Ο Ορφέας και η αρχαία ελληνική θρησκεία

by W.K.C. Guthrie

Πανάρχαιος τραγουδιστής, ήρωας, ιδρυτής θρησκείας, θύμα. Ο Ορφέας δάνεισε το όνομα του σε πολύ διαφορετικούς μύθους και έγινε παράδειγμα για οπαδούς διακεκριμένων κοινωνικών πρακτικών στην αρχαία Ελλάδα. Ο Guthrie, χρησιμοποιώντας με ακριβή και προσεκτικό τρόπο όλη τη σειρά των μαρτυρίων, επιτυγχάνει ώστε αυτό το βιβλίο να είναι η βασική θεώρηση αυτής της πολυσύνθετης και πεμπτουσιακά ελληνικής μορφής. Η εξαίρετη εισαγωγή του Alberink, η οποία εντάσσει το βιβλίο του Guthrie ανάμεσα στα έργα της πιο πρόσφατης και συναρπαστικής γραμματείας περί Ορφισμού, αξίζει να επαινεθεί και για τη ρωμαλέα ενημερωμένη επιθεώρηση των έργων ενός ολόκληρου αιώνα που αφορούν την ελληνική θρησκεία.
(από http://www.greekbooks.gr/books/filoso...

Genres: Religion, Nonfiction, Mythology, History, Classics, Philosophy, Esoterica

448 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1934

About the author

William Keith Chambers Guthrie was a Scottish classical scholar, best known for his History of Greek Philosophy, published in six volumes between 1962 and his death.

Reviews

[Scriptor Ignotus · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is said that every great religion begins as a reforming movement within the ambit of a formula-bound and decadent predecessor. Jesus subverted the empty ritualism of the temple hierarchs and the despotic opulence of the Herodian monarchy by offering Himself—and the mystical life of which He is the prototype—as a more vivacious and experiential path to the fulfillment of the Mosaic law and ultimate union with God. Muhammad removed the idols from the Kaaba, denouncing their clay faces as so many barnacles spotting the luster of true worship and proclaiming the name of Allah—a name already known to pre-Islamic Arabia—as the Absolute. His Quran was said to be the perfect recapitulation of a primitive revelation that had been distorted in the hands of Jews and Christians. The renunciationism of the Buddha may be understood in part as a rebellion against the inhuman social stratification that prevailed under the Indian caste system—as well as its metaphysical justifications—while the sufferings of the Sikh martyrs exposed the raw brutality and doctrinal chauvinism that buttressed the imperial ambitions of the Mughal Emperors.

The same principle holds true of a religious movement that began to take shape among the Greeks beginning in the sixth century BC. The archaic belief system that produced Homer and Hesiod was in better part the property of the privileged classes, an exaltation of the terrestrial ethos of the warrior aristocracy. The heroes of the Iliad paid worship only to mortality itself; a life made shimmering and resplendent by the deathly liturgy of battle. The wailing souls of the slain went flittering down into Hades, where they subsisted only as vegetative husks, while their killers drew their animating breath with heightened intensity. The gods were a tangible presence, but they were merely celestial princes who used the mundane realm as a theater of proxy warfare in an ageless struggle for cosmic supremacy. It was an ethic tethered to the pretentions of the horse lord rather than the onerous sighs of the galley rower.

Those sighs were addressed by the emerging cult of Dionysus, and with greater refinement by a movement within the Dionysiac tradition that claimed as its prophet a prehistoric sage named Orpheus. With the notable exception of Aristotle, the ancient writers were nearly unanimous in their conviction that Orpheus was a real person; and, astonishingly enough, there was no dearth of twentieth-century antiquity scholars who agreed with them. Guthrie is agnostic on the question, but gives hope to the X-Files crowd (“I want to believe”) by pointing to the unique and unassimilable characteristics of his legend: his portrayal in red-figure as a Greek with conspicuously Apolline characteristics surrounded by an audience of semi-barbarous bacchic Thracians, his contrarian inclination toward mysticism over ritual, and his supposed misogyny among them. None of these idiosyncrasies are easily paired with preexisting legends, which may suggest the presence of a three-dimensional person behind the mythmaking. Whatever the case, the teachings attributed to him in the extant Orphic texts, which formed part of an elusive Orphic Bible, inaugurated an epochal transformation of the Greek mind; and their attribution to a celebrated figure of a remote and inaccessible past was a familiar method of endowing such teachings with an air of authority.

Enthusiasts of Greek myth will be acquainted with the salients of the Orpheus story. He was a musician, poet, and theologian—the three modes of expression were conjoined at the head in those days—of supernatural power and allure. He accompanied Jason and the Argonauts in their quest for the Golden Fleece, where he presided over religious rites to appease the gods for the journey and used his own music to drown out the song of the Sirens. After the death of his wife Eurydice, he found a portal to the underworld and performed a subterranean concert that charmed the shades and softened the hearts of Hades and Persephone, who allowed him to take Eurydice back above ground with him on the condition that he did not look back at her until they both saw the sunlight. Naturally, Orpheus looked back at the last moment, and the shade of Eurydice was dragged back into the pit forever. In another telling, his mission was doomed from the beginning because he lacked the courage to actually die so he could be reunited with his love.

The cadences of his song, always pertaining to the origins of gods and men, the impurity of the human condition, and our essential quest for the transcendence of the sufferings of embodiment, had a soothing effect on the tempers of men and beasts alike, and they gathered transfixed around his lyre like moths to the proverbial flame. The pacific quality of his music—more Carpenters than System of a Down, to be sure—made a striking contrast with the raucousness of traditional Dionysian chants, contributing to Guthrie’s theory that Orpheus was initially an Apolline figure, a totem of reason and decorum whose Thracian homeland was inundated by the revelrous humors of the wine god.

Tradition has it that he met his end at the hands of a crowd of angry bacchantes—crazed female followers of Dionysus—who tore him to pieces and consumed his flesh much as the Titans were said to have done to the infant Dionysus himself (more on that in a moment). In some accounts, Orpheus was killed out of jealousy. After he failed to rescue Eurydice from the underworld, he shunned the attentions of women and taught his mystical rites only to men. The bacchantes were driven to their deed in a fit of rage at his refusal to love them and the fact that he was luring their husbands away with his song and his teachings. In others, Dionysus himself ordered the murder because Orpheus was paying his devotions to Apollo instead of to him. In any case, it is intriguing to observe that a figure who died at Dionysian hands came to be understood as a prophet or avatar of the very god in whose name the slaying was committed.

The Orphic cosmogony was innovative in a number of ways. It introduced the concept of a creator god, a notion largely unfamiliar to Greek thought, and it did so in an exceptionally peculiar manner. The religious mind of the Hellenes was conservative by nature—practitioners were reluctant to set aside old gods and adopt new ones—so religious innovators generally fashioned new systems of thought using constellations of familiar deities as their raw elements. Zeus was known throughout the Greek world as the king of the gods, so the Orphic writers affixed the title of creator to his name. But there was a problem: everyone knew that Zeus had not created the cosmos; he was merely the latest in a succession of ruler gods, preceded in his role by Kronos and Ouranos. How could he be the creator?

The Orphics offered an ingenious, if paradoxical, solution. A marginal deity called Phanes-Eros was repurposed as the creator of heavens and earth. The cosmic scepter passed from him to Night, Ouranos, Kronos, and Zeus, with Night providing counsel to each successive ruler. Upon taking the celestial throne, Zeus swallowed up the entire cosmos, including Phanes-Eros, and by so doing he became the creator he had always been, rebirthing the universe through himself. With this development Zeus became closer in nature to the God of Genesis; a radical departure from the Homeric cosmology in which the gods overthrew one another in a potentially endless succession and little thought was paid to ontology.

There was also something vaguely analogous to the concept of “original sin” in Orphic thought. The Orphic writers taught that Dionysus, the son of Zeus and Persephone, was to succeed his father as ruler of the universe. But while Zeus was away, possibly at the instigation of a jealous Hera, the Titans distracted the infant with baubles, slew him, cut his body into pieces, and ate his flesh. His heart was preserved by Athena, and with it Zeus was later able to resurrect the slain deity. A wrathful Zeus turned the Titans to ash with his lightning, and from these ashes emerged the human race. The human being is thus a composite of Titanic (bodily, unclean) and Dionysiac (divine, pure) elements, and the object of the Orphic religious life is to cultivate the kernel of divinity within oneself and to shed the grossness of one’s corporeal veneer. The Dionysian ritual of the omophagia, the tearing apart and eating of the raw flesh of a sacrificial animal that represented the murdered god, was a means of communion with the divine and ritual purification; but the Orphics modified this practice by arguing against the need for animal sacrifice and positing instead that total purity could be achieved, and divinization realized, by living a peaceful and ascetic life.

The Orphics abstained from eating meat, avoided the killing of any living creature, and renounced all bodily pleasures as fundamentally degrading. By purifying themselves in this manner, practitioners sought to progress through a long cycle of birth, death, and purgation, and ultimately to transcend their corporeality and achieve godhood through union with Dionysus, their ancestor and savior. This salvation was entirely individualist in nature; the Orphic initiate was akin to the solitary buddha, focused on his own escape with little concern for the lost souls trapped in the circle of birth and death.

Orphism likely served as a drawbridge between traditional Greek paganism and Christianity. The parallels between Orphic and Christian theology are indeed striking: the notion of a savior god to whom one must be assimilated; the idea of religion as a comprehensive way of life, to which one must experience a deep spiritual conversion, rather than a disconnected series of cultic practices; the concepts of a creator god and an inherited state of fallenness; the promise of salvation and eternal bliss for the initiated and punishment for the unrighteous. These similarities both piqued and irritated the early Christians, but it also likely primed the Greek mind to receive a new revelation and adopt a new life of conversion. Thus did world-famed Orpheus serve as a precursor of One to come.

[AC · Rating 2 out of 5]

Nice book; good -- even (in part) a thrilling read. Only problem is -- it is wrong.

If you're interested in this topic, you must read Ivan Linforth's Arts of Orpheus -- which is a masterpiece. Unfortunately, it cannot really be read by a reader who does not have Greek.

That is a great advantage with Guthrie -- you don't need to know anything to read it; and precisely what is wrong with so much Classical scholarship today.

[Daniel Chaikin · Rating 4 out of 5]

48. Orpheus and Greek Religion : A Study of the Orphic Movement by W. K. C. Guthrie
with an introduction by Larry J. Alderink (1993)
Published: 1935, revised 1952
format: 326 page hardcover
acquired: from library
read: Jul 24 - Aug 4
rating: 4 stars

This book was difficult for me, and I'm left wondering how much I got out of it, and of what use any of it was. As I understand Orphism was a religion and a philosophy of life that is basically lost to history. We think it led to an ascetic life for its most devout followers. We think it has core texts that are now lost. (although the Derveni papyrus, found after this book, appears to be one of these texts.) We think it influenced Pythagoras and his followers to a great degree, and we think we see its influence in many other places. Aeschylus and Euripides refer to it both directly and discretely. Aristophanes makes fun of it, discretely. Plato criticizes it heavily, but also has a strongly mystical side that seems to have been heavily influence by Orphism, in striking ways, although never directly acknowledged. He is Guthrie's main evidence of the the significance of Orphism. And the short section on Plato is the most fascinating and most moving in the book. And, finally, we know the Neoplatonists of the Roman era found Orphism very signifcant...but we don't know how much their Orphism had anything to do with the 6th-century Orphism that would lead to Pythagoras and Plato.

"Having taken the plunge into this dark and torturous labyrinth, what thread are we going to catch hold of in order to make our way back to where there is at least a patch daylight on which we can fix our eyes amid the surrounding gloom?"

Orpheus, was, of course, the musician whose lyre charmed the underworld and who almost got his dead bride, Eurydice, back. He was much more than this, though, and the Eurdice story is much younger than other Orphic stories. In Thrace he had given up women (although the homosexual element is only implied. He was asexual) and lured the men to him with his music. Thracian women in a jealous Dionysian frenzy tore him apart...and yet his dismembered head continued to sing.

The full details of the religion had a lot of oddball characteristics, and had its own cosmologies, inconsistent among themselves. These were inconsistent with Hesiod and Homer, but still had many parallels with them, and with other eastern mythologies. Despite the above, Ophism was closely associated with Dionysos/Bacchal worship, and is historically viewed as a civilizing force on these worshippers. It's worth a moment to consider where this comes from. Here is Guthrie's take on the common impression of the festival worshiping Dionysos - the Bacchante:

"The worshippers trail dancing over the mountains, using various means to induce in themselves the condition desired, namely 'madness ' or ecstasy. They utter loud cries, they make music with flutes and cymbals. Arrived at the culminating pitch of frenzy, they tear and eat raw an animal victim. Dionysos appeared to them in the form of a bull. The ultimate aim was union with the god, by the attachment of ecstasy and the sacred meal to become oneself a Bakchos. "

Looking at my notes, which are actually brief, I was surprised to find that the boring introduction by Larry J. Alderink was the clearest part for me of the whole book. From there I get some apt summaries:

"Viewing Orphism as a reform of Dionysiac energy in the direction of Apllonian sanity allows us to focus on the two deities who are polar opposites yet mutually attracting in Orphism. "

...

"On Guthrie's interpretation, Orphic writers sifted through popular religious attitudes to organize their own set of beliefs, at the center of which was the myth of the dismemberment of Dionysos by the Titans, the revenge Zeus took by striking the Titans with lightning, and finally the birth of human beings from the smoldering ashes. Eschatological doctrines could easily be derived from such a myth: human nature, derived from Titanic actions, is evil, but escape from an evil present is possible through proper ritual practices and a strenuous ascetic life. "

It seems Orphism was an oddball in Greek religious life that was hard to reconcile for most Greeks. Its ideas of original corruptness and a striving for a better afterlife have some striking parallels with Christianity.

As for Guthrie himself, reading him was interesting in many ways. First, although he is difficult (partially because of the topic), he has a charm that is hard to find these days. One can imagine the text as a lecture given by a well spoken expert. Also, his writing is early enough that he has to deal with a lot of proof of the basics, the kind of stuff that just gets put into citations in modern books. So, he does a lot of the fundamental reasoning of the facts of his day, often tearing apart his predecessors. And, what comes out of that is a really nice methodology of working with limited facts and constructing from it an argument of great value than those source elements. I can't say I recommend him or this dated book to a reader who is just a bit curious on Orphism, but it is nice to know it was there and served a part of the making of our historical reconstruction.

[William Bies · Rating 4 out of 5]

Why should anyone care about an ancient religious movement such as that of the Orphics, dating to the late Iron Age in mainland Greece and Ionia? Every expression of religiosity is germane, needless to say, to the human condition, and Orphism (in particular) reveals, without remedy, the tendency to doubt to which we all are subject.

W.K.C. Guthrie, author of the present work (originally published in London in 1935; second edition,1952) was born a classicist in 1906 and became author of A History of Greek Philosophy in six volumes (Cambridge University Press, 1962–1981). His study of Orpheus has been reissued in 1993 by the Princeton University Press under the label, Mythos: The Princeton/Bollingen Series in World Mythology, furnished with a somewhat mechanical foreword by Larry J. Alderink in the sense that he confines himself to paraphrase of what Guthrie does rather than prepare the reader to engage the text itself. For the latter, see Guthrie’s own preface to the 1932 edition.

The extant record concerning Orphism is fragmentary and, at that, widely dispersed across more than a millennium's worth of texts, so has to be supplemented with speculative reconstructions. To these one may add the testimony of the human heart, after the Fall. Unfortunately, Guthrie’s text is a little oblique if one merely wishes to wrest a conspectus of the Orphic movement from it, without all the apparatus of classical scholarship and controversy. Certainly, at any rate, Guthrie’s occasionally pointed construal of the historical record and literary evidence makes for heady reading. Yet, with editorial help all but non-existent in this Bollingen reprint, many of Guthrie’s sallies will be hard to judge for us who stand at a remove from the old debates.

1) Orphism versus Olympianism, a preliminary sketch

Right from the start a declamatory and pleonastic style comes to the fore much more so than in Guthrie’s later history of philosophy. Remember that the author was a young man as of this writing; it is indeed notable that by the time he came to pen his history he had effaced the defect—Walter Kauffman (another classicist with whom many readers will be familiar, ensconced at Princeton rather than at Cambridge) never manages to reach such a stage of maturation.

A first question to ponder concerns whether, in the minds of Greek contemporaries, Orpheus was just a personification of a legendary musician or does he also possess a mystical side? A philologist would always presume the latter, but can Guthrie the classicist really tell the difference anyway? It proves of interest that Orpheus might well be not merely a mythological figure! On the plane of theory, for Guthrie there could be no strictly mythopoietic origin of the figure of Orpheus. The idea that the mythical figure of Orpheus may be rooted in the memory of an actual human being can be associated with fellow classicist Jane Harrison [p. 4], but for Guthrie this possibility need not rule out a religious aspect, as (one supposes) Harrison herself takes for granted; the latter adduces the example of Moses, whom everyone knows as the great law-giver to the Hebrews yet who, in order to be able to fulfill a law-giving function, had first to become adept at mystical prayer and prophecy. For scripture itself harbors no reserve as to Moses’ unique status (cf. Deuteronomy 34:10, since that time, no prophet has arisen in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face).

Orphism dogmatizes certain popular beliefs about judgment and life after death,

But much more was necessary if the Orphic was to become a bakchos in the fullest and highest sense. He must be taught the deep significance that lay behind it all, and that significance was revealed in the sacred writings. [p.155]

Concise paraphrase: the age of Phanes = intelligible world succeeded by the age of Zeus = world of matter and sense (in a Neoplatonic interpretation), but as Guthrie rightly observes, such a distinction would have been otiose in the early period. Guthrie deliberately shows off his scholarship here, as if preening, in a prelude to the main exposition of the theogony in outline (reminiscent of twenty-first-century debates over what happened before the big bang). The role of time is central:

From this it follows that the human interest with which the Orphic poem ends is entirely lacking in Hesiod, and his theogony is divorced from ideas of good and evil. Hesiod’s narration keeps us in an atmosphere of clear, cold daylight: it is a straightforward account of plain, if miraculous facts. The Orphic poems are pervaded with a sense of the mystery and paradox of life, from their preoccupation with the eternal question—how shall all be one yet each thing apart?—to their culmination in the revealing of our own half-divine, half-earthly nature, with the complete change of outlook, the new obligations and the undreamed-of yearnings which that revelation imparts. In short, the fundamental difference between the two systems lies here: the one could never be made the doctrinal basis of a religious life; the other both could be and in fact was. [p. 84]

Treating of Orphism versus Pythagoreanism and Milesians, Guthrie unthinkingly adopts John Burnet’s rationalistic standpoint:

Now in trying to satisfy this curiosity, every Greek, were he Orphic theologos, Pythagorean mathematician or Ionian physicist, made the same fundamental assumption, the assumption that there must be a unity somewhere behind or beneath the manifold phenomena of the world. [p. 221]

Guthrie follows up with some good points on Heraclitus, makes short work of Parmenides, eschews to examine Empedocles very closely since already treated in chapter five and, again, dismisses any connection between Anaxagoras and Orphism. He criticizes (in voci the Neoplatonists as defenders of paganism against) Christianity as a ‘mere external relationship between man and God’ whereas Orphism offers a ‘real spiritual kinship as opposed to a relation as of master and servant, or, as in Homeric genealogies, of physical son and physical father’ [p. 73]. The tone somewhat ironical about these also, where does Guthrie himself stand? Nonetheless, it proves interesting that we can reconstruct from such data fairly well what the Orphics must have believed doctrinally, but what remains elusive is to gather an impression of the moment such religious beliefs would have had for their devotees.

Relation with respect to literature in Aeschylus, Pindar but mainly Plato and Aristotle. Plato sees in the Orphic writings an anchor for his rationalistic speculations, such as his doctrine of anamnesis [cf. pp. 238-244]. The hard-nosed Aristotle, on the other hand, could scarcely tolerate Orphic woolliness [cf. 244-246]. For Orphics, the potential is prior to the actual while the reverse is the case for Aristotle [p. 246].

There follow a few good points on the historical causes behind the appeal of Oriental mystery cults in the post-classical age: ‘...thus the interaction of Greek and Oriental religions, the result of the new political expansion, gave immense impetus to syncretism...and ends by paving the way for monotheism’ [p.250]. Lastly, ‘here is perhaps the most striking difference between Christianity and Orphism or any of the mystery-religions among which it was born, that it taught a positive ethic and made that the kernel of its message. The Orphic religion was purely selfish’ [p. 269].

2) Why Orphic religion poses an ever-present temptation

Consider by contrast the almost a-religious character of Norse mythology. Typically one says the same thing about Olympian religion, an opinion this recensionist would rather contest. All the same, the Orphic mind-set taps into a vein of desperation, perhaps more so than ever in view of current events. This would be, basically, the inverse of what Paul says about hope, the ‘anchor our souls have’ (Hebrews 6:19)—‘Now, faith is the assurance of what we hope for and the certainty of what we do not see’ (Hebrews 11:1).

The Orphic inverts the proper procedure, by starting with a lack of trusting confidence in God’s goodness (whence also the goodness of the created order). What happens when Orphism grades over into the Dionysiacal? One usually would turn to Euripides, The Bacchae for a characteristic of what devotion to the decidedly non-Olympian Dionysius consists in, but this would be something of a red herring in connection with Orphism per se. For Guthrie, in an interesting though elliptical passage suggests that the popular view found in Euripides is incomplete in that Orphics would have recognized it as falling short of what they themselves sought in the Dionysiacal rites [p. 194]. What then could this latter be? ‘The legends of Kore and the mythology of Eleusis were not foreign to the Orphic writings’ [p. 153]. There follow a page and a half on the Eleusinian mysteries (in Guthrie’s a little bit jaunty and arch tone). Scholars will forever speculate on what the esoteric teaching conveyed by the Eleusinian rites may have been (the ancient sources are surprisingly coy in keeping the secret), but the Orphics who participated in them would have seen in it a symbol of the divine life to the restoration of which their asceticism was directed.

3) Orphism versus Christianity

For Guthrie’s take, consult his bullet-like enumeration:

Looking back like this, we are struck not only by contrasts with the prevailing religious type of fifth-century Greece, but no less by resemblances with Christianity. Features which it seems at first sight to have in common are these, the idea of conversion, and of religion as a way of life, original sin, communion, and parts of its eschatology. [p. 207]

Next, we must situate the Orphic movement of the sixth century BC with respect to the later Gnostic movement from the second century AD onwards (a closer comparison than that to Zoroastrianism). What Orphists and Gnostics have in common is that they both forget the precedence of praxis over theoria (cf. Walther Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament in two volumes (English trans., Westminster Press Old Testament Library, 1957–1967; our reviews here resp. here), vide Deuteronomy 6:4-5. What Gnostics enlarge the scope of the Orphic attitude with would be the lugubrious conviction that the creator God is evil (Eichrodt, op. cit., vol. II, p. 108), in as much as the concept of creation was unknown to Orphic devotees in Greece.

For one who has not been seduced by dismal Gnostic antinomianism, praxis is not indeed opposed in principle to theoria, but rather should embody the latter in accord with our summons from God. In consideration of the times and the scant leisure afforded most everyone these days, it will not be amiss, in this context today—Ascension Thursday—, to quote the footnote from a letter this recensionist wrote to his good friend, Iuliana Petrescu on December 19, 2018:

Everyone finds himself immersed in his own personal drama, which is but a tiny thread woven into the tapestry of salvation history. The early stage of life, from childhood to the threshold of adulthood, builds up to the critical decision in which one embraces and commits to one’s vocation. However many peripeties may intervene in the intermediate years, the denouement will be one’s entry into heaven, provided one has been blessed with the grace of final perseverance. What confers on the drama its piquancy is precisely this heavenly destination, which organizes everything that tends towards it into the form (Gestalt) God wishes it to have and for which he creates the human being in the first place. I hypothesize that this statement of mine constitutes a natural characterization of what the medieval mystics mean by the ‘apex of the soul’ (apex animae). Bonaventure, a keener scholastic theologian, would have termed it the apex mentis, which must be more correct from a philosophical point of view….Jesus has something surprising to say about this question in the readings for the liturgy on Sunday, November 4th this year [2018]. The first reading was the ancient formulation of Israelite monotheism from the Pentateuch, ‘And hence, if, throughout your lives, you fear YHWH your God and keep all his laws and commandments, which I am laying down for you today, you will live long, you and your child and your grandchild. Listen, then, Israel, keep and observe what will make you prosperous and numerous, as YHWH, God of your ancestors, has promised you, in giving you a country flowing with milk and honey. Listen Israel: YHWH our God is the one, the only YHWH. You must love YHWH your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength. Let the words I enjoin on you today stay in your heart’ (Deuteronomy 6:2-6). The gospel reading was from Mark, ‘One of the scribes who had listened to them debating appreciated that Jesus had given a good answer and put a further question to him, “Which is the first of all the commandments?” Jesus replied, “This is the first: Listen, Israel, the Lord our God is the one, the only Lord, and you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: You must love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these.” The scribe said to him, “Well spoken, Master; what you have said is true, that he is one and there is no other. To love him with all your heart, with all your understanding and strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself, this is far more important than any burnt offering or sacrifice.’ Jesus, seeing how wisely he had spoken, said, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” And after that no one dared to question him any more’ (Mark 12:28b-34). Notice how, strikingly, Jesus inserts on his own authority into the words of scripture, ‘with all your mind’. Here, what translates into English as ‘mind’ must be ‘nous’ in Greek, often rendered as ‘intellect’ in English (I wonder what Aramaic word Jesus could have used that Mark put as ‘nous’ in Greek). Anyway, if one were to adopt the traditional Hellenistic graded divisions, the sequence would be heart, soul, intellect, with intellect the highest element in man. Jesus appears to agree so far, but then the sequence continues with strength. How could there be something higher and closer to God than the intellect, and why is it strength? I’ve been pondering for six weeks what these scriptural passages are saying to us. As far as I’ve gotten thus far, it’s evident that strength isn’t quite the same thing as power, which theoretically belongs to God alone.

Aside, the actual word employed by the NT at this locus for ‘mind’ is δɩανοίας = state of mind or way of thinking, thoughts, intention, purpose, faculty of thought, intelligence, understanding, intellect (in Aristotle), which derives from δɩα- = through + νοίας, from νους = mind of gods or humans, as the seat of thought and perception (in Homer) = mind, reason as a creative principle in the universe (in Aristotle). To complete the thought, it will not be supererogatory to affix here its immediate sequel:

This point is very important, though rarely, if ever, acknowledged. For it implies that the apex of the soul serves as the conduit through which information flows into the created person under the supervision of the Holy Spirit. Here, we must understand ‘to inform’ in its etymological sense deriving from the Latin, where ‘in-’ means ‘into’ and ‘form’ stands for ‘formare’, which is a verb indicating the action of imparting form. Gregory of Nyssa was the first theologian to conceive of the infinitude of God (Duns Scotus was the medieval scholastic most associated with an emphasis on this divine attribute). In as much as we are to become ‘partakers of the divine nature’ (2 Peter 1:4), we human beings are destined to take on the robes of infinity ourselves as well: ‘The nature of souls and of angels does not know limits, and nothing stops their respective natures from progressing to the infinite’ (Gregory of Nyssa). Progressing to the infinite = welcoming the splendorous form = accepting one’s calling from God. Resplendence is the proper state of the resurrected bodies.

4) Olympianism versus Orphism, concluding statement

First, a string of quotations from Guthrie:

There is no Chronos in Hesiod, none of the curious second beginning of all things within the body of Zeus, above all none of the story of Dionysos and the Titans. From this it follows that the human interest with which the Orphic poem ends is entirely lacking in Hesiod, and his theogony is divorced from ideas of good and evil. Hesiod’s narration keeps us in an atmosphere of plain, if miraculous, facts. [p. 84]

Orphism was a religion with a belief in immortality and in posthumous rewards and punishments. So far so good. But it had a more individual doctrine than that. Hades, with its prospect of torment or feasting, was not the end. There was also the doctrine of the circle of birth, or cycle of births, and the possibility of ultimate escape from reincarnation to the state of perfected divinity. [p. 164]

The experience of conversion to a new life was one to which the general Hellenic mind was not prone, any more than the submission to an absolute external authority in matters of belief. [p. 206]

Indeed, we could say that Olympianism is the more communal and civic-minded, as can be seen with its votive offerings and temple dedications, while Orphism is the more oriented to the solitary individual and his spiritual exigency. It were remonstrable, however, to lower oneself to eking out a disgruntled existence as a misanthrope and antitheist, when the high road of an active and loving engagement with others purveys to us instead the hopeful prospect of treading a pilgrimage to eternal life (rather than to a reabsorption into the divinity). Thus, the Orphic spiritual temperament, for all its sad finery, is to be shunned as a dangerous trap.

A notice on Guthrie’s scholarship—impeccable, if this mean but knowledge of the source texts; yet simultaneously rather questionable and unreliable, if it mean also knowledge of man’s heart and its perpetual aspirations. Four stars deserved for the wealth of material proffered, if not for the defective quality of the author’s grasp of religion per se.

[David Sarkies · Rating 4 out of 5]

Exploring the Mystery Religions
4 November 2011

I haven't read many books on the mystery religions and even less on Christianity and mystery religions, but while the focus of this book is not to compare religions, it is very difficult to explore even one of the multitude of ancient mystery religions and not find one self looking over at Christianity and seeing the similarities. As mentioned, this book is not on the subject of comparative religion but rather exploring the Orphic Mysteries as they existed in Classical Athens (around 4th Century BC) and, with the very limited information that we have available, looking at the theology of this particular cult.

The good thing about Gutherie is that he tries to be very objective, though in writing this book you get the impression that he is not hostile to the Judeo-Christian faith, and accepts the historicity of Jesus Christ. In fact, it is the historicity of Jesus Christ that he uses as proof of the existence of Orpheus, though we must remember that unlike Christ, whose existence is confirmed through documents that were written within 50 years of his death, that most of the documents that we have that support an historical Orpheus are at least 500 years after his purported existence. Unlike Christ, the real Orpheus has been lost to mythology and we are unlikely to be able to learn the truth about him beyond the myths.

Orpheus was a bard that legend says was taught the gift of music on Mount Parnasus near Delphi in Central Greece. His gift of music was said to be so powerful that he was able to use it to tame wild beasts, and images show him sitting among animals playing his harp. The legend has it that his wife was killed on their wedding day when she was wondering through the fields and was bitten by a snake. In response Orpheus descended into the House of Hades and bargained with the god of the underworld to release her. This he did, but on one condition, that he could not look upon her until they had both returned to the surface. When Orpheus had returned to the surface he turned around to see her, but because she had not yet passed the threshold, she was whisked away never to be seen again. Orpheus is said to have then rejected women, and created a cult restricted only to men, and while he lasted a while, he was finally caught by a group of women and torn apart.



The concept of tearing apart is a common theme in the ancient world. Osiris was torn apart by his brother Set, Dionysius was torn apart (and was resurrected as was Osiris), and a number of Dionysius' enemies (such as Pentheus in the Bacchae) were also torn apart. I guess this is where we get the saying 'to be torn limb from limb'. Not really the most pleasant way to go if I do say so myself, but that is a digression. The other interesting this about this book is how they explore the eschatological (end times) and soteralogical (doctrine of salvation) in application to the Orphic religion. It is suggested that Christianity is the only faith with a Teleological view of the world (that is history moves from a definite beginning to a definite end) however this does not seem to be the case. Putting Islam aside, not all of the ancient religions had a cyclical view of history (that is that history moves in cycles but the end always comes back to the beginning). Further Christianity is not necessarily the only faith that looks at a means of salvation, or even having a personal relationship with a deity. However, unlike Christianity, a number of the cults did believe in reincarnation, but not strictly in the cyclical sense but in a sense where there is an ultimate move to an end point.

This book is much more of an academic text book and can be difficult going, especially when Guthrie quotes in Greek, Latin, German, and French. Okay, my Greek is reasonable however I am not a linguist and this quoting in other languages does make the book difficult to follow, but then being an academic text makes it slow reading anyway. However, that does not mean that it is a bad book, but probably not one that one would sit down and casually read. However, objective, non-anti-christian books on the topic of mystery religions are hard to find, especially since many of the authors in this field use this topic to attack Christianity and attempt to undermine the historicity of Christ. If there is one final thing I can say about this book is that it is the only book that I have read that uses the word 'eschatology' outside of a Christian context.

[Jesse Whyte · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is fine. A bit dated, in terms of its approach now, but its fine. It only suffers from the fact that it isn't as awesome as Kerenyi's approach. I feel like it lacks the kind of clean structure, crystal clear scholarship, and the lucid, brilliant prose that makes Kerenyi's work so accessible and still so rich. But it's fine. Really, the only academic quality work on Orpheus that I've found. Why is that?

[Kevin Fitzpatrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Somewhere near the terminus of this flawed but interesting book, the author, W.K.C. Guthrie, introduces the reason why Aristotle would have rejected the main tenets of the subject of the book, Orphic thought: like all mysticisms, it asserts the "potential" primary position over the "actual," and is thus invalid. Being a follower of Aristotle, I must say that this colored my view of the validity of the thought explored in the book. However, having given that caveat, the book itself, even though it is somewhat slow in parts, rises above its flawed assumptions, and, like the immortal soul in Orphic thought, achieves a sort of purity and grandeur, removing its earthly flaws. This is particularly true of Professor Guthrie's discussion of Cretan Dionysian rituals and Plato's rich treatment of Orphic thought. So, overall, this book should be read for its rigorous research, depth of purpose, and the general hope that it gives that, like an ancient devotee of Orphism, we too can rise above our Earthly, "Titan" nature and, metaphorically at least, touch the stars!

[Kurt R. · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you have any affinity for esoteric religions, Greek myths or ancient wisdom. This volume is unmatched on the topic of Orphism. Aside from the detailed accounts it also contains a multitude of references that can be followed up on to get deeper into the field. Well written and illustrated at times this is a great read.

[Baran Karagülleoğlu · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a philosophy student giving attention to Orpheus gave me lighted road to understand Greek thought.

[Arthur George · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent analysis. A little dated but still thought provoking and really an essential book for anyone seriously researching the subject.

[Nick Mather · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an older text, originally published in 1952, that examines the Orphic mystyery tradition in quite some depth. It is more of a source book for scholars rather than a text that is accessible to anyone interested in Orphism (though they may find much of interest - though the lay reader will likely be frustrated by the use of Greek, German and French without any translation offered - it is assumed the reader knows these languages). Guthrie does an exceptional job, examining the various myths of Orpheus, comparing Orphism to other Greek religious expressions (particularly the Dionysian mystery cults) and Greek philosophy (both pre-Socratic and post-Socratic).

[Wilhelmina · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5. Fascinating but dated.

[Maan Kawas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book about Orpheus and Orphism, so informative and interesting! I highly recommend it!