Orpheus and Greek Religion (Mythos Books)

This book offers a rare all-facets expose of the Orpheus myth, that which first introduced the notion of returning to life after seeing the hereafter, as well as the magic of music and desires of an alternate sexuality. There is no book quite like it if Orpheus is a subject you wish to know all about.

Guthrie's tentative exploration of one of the most influential mysteries of the Ancient World, together with Eleusis, is very revealing. The author situates the origin of Orphism with a Thracean hero/singer who was adopted as founder/teacher by mystical sects and whose songs became sacred texts. Although this sects contained only a small group of devotees, some aspects of their philosophical message were taken over by Plato and influenced indirectly Christian belief. Like many other religions, Orphism's basis was man's aspiration of immortality. The sacred texts included dogmas and precepts. Dogmas were a belief in a god as a creator and supreme ruler of the universe, man's original sin, a belief that purity of life and observance of the rites would be rewarded by perfect divinity (immortality) eventually after a cycle of rebirths and that punishment awaited the uninitiated and impure. The precepts were directed towards eradication of sin through ascetism and prohibitions (e.g. meat-eating). Life was considered as a period of trial and a practise for death. It was seen as a punishment for the soul for previous sins, wherefore the soul was fettered to a body. The body was seen as a source of evil. Other important characteristics were the emphasis on free will and personal responsibility as well as misogynism. Each individual had a divine part and a part prone to sin. He had to make a choice between them. Guthrie explains clearly the crucial differences with Christianism. Orphism excluded the possibility of the resurrection of the body. It had no social ethic. It was selfish for one could save only his own soul. He also shows the difference with the Eleusian Mysteries. The latter were only a ritual, whereas Orphism was a way of life. This is a very rich book which treats also other important aspects of religion (e.g. syncretism). It contains excellent illustrations and a very interesting introduction by Larry J. Alderink. This book is an essential read for the understanding of a very influential Ancient Mystery.

This work contains excellent notes, supplements, and photographic plates, as well as illustrations in the text itself which have been taken from vases, reliefs, and other sources. Guthrie's work is an excellent source of knowledge, insight, and inspiration concerning Orpheus, this ancient figure who was poet, harmonic musician, priest, prophet, and oracular magus all in one.

I just received my book and the quality of the product is extremely low. The cover is paper, which I expected, but it was not properly cut flush with the pages. Which means the cover paper extends out beyond the pages and if you sit it on a bookshelf, then the cover paper will start to bend. Shoddy work for a book that costs $47.00! I might give it an extra star if the content is good, so I might update this in the future.

This is a heavy work that one needs preparation to read. Since I was a child I have read Greek myths, so I had a rough idea of Greek cosmogony (Chaos, Gaiai, Uranus, Cronus, etc.), the Olympian gods, and Greek heroes (Heracles, Theseus, Odysseus), but I still was often disoriented reading Guthrie's book. This doesn't mean Guthrie's book is poorly organized, but I would have been better able to understand the book in particular if I had read about Dionysus before; I have done some searching and the most promising book on Dionysus I've seen is Carl Kerényi's "Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life". Also, because Guthrie often refers to places in the Greek world like Thrace and Boeotia, the reader would be helped by maps. "Orpheus as a religious teacher was famous for three things: he was the revealer of mysteries (teletai), the theologos or singer of the gods, and the preacher of a way of life." Guthrie uses both written sources and archeological sources, and the book includes images of Orpheus on walls and vases, and descriptions by the ancient traveller Pausanias. Guthrie uses many written sources from classical Greece to late antiquity in his explanations of Orphism itself and Greek religious ideas generally. Poets and satirists: Homer, Hesiod, Aeschylus, Pindar, Aristophanes, Euripides, Phanocles, Apollonius of Rhodes, Virgil, Lucian; historians, biographers and mythographers: Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus, Strabo, Plutarch, Konon, Philostratus; Christian apologists: Athenagoras, Clement of Alexandria, Firmicus Maternus; philosophers, cosmologists and doxographers: Epimenides, Pherecydes, Empedocles, Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle, Dio Chrysostom/Favorinus, Damascius, Alexander of Aphrodisias, Diogenes Laërtius. What I care most about in Greek religion are ideas about cosmology and cosmogony. Orphism personified Time as Chronos, who was not included in Hesiod's cosmogony. Guthrie quotes Musaeus from Diogenes Laërtius: "Everything comes to be out of One and is resolved into One." Elsewhere, Guthrie states about Orphism that "The supreme ruler of the universe is to be at the same time its creator, one whose way of working resembles that of the God of Genesis rather than those of the gods of Hesiod." Guthrie describes Zeus asking Night what to do: "'Mother,' he says (a term of respect, not one implying kinship), 'highest of the gods, immortal Night, how am I to establish my proud rule among the Immortals?' Again he puts to her what for a Greek was the one eternal problem involved in the making of a universe: 'How may I have all things one and each one separate?'" Orphism and Pythagoreanism are both systems of ideas and ways of life. They both require abstaining from meat and purifying the soul. "The notion of katharsis is dependent for the Orphics on the belief in transmigration, the circle of birth, and the sharply dualistic conception of body and soul, according to which the former is no more than the tomb or prison of the latter. This doctrinal basis for their practice was accepted also by Pythagoras or his immediate followers." The great work on Pythagoreanism is Walter Burkert's "Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism".

The fact that Princetown decided to republish Guthrie’s seminal 1953 study in their Mythos series, some fourty years later, speaks for itself. The name Orpheus evokes the story of him looking back to see if Eurydice is following him out of Hades – something which he has been explicitly told not to do, is but one of the stories or legends about Orpheus; and of course there are other stories where someone is told not to look back, and they do, with fateful consequences. Guthrie comes to the view that Orphism was not so much a religion in the sense that we understand the word, but an aspect of the worship of Dionysos, complicated by the fact that Orpheus at heart belongs to the traditions of Apollo, and Apollo is not only the god of light, but also a musician. So this is about as much about Orpheus as it is about Greek Religion, from the pre-Homeric age to the eventual dominance of Christianity, and the destruction of ancient cult centers and shrines such as the one at Eleusis, whose fundamentalism saw everything un-Christian as pagan – sounds familiar doesn’t it. I found this book fascinating, not only for its erudition and its scholarship, where when academic – so to speak, differences of opinion are discussed, they are discussed very simply, without any domination by coded jargon. In fact the use of drawings and photographs in the appendix at the end, suggest a much wider intended readership that a purely academic one. Guthrie is scrupulous in not being definitive about interpretations, of the gold plates with inscriptions found in Italy, which certainly some modern writers of Orphic matters, might rhapsodise about. His aim is balance, here is the evidence, it agrees or disagrees with other apparent evidence. The long section comparing Orphic and Pythagorean thought, is quite revealing: both shared a belief in reincarnation and the immortality of the soul; both shared a vegetarian diet as one conducive to purification; cosmology, quite different, the one preferring to rely on myth; and the other, very rational and mathematical. He complains – as a scholar, about Plato sometimes being ‘vague’ about the origins of some of the stories he tells, and there is an negative undercurrent regarding the Neoplatonists, but his reference framework is the wider Greek culture. It is not just Homer and Hesiod, but Pindar and the dramatists, and even historians like Herodotus and travellers like Pausanius. This is a lot more that just a book about a Greek Cult which has a superficial resemblance to Christianity, it is an over-view of the Greek world. Excellent.