My days have run. The servant I, Initiate, of Idaean Jove; * Where midnight Zagreus †roves, I rove; I have endured his thunder-cry;
Fulfilled his red and bleeding feasts; Held the Great Mother’s mountain flame; I am set free and named by name A Bacchos of the Mailed Priests.
Robed in pure white I have borne me clean From man’s vile birth and coffined clay, And exiled from my lips alway Touch of all meat where Life hath been.
Orphic tablets have been found in tombs, giving instructions to the soul of the dead person as to how to find his way in the next world, and what to say in order to prove himself worthy of salvation. They are broken and incomplete; the most nearly complete (the Petelia tablet) is as follows:
Thou shalt find on the left of the House of Hades a Well-spring, And by the side thereof standing a white cypress. To this well-spring approach not near. But thou shalt find another by the Lake of Memory, Cold water flowing forth, and there are Guardians before it. Say: «I am a child of Earth and of Starry Heaven; But my race is of Heaven (alone). This ye know yourselves. And lo, I am parched with thirst and I perish. Give me quickly The cold water flowing forth from the Lake of Memory.» And of themselves they will give thee to drink from the holy well-spring, And thereafter among the other heroes thou shalt have lordship. . . .
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* Mystically identified with Bacchus.
€ One of the many names of Bacchus.
Another tablet says:—«Hail, Thou who has suffered the suffering . . . Thou art become God from Man.» And yet in another:—«Happy and Blessed One, thou shalt be God instead of mortal.»
The well-spring of which the soul is not to drink is Lethe, which brings forgetfulness; the other well-spring is Mnemosyne, remembrance. The soul in the next world, if it is to achieve salvation, is not to forget, but, on the contrary, to acquire a memory surpassing what is natural.
The Orphics were an ascetic sect; wine, to them, was only a symbol, as, later, in the Christian sacrament. The intoxication that they sought was that of «enthusiasm,» of union with the god. They believed themselves, in this way, to acquire mystic knowledge not obtainable by ordinary means. This mystical element entered into Greek philosophy with Pythagoras, who was a reformer of Orphism, as Orpheus was a reformer of the religion of Bacchus. From Pythagoras Orphic elements entered into the philosophy of Plato, and from Plato into most later philosophy that was in any degree religious.
Certain definitely Bacchic elements survived wherever Orphism had influence. One of these was feminism, of which there was much in Pythagoras, and which, in Plato, went so far as to claim complete political equality for women. «Women as a sex,» says Pythagoras, «are more naturally akin to piety.» Another Bacchic element was respect for violent emotion. Greek tragedy grew out of the rites of Dionysus. Euripides, especially, honoured the two chief gods of Orphism, Bacchus and Eros. He has no respect for the coldly self-righteous well-behaved man, who, in his tragedies, is apt to be driven mad or otherwise brought to grief by the gods in resentment of his blasphemy.
The conventional tradition concerning the Greeks is that they exhibited an admirable serenity, which enabled them to contemplate passion from without, perceiving whatever beauty it exhibited, but themselves calm and Olympian. This is a very one-sided view. It is true, perhaps, of Homer, Sophocles, and Aristotle, but it is emphatically not true of those Greeks who were touched, directly or indirectly, by Bacchic or Orphic influences. At Eleusis, where the Eleusinian mysteries formed the most sacred part of Athenian State religion, a hymn was sung, saying:
With Thy wine-cup waving high, With Thy maddening revelry, To Eleusis’ flowery vale, Comest Thou—Bacchus, Paean, hail!
In the Bacchae of Euripides, the chorus of Maenads displays a combination of poetry and savagery which is the very reverse of serene. They celebrate the delight in tearing a wild animal limb from limb, and eating it raw then and there:
O glad, glad on the Mountains To swoon in the race outworn, When the holy fawn-skin clings And all else sweeps away,
To the joy of the quick red fountains, The blood of the hill-goat torn, The glory of wild-beast ravenings Where the hill-top catches the day,
To the Phrygian, Lydian mountains ‘Tis Bromios leads the way.
( Bromios was another of the many names of Bacchus.) The dance of the Maenads on the mountain side was not only fierce; it was an escape from the burdens and cares of civilization into the world of nonhuman beauty and the freedom of wind and stars. In a less frenzied mood they sing:
Will they ever come to me, ever again, The long, long dances, On through the dark till the dim stars wane? Shall I feel the dew on my throat and the stream Of wind in my hair? Shall our white feet gleam In the dim expanses? O feet of the fawn to the greenwood fled, Alone in the grass and the loveliness; Leap of the hunted, no more in dread, Beyond the snares and the deadly press. Yet a voice still in the distance sounds, A voice and a fear and a haste of hounds, O wildly labouring, fiercely fleet, Onward yet by river and lien—
Is it joy or terror, ye storm-swift feet? To the dear lone lands untroubled of men, Where no voice sounds, and amid the shadowy green The little things of the woodland live unseen.
Before repeating that the Greeks were «serene,» try to imagine the matrons of Philadelphia behaving in this manner, even in a play by Eugene O’Neill.
The Orphic is no more «serene» than the unreformed worshipper of Bacchus. To the Orphic, life in this world is pain and weariness. We are bound to a wheel which turns through endless cycles of birth and death; our true life is of the stars, but we are tied to earth. Only by purification and renunciation and an ascetic life can we escape from the wheel and attain at last to the ecstasy of union with God. This is not the view of men to whom life is easy and pleasant. It is more like the Negro spiritual:
I’m going to tell God all of my troubles When I get home.
Not all of the Greeks, but a large proportion of them, were passionate, unhappy, at war with themselves, driven along one road by the intellect and along another by the passions, with the imagination to conceive heaven and the wilful self-assertion that creates hell. They had a maxim «nothing too much,» but they were in fact excessive in everything—in pure thought, in poetry, in religion, and in sin. It was the combination of passion and intellect that made them great, while they were great. Neither alone would have transformed the world for all future time as they transformed it. Their prototype in mythology is not Olympian Zeus, but Prometheus, who brought fire from heaven and was rewarded with eternal torment.
If taken as characterizing the Greeks as a whole, however, what has just been said would be as one-sided as the view that the Greeks were characterized by «serenity.» There were, in fact, two tendencies in Greece, one passionate, religious, mystical, other-worldly, the other cheerful, empirical, rationalistic, and interested in acquiring knowledge of a diversity of facts. Herodotus represents this latter tendency; so do the earliest Ionian philosophers; so, up to a point, does Aristotle. Beloch (op. cit. I, 1, p. 434), after describing Orphism, says:
«But the Greek nation was too full of youthful vigour for the general acceptance of a belief which denies this world and transfers real life to the Beyond. Accordingly the Orphic doctrine remained confined to the relatively narrow circle of the initiate, without acquiring the smallest influence on the State religion, not even in communities which, like Athens, had taken up the celebration of the mysteries into the State ritual and placed it under legal protection. A full millennium was to pass before these ideas—in a quite different theological dress, it is true—achieved victory in the Greek world.»
It would seem that this is an overstatement, particularly as regards the Eleusinian mysteries, which were impregnated with Orphism. Broadly speaking, those who were of a religious temperament turned to Orphism, while rationalists despised it. One might compare its status to that of Methodism in England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
We know more or less what an educated Greek learnt from his father, but we know very little of what, in his earliest years, he learnt from his mother, who was, to a great extent, shut out from the civilization in which the men took delight. It seems probable that educated Athenians, even in the best period, however rationalistic they may have been in their explicitly conscious mental processes, retained from tradition and from childhood a more primitive way of thinking and feeling, which was always liable to prove victorious in times of stress. For this reason, no simple analysis of the Greek outlook is likely to be adequate.
The influence of religion, more particularly of non-Olympian religion, on Greek thought was not adequately recognized until recent times. A revolutionary book, Jane Harrison Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, emphasized both the primitive and the Dionysiac elements in the religion of ordinary Greeks; F. M. Cornford’s From Religion to Philosophy tried to make students of Greek philosophy aware of
