Another View of the Afterlife: Mystery Religions

Major Points

Introduction of the Soul as Moral Principle
- notions of choice, purity, afterlife, immortality, morality
Communion with the gods: Titans and Dionysus
- cf. slaves of gods and blood of Kingu (Enuma Elish)
- artifacts of gods (Genesis)
Greek concern with intelligence: Metis

Recapitulation

Chaos predates order;
- is somehow explanatory of order
- this is reversed for Plato
water as first principle: most susceptible of change
- earth is not a popular element later
Eros: fourth item in the Hesiodic theogony:
- important later: Anaximander, Heraclitus, Empedocles
- strife among the principles
- political order based on justice
- mutual respect for honor (time)

Mystery Religions

a form of personal religion
- not necessarily spiritual, may be just votive
- desire for personal benefit, salvation from distress
continued success requires constant association
rituals seems to provide a catharsis: a sort of medical therapy:
- cf. telestic madness in Phaedrus used against illness
the idea of practical success is embodied in the grain imagery of the Demeter mysteries
the ultimate distress is fear of death

Who is Orpheus: poet and legend: Eurydike and the witches

Why are theologies associated with him?
Thracian reincarnation belief
- thought the soul could survive if it were kept pure
- Thracian Orpheus: sexually pure, musically gifted
- with power of prophecy after death
Digression on Muses and the wisdom of the poets
- keepers of memory: fitting
Epimenides: represents a similar tradition
- story: a Cretan: (late 6th-early 5th c)
- wrote a number of epic poems giving an Orphic cosmogony cosmogony: air and night first,
- generally seems to have an extensive theogony
- Cosmogony
  - there are various accounts
  - fr. 30 is a papyrus from about 400BC
  - fr. 29 is the golden plate from Hipponion 400BC
  - these are the earliest sources
  - others come quoted from Neoplatonics
  - tend to read Neoplatonism into their texts
    - so less reliable
  - generally they adopt a lot of Hesiodic material
    - but it is rearranged
Pherecydes
- Chronos
- the muchoi
- the marriage of Chthonie and Zas
- The presentation of the garment
- the birth of the gods by Zas/Eros the birth of Ophioneus
- the battle of the gods
the usual Orphic theology (21)
- Chronos
- Chaos/Aither
- egg
- Phanes
Derveni papyrus
Night
Ouranus (de penised: leaping into the upper air: i.e. taking his place in heaven
Kronos (wishes to mingle with his mother Rhea/Demeter/Ge) Zeus
in the Rhapsodies, Zeus swallows Phanes/Metis, perhaps equivalent to the swallowing of the phallus Orphic Egg:
- "Then great Chronos made in divine aither a silvery egg" 1. Sidonian account (Mochos): Aither and Aer and from them arose Ulomos (='ulom = 'olam eternity) he unities with himself and produces the divine craftsman Chusoros and an egg for him to open
2. Ohrmazd fashions his creation in the form of a white, round, shining fire and out of time without limit he fashions time for long autonomous: 12, 000 yrs the period of history to perfect. First 3000 yrs creation is moist like semen. Ohrmazd forms it into an egg and everything is created inside it.
Phanes is exclusively Orphic:
- modelled on Hesiodic Eros/Metis
Interpretation
- basically there are different versions of the same story
  - variations between Orphic accounts and other accounts
  - reflects the tension in an explanation by sexual reproduction
  - which imports notions of causation and priority
  - which are not always entirely clear
  - evidence of some strain in that mode of explanation
  - with Greek competition and without a canonical text, with the flow of ideas which is constant, difficulties are recognized
  - this kind of mythology does not die, it merely gets appended to the legends of mortals and the stories of the gods
  - it ceases to play the active role in explanation

The Soul

Golden Plates from tombs in Italy and Crete
Bacchic funerary practices were equated with Orphic one by Herodotus (II.81) who added they they were really Pythagorean and Egyptian.
that is, they seem to reflect, as best we can determine, a general belief in the afterlife:
gold plate;
why have these instruction at all
surely the initiants knew of them already and didn't have to be informed (it's a bit late now)
obviously intended for passers-by: an attestation of belief and a commercial for the sect
involves a choice in the underworld: it echoes the choice that the initiates have made on earth to become initiates
image of the cypress is obscure
lake of memory suggests rebirth in Plato and in Pythagoras
- but not here
- presumably countering the Odyssean view of the dead:
- gibbering shades
there are guards:
the choice goes both ways
(and this is a fact of the mysteries too: a priest may exclude an unpromising candidate)
they make a claim to parentage,
but it is hardly exclusive,
does not depend on a knowledge of Orphic cosmology
attached to belief in the heroes and the isles of the blessed (cf. Menelaus in the Odyssey)
DK 19: I have paid the penalty for unjust deeds
DK 20: "But whenever asoul leaves the light of the sun - enter on the right where one must if one has kept all the laws well and truly. Rejoice at the experience! This you have never before experienced: you have become a god instead of a man.
different view of man
- communion with the gods
- extended franchise to all humans
- from Enuma Elish: slave of gods
- from Hesiod: wretched artifact of the gods