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Ο Ορφέας και η αρχαία ελληνική θρησκεία
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...
(από http://www.greekbooks.gr/books/filoso...
448 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1934
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About the author
W.K.C. Guthrie
72 books51 followersWilliam 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.
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April 25, 2021
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.
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.
August 31, 2011
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.
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.
August 6, 2016
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. "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.
...
"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. "
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.
March 24, 2016
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.
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.
April 9, 2014
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?
February 4, 2018
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!
December 19, 2021
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.
June 7, 2022
As a philosophy student giving attention to Orpheus gave me lighted road to understand Greek thought.
October 12, 2023
Excellent analysis. A little dated but still thought provoking and really an essential book for anyone seriously researching the subject.
August 5, 2011
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).
February 27, 2015
3.5. Fascinating but dated.
July 15, 2019
Excellent book about Orpheus and Orphism, so informative and interesting! I highly recommend it!
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