Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/61

R P_ O K P 51 ORPHEUS, a very important figure in Greek legend. The name is an ancient Indo-European one ; the original Arbhu can be traced in the Ribhu of the Rigveda and the Alp or Elf of Teutonic folklore. It is, however, impossible to establish any connexion between the Orpheus legend in the highly developed form which alone has come down to us and the beliefs entertained about Ribhu and Elf. In Greece, Orpheus was always associated with the early Thraciau race, which was supposed to have inhabited the neighbourhood of Mount Helicon, the district of Pieria in Macedonia, and the coasts and country generally on the north of the ^Egean Sea. The religion of the Muses and the religion of Dionysus, with both of which Orpheus is connected, are intimately associated with this race (see MUSES). Orpheus was son of the river god CEagrus and the Muse Calliope. He played so divinely on the lyre that all nature stopped to listen to his music. When his wife Eurydice died, he went after her to Hades, and the strains of his lyre softened even the stern gods of the dead. Eurydice was released, and followed him to the upper world, but he looked back towards her before she was clear of the world of death and she vanished again from his sight. The Thracian women, jealous of his unconquerable love for his lost wife, tore him to pieces during the frenzy of the Bacchic orgies ; his head and his lyre floated " down the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian shore," where a shrine of Orpheus was built near Antissa. The legend, with all its melancholy, its love, and its sympathy with nature, has obviously taken shape in the hands of an early school of lyric poetry, associated with the worship of the Muses ; the ancient Thracian aoidoi are recognized as the earliest singers in Greece, but their art and their Muse-religion have passed to Lesbos, which was the chief seat of Greek lyric poetry in the 7th and 6th centuries B.C. The tragic death of Orpheus is obviously connected with the Bacchic ritual (see OEGIES). Orpheus is the representative of the god torn to pieces every year by the envious powers of nature, a ceremony that was duly enacted by the Bacchas, in earlier times with a human victim, afterwards with a bull to represent the bull-formed god. The Orpheus legend is closely analogous with that of Marsyas. Orpheus and Marsyas are embodiments of the supposed origin of music in Thrace and in Phrygia, countries inhabited by kindred races, viz., the influences of nature (both being closely connected with river-worship) and the teaching or gift of a goddess. The melancholy history of both must have its origin in the character of the Thrace-Phrygian people : the divine gift brings sorrow as well as power. Each uses the musical instrument that characterized his country. The name of Orpheus is equally important in the religious history of Greece ; and in this respect also it is associated with Thrace. He was the mythic founder of a religious school or sect, with a code of rules of life, a mystic eclectic theology, a system of purificatory and expiatory rites, and peculiar mysteries. This school is first observable under the rule of Pisistratus at Athens in the Gth century B.C. Its doctrines are founded on two elements (1) the Thraco-Phrygian religion of Bacchus with its enthusiastic orgies, its mysteries, and its purifica tions, and (2) the tendency to philosophic speculation on the nature and mutual relations of the numerous gods, developed at this time by intercourse with Egypt and the East, and by the quickened intercourse between different tribes and different religions in Greece itself. These causes produced similar results in different parts of Greece. The close analogy between Pythagoreanism and Orphism has been recognized from Herodotus (ii. 81) to the latest modern writers. Both inculcated a peculiar kind of ascetic life ; both had a mystical speculative theory of religion, with purificatory rites, abstinence from beans, &c. ; but Orphism was more especially religious, while Pythagoreanism, at least originally, inclined more to be a political and philosophical creed. The rules of the Orphic life (/Sib? Op<f>u<6<;) prescribed abstinence from beans, flesh, certain kinds of fish, &c., the wearing of a special kind of clothes, and numerous other practices and abstinences, for all of which reasons were given in religious myths (tepoi Aoyoi). The ritual of worship was peculiar, not admitting bloody sacrifices. The belief was taught in the homogeneity of all living things, in the transmigration of souls, in the view that the soul is imprisoned in the body, and that it may gradually attain perfection during connexion with a series of bodies. It is not possible here to treat of the Orphic mysteries (see Lobeck, Aglaophamus). The influence of Orphism on the Eleusinian mysteries has been described under MYSTERIES, and points of similarity and diversity noted. Greek litera ture was always hostile to the Orphic religion (cf. Eur., Hipp., 952 sq.; Plato, Rep., ii. 364; Theophr., Char., 25). A large number of writings in the tone of the Orphic religion existed and were ascribed to Orpheus, as the poems of the Trojan and Theban cycles to Homer and Hesiod. The real names of the authors of these works were in many cases known to those who inquired into the matter, though the common people believed that all were written before the time of Homer by Orpheus (Herod., ii. 53). Aristotle declared that there had never been a poet Orpheus. The names of poets of the Orphic cycle can be traced as early as 550 B.C. Onomacritus is the most famous of them all (see ONOMACRITUS). These poems were recited at rhapsodic contests alongside of Homeric and Hesiodic works (Plato, Ion, 536). Orphic hymns were used in the mysteries at Phlya and Eleusis (Paus., ix. 27, 2; 30, 5; i. 14). The poems were a favourite sub ject of study for the Alexandrian grammarians. Again in the controversies between Christian and pagan writers in the 3d and 4th centuries after Christ the Orphic religious poems played a great part : pagan writers quoted them to show the real meaning of the multitude of gods, while Christians retorted by reference to the obscene and disgraceful fictions by which they degraded the gods. The Orphic literature was united in ^corpus, entitled TO Opened, or Ta els Opcpfa a.va<pfp6^fva ; the different parts were connected, and the whole prefaced by a dedication to Musseus as son and first initiate of Orpheus. The chief poem was ^ TOV Optyf cos 6fooyia or /j.v0oTroua, which existed in several versions, showing consider able variations. There was also a collection of Orphic hymns, con taining numerous liturgic songs used in the mysteries^ and in exo teric ceremonial ; also practical treatises, "Ep-ya ital Hyuspcu, and poems on stones, herbs, and plants, &c. These works have been lost, except fragments collected by Lobeck. There exist several poems called Orphic (Argonautica, Hymns, Lithica). These are very late works, composed at the time when paganism was passing away before Christianity. The story of Orpheus, as was to be expected of a legend told both by Ovid and Boetius (bk. iii. cap. xxxv.), retained its popu larity throughout the Middle Ages and was transformed into the likeness of a northern fairy tale. In English medieval literature it appears in three somewhat different versions: Sir Orphco, a "lay of Brittany " printed from the Harleian MS. in Ritson s Ancient English Metrical Romances, vol. ii ; Orphco and Hcurodis from the Auchinleck MS. in David Laing s Select Remains of the Ancient Popular Poetry of Scotland ; and Kyng Orfciv from the Ashmolean MS. in Halliwell s Illustrations of Fairy Mjiliology (Shakespeare Soc., 1842). The poems bear trace of French influence. ORPIMENT (auripiymentum), the trisulphide of arsenic, As 2 S 3 , or yellow realgar, occurs in small quantities as a native mineral of a brilliant golden -yellow colour in Bohemia, Peru, &c. For industrial purposes an artificial orpiment is manufactured by subliming one part of sulphur with two of arsenious acid. The sublimate varies in colour from yellow to red, according to the intimacy of the combination of the ingredients ; and by varying the relative