Christianity by reinventing what Orphic material they had access to as a revealed religion of salvation that could match Christianity point for point in its appeal of granting its followers a beatific afterlife. Orpheus was not the only figure reinterpreted in this way. Efforts were also made to turn figures like the pre-Socratic philosopher Pythagoras and the first-century Neopythagorean philosopher (and purported magician) Apollonius of Tyana into wonderworkers after the fashion of Jesus. Orpheus’s claim to bring the dead back to life and to save the soul in the underworld made him a logical alternative to Jesus; the early Christians even used him as a symbol for Jesus, as evidenced by his frequent appearance in early Christian art. Their efforts, however, were ultimately unsuccessful and could not slow the whole Greco-Roman world from becoming a new Christian world. Scholars of the Christian Byzantine Empire, however, did not lose any enthusiasm for Orpheus and continued to compose new works in his name, including books of magic like the Orphic Lithika (on magical gems) and the Orphic Argonautica, a retelling of the adventure to recover the Golden Fleece.

Orpheus’s fame endured through the Renaissance, when he was the subject of the first opera, Claudio Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo (1607). Orpheus continues to be reinvented by modern artists in works ranging from Gustave Moreau’s 1865 painting Orpheus to such films as the Orphic Trilogy of Jean Cocteau—Blood of a Poet (1930), Orpheus (1950), and The Testament of Orpheus (1959)—to Marcel Camus’ Black Orpheus (1950) and Denise Levertov’s 1968 poem “A Tree Telling of Orpheus.” But these center on the myth of Orpheus. The quasi-religious Orphic cult, with its mysteries and secrets, remains largely unknown in popular culture.