
The myth of Orpheus,
served as a storehouse of mythological data, the hymns and Orphic poetry
containing a wide range of mythological thinking which was recited in
mystery-rites and purification rituals. There is little know about the
original Thracian "Orphic Mysteries", rituals but through history
Orpheus is a god of love and death whose adherents valued esoteric
knowledge and an ascetic life as a path for their soul to achieve a
higher level in the next life. Orpheus, although known as a priest of
both Apollo and Dionysus, was not particularly popular with the Greeks,
whose preference for the Dionysian carnavals of rebirth and wine to
the stories of afterlife and remonstrations against sin is aptly
demonstrated by the abundance of art stilling surviving more than a
great age later. The Greek initiations,
[Elysian, which featured a guided path into the archetypal world
of the collective conscious we
The cult of Dionysus was more simple, primitive,
elemental, spontaneous, and emotional. That of Orpheus was more
elaborate, developed, controlled, and intellectualistic. Still, when all
is said, the two systems had much in common. Both centered in the same
god, Dionysus. Both aimed at the same goal, immortality through
divinity. Both sought to attain that goal by prescribed rites and
ceremonies. Both made a strictly individualistic appeal and were highly
developed along the lines of personal experience. But Orphism fostered
an ascetic rule of life that was the exact opposite of Dionysian
license, and developed an elaborate theology of a highly speculative
character. In brief, Orphism represented a reformed Dionysianism.
The name Orpheus does not occur in Homer or Hesiod,
but he was known in the time of Ibycus (c. 530 BC). Pindar (522—442 BC)
speaks of him as “the father of songs”. Aristophanes, Euripides, Plato,
and Pindar, make up the bulk of classical writing the Orphic
mysteries There are also references to Orphism from later pagan
writers, Strabo, Pausanias, and Plutarch. Orphism was in active
competition with Christianity during much of the time of the Roman
Empire.
According to a Late Antique summary of Aeschylus's
lost play Bassarids, Orpheus at the end of his life disdained the
worship of all gods save the sun, whom he called Apollo. One early
morning he ascended Mount Pangaion (where Dionysus had an oracle) to
salute his god at dawn, but was torn to death by Thracian Maenads for
not honoring his previous patron, Dionysus. Here his death is analogous
with the death of Dionysus, to whom therefore he functioned as both
priest and avatar.
The Orphic first, and the Pythagorean later, believed
in the transmigration of souls from body to body. On leaving the corpse
at death, the soul was normally doomed to inhabit the bodies of other
men or of animals even, passing on through a chain of physical
existences until finally purified. An Orphic fragment preserved by
Proclus reads: "Therefore the soul of man changing in the cycles of time
enters into various creatures; now it enters a horse, again it becomes a
sheep . . . . or as one of the tribe of chill serpents creeps on the
sacred ground." Reincarnation, like dualism, was an important item in
Orphic theology.
ESCAPING THE WHEEL OF
REBIRTH |
moral
transfiguration leads to future immortality |
Only those who "thrice had been courageous in keeping
their souls pure from all deeds of wrong" could pass by the highway of
Zeus into the tower of Cronus where the ocean breezes blow around the
Islands of the Blest." In Plato the series of three incarnations was
magnified to three periods of a thousand years each, during which the
process of purgation might be completed
The technical Orphic expression for the transmigration
of souls and their reappearance in human bodies was "rebirth" (palingenesia).
These physical rebirths, however, were what the Orphic least desired,
and to escape this weary round of reincarnation was the goal of all his
endeavor.
According
to Proclus, the salvation offered by this system was the freeing of the
spirit from the wheel of physical rebirths. In his commentary on Plato's
Timaeus, he said, "This is what those who are initiated by Orpheus to
Dionysus and Kore pray that they may attain:
'To cease from the wheel and breathe again
from ill.'"
The persistent representation of Orpheus in antiquity
was that of a reformer of Dionysiac rites. Diodorus affirmed that
"Orpheus being a man highly gifted by nature and highly trained above
all others, made many modifications in the orgiastic rites; hence they
call Orphic those rites that took their rise from Dionysus."
"Purification is by means of cleansings, and
baths and aspersions. A man must also keep himself from funerals and
marriages and every kind of physical pollution, and abstain from all
food that is dead or has been killed, and from mullet, and from the fish
melanurus, and from eggs, and from animals that lay eggs, and from
beans, and from the other things that are forbidden for those who
accomplish the holy rites of initiation."
The Orphic, like the Pythagorean, lived a life of
ceremonial cleanliness and holiness. By washing and aspersions, at once
symbolic and sacramental in character, he sought to purge away the taint
of his bodily nature, the "ancient woe" inherited from the Titans. In
life the Orphic wore garments of pure white.
It is difficult to trace the influence of
Orphism as a distinct religious movement during the Hellenistic and
later periods of Greek influence. One theory was his cult was
rejuvenated following the introduction into Roman thought by Ovid's
acclaimed publication of
Metamorphoses, which may
have been used as a school text. In
Italy, the Pythagorean brotherhood, had flourished in the south since
the beginning of the 6th century which would have made the Orphic creeds
familiar among the learned.
The Balkans:
The identity of the Balkans owes as much to its fragmented and
often violent common history as to its mountainous geography.
The region was perennially on the edge of great empires, its
history dominated by wars, rebellions, invasions and clashes
between empires, from the times of the Roman Empire to the
latter-day Yugoslav wars. The area is also known as the Balkan
peninsula as they are surrounded by the Adriatic, Ionian,
Aegean, Marmara and Black seas from the southwest, south and
southeast. The Balkan region was the first area of Europe to
experience the arrival of farming cultures in the Neolithic era.
The practices of growing grain and raising livestock arrived in
the Balkans from the Fertile Crescent by way of Anatolia, and
spread west and north into Pannonia and Central Europe.
Today the region's principal nationalities include Greeks
(11.5 million, with about 11 millions of them being in Greece),
Turks (9.2 million in the European part of Turkey), Serbs
(8.5 million), Bulgarians (7 million), Albanians
(6 million, with about 3.3 millions of them being in Albania),
Croats (4.5 million), Bosniaks (2.4 million),
Macedonian Slavs (1.4 million) and Montenegrins
(0.265 million). If Romania and Slovenia are included, then also
Romanians (26 million) and Slovenians (2 million).
Practically all Balkan countries have a smaller or larger Roma
(Gypsy) minority. |
The musical abilities of the Thracian and
Dacian tribes were noted in ancient Greek texts, and may be
continued in the strong music and dance traditions of
Bulgaria, Romania and Macedonia. Orpheus' music became
integrated into ancient Greek culture and so into east
Mediterranean culture. |
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The Rhodope Mountains : Birthplace of
Orpheus |
Orpheus is said
to have come from the Rhodopes, a mountain range
primarily in
Bulgaria, is considered one of the cradles of
European civilization. A place of
extraordinary beauty, the Rhodopes are one of
the few mountain ranges in Europe where the brown
bear and wolf still breeds. Old-growth forests are
home to deer, elk, fox, wild goat, and other rare
European species. In early spring you can see the
pink petals of Silivriak (Heberlea rhodopaensis),
the symbol of the Rhodopes, which has the unique
quality of being able to spring back to life even
after being pressed for years. Legend has it that
the flower bloomed out of the blood of Orpheus after
he was dismembered.[more at
carnaval.com/bulgaria ] |
Perperikon:
For more than a century, archaeologists searched for
the famous temple where Dionysus had an oracle in
the Holy Rhodope mountains.
The ancient Greek historian
Herodotus gives an account of the march of Xerxes'
immense army on Greece in 480 BC. As the huge
invasion force was slowly making its way along the
Aegean coast, many Thracian tribes sent envoys to
pledge their allegiance to Xerxes. Only the Satrians
[ aka Bessians], who inhabited the Rhodope, chose to
ignore him: According to Herodotus "The Satrians
however never yet became obedient to any man, so far
as we know, but they remain up to my time still
free, alone of all the Thracians. [...] These are
they who possess the Oracle of Dionysus; which
Oracle is on their most lofty mountains. Of the
Satrians those who act as prophets of the temple are
the Bessians."
Marcus Licinius Crassus, a Roman
General in Augustus' service, in 29-28 BC, when he
captured the famous Temple from the Bessians
(Bessoi) and gave it to the Odrysae,
a rival Thracian tribe. In 11 BC, a fierce war for
the Temple broke out between the two tribes, in
which the Bessians were led by the Oracle's High
Priest
Only the highest ridge of the southern Rhodope can
be seen from the Aegean coast. Beyond it, are the
low, habitable middle and eastern ranges of the
mountain which abound in archaeological remains from
various ages. Among them, the holy city of
Perperikon, the biggest megalith in Europe, is both
a geographical and a historical landmark.
Here also is the likely ruins of a great temple
complex which Perperikon and many archeologists
believe is this temple of great magnitude . |
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Fall 2004
Spring 71
ISBN: 1-882670-27-2 |
Obscure
Mystery Cult?
Gianfranco Salvatore (Spring 71) writes about the rarity of
references to Orpheus the first over the first eight centuries
of Greek literature. "barely a dozen poets who mention
Orpheus-on the average of one every 75 years and the majority of
them only hit at the details of his legend." He also point out
that among the considerable collection of Attic ceramics there
is only one depiction of Orpheus among the animals.
Thus lending credence to the Bulgarian
hullabaloo over the prominent use of Orpheus by Greek
tourism authorities |
Orphism greatest triumph
has been as an inspiration to artists and musicians who came
after his time as a worshipped cult figure. There is little
Greek art that features Orpheus from the Hellenic period and
many Greek historians do not mention him in their discussion of
the gods. There is a good possibility that the Orphic priests
traced their lineage to the Pythagoreans priesthood who before
the time of Socrates and Plato were mostly philosophers,
mathematicians and geometricians with much to say about the
transmigration of souls. |
Plato himself speaks
of them as a class of vagrant beggar-priests who would go about
offering purifications to the rich, a clatter of books by
Orpheus and Musaeus in tow (Republic 364c-d). Those who were
especially devoted to these ritual and poems often practiced
vegetarianism, abstention from sex, and refrained from eating
eggs — which came to be known as the Orphikos bios, or "Orphic
way of life". Plato did make use of Ophic ideas in his writing.
In Cratylus, the Orphic idea of the body as a prison house of
the soul (soma-sema) as well as Plato's acceptance of the Orphic
view on the transmigration of souls |
Aristophanes, who
did not hesitate to poke fun at Orphism, paid a serious tribute
to in The Frogs when the tragedian Aeschylus said of the poet
Orpheus:
"He made known to us mystic rites, and to abstain from
slaughter."
Certainly this last statement had reference to
something more than mere abstinence from animal food. At the
very least it meant that Orphic ritual laid stress on the
necessity of purification from blood, and at most it meant that
Orphism came with a gospel of abstention from murder and of
peace on earth. |
Jason & the Argonauts
 |
When the great adventurer
Jason was about to set out on his search for the Golden fleece,
Orpheus was invited to go along. Orpheus proved to be of great
help on the long journey. When the tempers of the heroes of the
ship flared up, Orpheus would sing a peaceful song and calm
those who had been arguing. Sometimes when the rowing was long
and tedious, Orpheus would begin to stroke his lyre. Then time
would seem to float by and the rowers would not feel tired and
they listened to the soft rippling music.
The time came when Jason and the Argonauts had
to sail past the dangerous isles of the Sirens, three
small, rocky islands called Sirenum scopuli. The Sirens were
beautiful creature who were part human, part bird. Their songs
were so wonderful that any person who heard them would become
enchanted. All the sailors who heard the Sirens' songs would
hurl themselves overboard and swim to the island of the Sirens'.
Lured by these strange maidens the men would die upon the jagged
rocks around the isle. But as the Argonauts came close to the
rocky island of the Sirens, Orpheus began a splendid song of his
own. The Sirens and sang beautiful songs that enticed
sailors to come to them. They then ate the sailors. When Orpheus
heard their voices, he withdrew his lyre and played his music
more beautifully than they, drowning out their music.Jason and
this crew did not listen to the Sirens and were able to sail
past the island unharmed.
While away with Jason and the Argonauts,
Orpheus' wife, Eurydice, was killed by
a snakebite.
According to Ovid, the
sirens were nymphs and the play-mates of Persephone.
They were present when she was abducted and, because they did
not interfere, Demeter changed them into birds with female faces
(Ovid V, 551). |
The Birth of
Opera
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begins with Orpheus |
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Something amazing happened 400 years ago
in Renaissance Florence. At the turn of the 17th century, in one
of Italy's greatest cultural centres, a group of intellectuals
and musicians focused their creative powers on achieving the
impossible: the resurrection of Greek tragedy. They failed, but
in the process created what we know today as opera.
The first opera was performed in Florence at the Pitti Palace.
The opera, was
Euridice.
Learn more about this first opera
here
In the year 1637 saw the opening, in Venice,
of the first public opera house. No longer would musical theater
be the exclusive domain of royalty and the court: now anyone
with the price of admission could attend.
Singers and other artistic talent were immediately drawn to
opera for it offered them new challenges and more artistic
latitude than had sacred music. |
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