there is little to record that is certain and at the same time of
primary importance for the history of religion. The Arcadian
city of Pheneus possessed a mystery that boasted an Eleusinian
character and origin, yet in the record of it there is no mention
of Kore, and we may suspect that, like other Demeter-worships
in the Peloponnese, it belonged to a period when the earth-goddess
was revered as a single personality and Kore had not
yet emanated from her. We know much more of the details
of the great Andanian mysteries in Messenia, owing to the
discovery of the important and much-discussed Andanian inscription
of 91 B.C.[1] But what we know are facts of secondary
importance only. We gather from Pausanias (4. 33. 4; cf. 4. 1.
5. and 4. 26. 8; 4. 27. 6) that the rites, which he regards as second
in solemnity and prestige to the Eleusinian alone, were consecrated
to the Μεγάλαι θεαί, . . . the great goddesses, . . . and that
Kore enjoyed the mystic title of Hagnē, “the holy one.”
The inscription has been supposed to correct and to refute
Pausanias, but it does not really controvert his statements,
which are attested by other evidence; it proves only that other
divinities came at a later time to have a share in the mysteries,
such as the Μεγάλοι θεοί who were probably the Cabeiri (q.v.). It
is clear that the Andanian mysteries included a sacred drama,
in which women personated the goddesses. The priestesses were
married women, and were required to take an oath that they
had lived “in relation to their husbands a just and holy life.”
We hear also of grades of initiation, purification-ceremonies,
but of no sacrament or eschatologic promise; yet it is probable
that these mysteries, like the Eleusinian, maintained and
secured the hope of future happiness.
The Eleusinian faith is not wholly unattested by the grave-inscriptions of Hellas, though it speaks but rarely on these. The most interesting example is the epitaph of a hierophant who proclaims that he has found that “death was not an evil, but a blessing.”[2]
Of equal importance for the private religion of Greece were the Orphic mystic societies, bearing a Thraco-Phrygian tradition into Greece, and associated originally with the name of Dionysus, and afterwards with Sabazius also and the later cult-ideas of Phrygia.[3] The full account of the Dionysiac mysteries would demand a critical study of the Dionysiac religion as a whole, as well as of the private sects that sprang up under its shadow. It is only possible here to indicate the salient characteristics of those which are of primary value for the history of religion.
Originally a great nature-god of the Thraco-Phrygian stock, powerful over all vegetation and especially revealing his power in the vine, Dionysus was forcing his way into Greece at least as early as the Homeric period, and by the 6th century was received into the public cults of most of the Greek communities. We can gather with some certainty or probability his aboriginal characteristics and the form of his Worship. Being a god of the life of the earth, he was also a nether divinity, the lord of the world of souls, with whom the dead votary entered into privileged communion; his rites were mystic, and nightly celebrations were frequent, marked by wild ecstasy and orgiastic self-abandonment, in which the votary became at one with the divinity and temporarily possessed his powers; women played a prominent part in the ritual; a savage form of sacramental communion was in vogue, and the animal victim of whose flesh and blood the votaries partook was at times regarded as the incarnation of the divinity, so that the god himself might be supposed to die and to rise again; finally we may regard certain cathartic ideas as part of the primeval tradition of this religion. Admitted among the soberer cults of the Greek communities, it lost most of its wildness and savagery, while still retaining a more emotional ecstatic character than the rest. But this cooling process was arrested by a new wave of Dionysiac fervour that spread over Greece from the 7th century onwards, bringing with it the name of Orpheus,[4] and engendering at some later date the Orphic brotherhoods (thiasi). This religious movement may have started like the earlier one from the lands north of Greece; but Crete and even Egypt are supposed to have contributed much to the Orphic doctrine and ritual. Our earliest authority for the proceedings of the mystery-practitioner who used the name of Orpheus is the well-known passage in Plato’s Republic (p. 364a), in which he speaks contemptuously of the itinerant ritualists who knock at the doors of the rich, the vendors of magic incantations, who promise absolution from sins and happiness in the next world to be attained by a ritual of purification and mystic initiation. This record brings to our notice a, phenomenon unknown elsewhere in Greek religion; the missionary spirit, the impulse to preach to all who would hear, which foreshadows the breaking down of the gentile religious barriers of the ancient world. And it is probable that some kind of “Orphic” propagandism, whether through books or itinerant mystery-priests, or both, had been in vogue some time before Plato. We may fairly conjecture that it has to some extent inspired the glowing eschatology of Pindar, who describes the next world as a place of penance and purgation from ancestral or personal taint and of final reward for the purified soul, and who unites this belief with a doctrine of reincarnation. In the Hippolytus of Euripides, Theseus taunts his son with cloaking his immorality under hypocritical “Orphic” pretensions to purity, the pharisaic affectation, for instance, of a vegetarian diet (952–954). Still more important is the fragment of the Cretans of Euripides, attesting the strength of the antiquity of these mystic Dionysiac associations in Crete. The initiated votary proclaims himself as sanctified to Zeus of Ida, to Zagreus—the Orphic name of the nether-world Dionysus—and to the mountain-goddess Rhea-Cybele; he has fulfilled “the solemn rite of the banquet of raw flesh,” and henceforth he “robes himself in pure white and avoids the taint of childbirth and funerals and abstains from meat.” And—what is most significant—he calls himself by the very name of his god—he is himself Βάκχος. In spirit and in most of its details the passage accords well with the Bacchae of Euripides, which reflects not so much the public worship of Greece, but rather the mystic Dionysiac brotherhoods. Throughout this inspired drama the votary rejoices to be one with his divinity and to call himself by his name, and this mystic union is brought about partly, though Euripides may not have known it, through “the meal of raw flesh” or the drinking of the blood of the goat or the kid or the bull. The sacramental intention of this is confirmed by abundant proof; even in the state-cult of Tenedos they dressed up a bull-calf as Dionysus and reverentially sacrificed it (Ael. Nat. an. 12. 34); those who partook of the flesh were partaking of -what was temporarily the body of their god. The Christian fathers at once express their abhorrence of this savage ὠμοφαγία. and reveal its true significance (Arnob. Adv. nat. 5. 119); and Firmicus Maternus (De error., p. 84) attests that the Cretans of his own day celebrated a funeral festival in honour of Dionysus in which they enacted the life and the death of the god in a passion-play and “rent a living bull with their teeth.”
But the most speaking record of the aspirations and ideas of the Orphic mystic is preserved in the famous gold tablets found in tombs near Sybaris, one near Rome, and one in Crete. These have been frequently published and discussed; and here it is only possible to allude to the salient features that concern the general history of religion. They contain fragments of a sacred hymn that must have been in vogue at least as early as the 3rd century B.C., and which was inscribed in order to
- ↑ See Sauppe, Mysterieninschrift von Andania; cf. Foucart’s commentary in Le Bas, Voyage archéol. 2, No. 3268; H. Collitz, Dialect-inschriften, 4689.
- ↑ Eph. arch. 1883, p. 81.
- ↑ The best account of the origin and development of the Dionysiac religion is in Rohde’s Psyche, vol. i.; for Orphic ritual and doctrine see article on “Orpheus” in Roscher’s Ausfürliches Lexikon der griechischen und römischen Mythologie; Miss Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, pp. 455–659, with critical appendix by G. Murray on the Orphic tablets discovered in Crete, near Rome, and in south ltaly.
- ↑ The name Ὀρφεύς first occurs in Ibycus, Frag. 10: ὀνομακλυτὸν Ὀρφήν
