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Orpheus Leading Eurydice from the Underworld (detail)
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Carot, 1861
Redemptive Purification
"Orpheus was a legendary singer in Greek myth...who was musician to the Argonauts, could charm animals and stones and trees by his song, rescued his wife Eurydice from death by his music (the story of his last minute failure is a later addition), and was himself torn to pieces by Maenads, though his head continued to sing after death. He was thus a natural figure for a mystery-religion promising life after death and the inspiration of divine power. We meet Orphics in Sicily and Greece in the fifth century BC."
- John Ferguson, An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Mysticism and the Mystery Religions
"Orpheus, the poet-Argonaut, is also said to have come on earth to purify the religion of its gross, and terrestrial anthrophomorphism. He abolished human sacrifice and instituted a mystic theology based on pure spirituality. Cicero calls Orpheus a son of Bacchus."
- M. P. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled
"In the Greek conception of the underworld, the plain of Lethe, or Oblivion, was a place of stifling heat. Yet the soul is enjoined to drink only of the spring on the right (presumably the spring of Mnemosyne, or Memory, as opposed to the water of Lethe)."
- The Ancient Mysteries: A Sourcebook, Marvin W. Meyer, Editor
"I am parched with thirst, and perishing,
But drink of me, the ever-flowing spring on the right, (where) there is a fair cypress.
Who are you? Where are you from?
I am a child of Earth and of starry Heaven, but my race is of Heaven (alone)."
- Orphic Lamella from Thessaly
"To the Orphics, the soul is of celestial origin and divine; man is a child of earth and starry heaven; his body of the earth, but his soul, as a late Orphic line expresses it, is 'rooted in the celestial element'. Each soul had lived in the society of Gods, and was in fact a God.
"This godly soul however sinned and ended up in a body. We are told by Aristotle that in the Orphic verses the soul was said to be carried to and fro by the winds, and drawn into the body by respiration. The cause of the soul's descent was sin, and its imprisonment in the body has a penitentiary purpose."
"...As soon as a soul got into the body, the doors of the prison-house close around her. The soul has entered upon what the Orphics call the 'circle' or 'wheel of generation', a long and weary circuit of birth and death."
"While present in the body, the soul is therefore a fallen angel who is doing penance for her sins and her ultimate aim is to be released from her chains and recover the inheritance she has lost."
- "Orphism, Return to the Gods" in Advance, Issue 119
"The followers of Orpheus turned the Dionysian method on its head, seeking ecstasy through abstinence and rites of purification, denying the senses rather than using them as vehicles for bliss."
- Search for the Soul
"Associated with the Orphics was a myth. Dionysos was killed and devoured by the Titans; his heart was rescued and a new Dionysos born from it. The Titans were destroyed by Zeus' thunderbolt, and mankind formed from their ashes. Man is thus compounded of a Titanic element, the body, and a Dionysiac element, the soul, and his aim is to purify himself of his Titanic element."
- John Ferguson, An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Mysticism and the Mystery Religions
"...The purer their lives the higher will be their next reincarnation, until the soul has completed the spiral ascent of destiny to live forever as God from whom it comes."
"Their methods of purity were mainly in the form of living a clean life according to their rules, which included several rules of abstinence, such as the rule against eating animal food, prohibition against beans and eggs. There were also a great variety of elaborate and complicated rites and ceremonies to accelerate the soul's release from the bodily prison."
"Various kinds of life were thought to form a graduated scale, with plants being lowest, followed by animals and then human bodies. When fully purified, one would rise up to Gods, sharing the same hearth and table with other immortals."
- "Orphism, Return to the Gods" in Advance, Issue 119
"The soul, if pure, departs to the invisible world, but, if tainted, by communion with the body, she lingers hovering near the earth and is afterwards born into the likeness of some lower form. That which true philosophy has purified alone rises ultimately to the gods.
"The earth, a globe self-balanced in the midst of space, has many mansions of the soul, some higher and brighter, some lower and darker than our present habitation. We who dwell about the Mediterranean Sea are like frogs at the bottom of a pool. In some higher place, under the true heaven, our souls may well hereafter, and see not only colors and forms in their ideal purity but truth and justice as they are."
- Socrates' dialogue in Plato's Phaedo
"...In the Hellenistic mystery cults initiates entering the holy of holies were often required to be naked, and, whereas women were excluded from Mithraic rites, they were essential to the Orphic-Dionysian, both as inciters of the mystic rapture and as vehicles of the revelation."
- Joseph Campbell, Creative Mythology
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"The ancient symbol of the Orphic Mysteries was the serpent-entwined egg, which signified Cosmos as encircled by the fiery Creative Sprit. The egg also represents the soul of the philosopher; the serpent, the Mysteries. At the time of initiation the shell is broken and man emerges from the embryonic state of physical existence wherein he had remained through the fetal period of philosophic regeneration."
- Bryant, An Analysis of Ancient Mythology
This "rebirth" is depicted on an Orphic bowl (dating from the 2nd or 3rd century AD). Inside around the rim, a ring of naked figures - male and female - are shown in the Sanctum of the Winged Serpent.
"The mound in the center, covered by the winged serpent, is the top of the Orphic cosmic egg, within which all mortal creatures dwell. The company is outside and above the egg. They have ascended (spiritually) through the sun door, which opens at the instant of noon at the summit of the sky....The normal limitation of human thought and sense, the clothing of the mind, were destroyed in the fiery passage, the purging flames of which are now blazing at their feet; and the serpent wrapped around the mound, at which they gaze in silent rapture, combines the forms that would have been seen below as opposites: the serpent crawling on its belly and the bird in winged flights."
"Standing in the bowl of the winged serpent, we are inside that sacramental chalice, drinking with our eyes, so to say, the intoxicant, there symbolized as wine, of the mystery of the substance of our being."
- Joseph Campbell, Creative Mythology
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