The Canon · No. 021
Orphism & Pythagoreanism
The Greek mystic underground
c.6th c. BCE – c.4th c. CE · Classical Mediterranean · Extinct · Greece, southern Italy, Sicily
III. THE AXIAL AGE — c.900 – 200 BCE
How many
None as such; absorbed into Platonism and thence into Christianity.
Who began it
Orpheus, the mythical singer who went into the underworld for Eurydice, is the claimed authority for Orphism — a pseudonymous attribution, not a historical founder. Pythagoras of Samos (c.570–495 BCE) is historical, though almost everything told about him is legend; he founded a communal, secretive religious-philosophical order at Croton in southern Italy.
What it is for
To escape the body and the cycle of rebirth through purity, knowledge and initiation. This is a minority Greek current that looks startlingly Indian, and whether there was contact is an old and unsettled question.
What it worships
Dionysus Zagreus, torn apart by the Titans and reborn — the central Orphic myth. Persephone as queen of the dead who can grant release. The Pythagoreans revered number itself as the substance of reality.
What it holds
The body is a tomb — soma sema, a pun the Orphics made central. Humanity is formed from the soot of the blasted Titans who ate Dionysus, and therefore carries both a Titanic (evil) and Dionysiac (divine) inheritance; this is one of the ancient world's few doctrines of inherited guilt. Metempsychosis: the soul transmigrates through many bodies, animal as well as human, until purified. Pythagoras added that all is number, that the cosmos is harmonically ordered, and — reportedly — recognised a friend's voice in a barking dog.
What it does
Vegetarianism, strictly, on grounds of kinship with animals. Abstention from beans, for reasons the ancients themselves could not agree on. Linen rather than wool clothing. Initiation rites and purification. Communal property and secrecy among the Pythagoreans, with a probationary silence for new members. Recitation of hymns and the memorisation of instructions for the journey after death.
After death
The gold leaves are the key evidence: thin inscribed sheets buried with initiates in southern Italy, Crete and Thessaly from the 5th century BCE, giving directions for the underworld. They tell the dead which spring to avoid (the one by the white cypress, which is Lethe, forgetfulness) and which to drink from, and what to say to the guardians: I am a child of Earth and starry Heaven, but my race is heavenly. Correct recitation secures release from the wheel of rebirth and a place among the blessed. This is a password-based salvation, dependent on knowledge, and it is the direct ancestor of Gnostic ascent literature.
Its texts
Orphic Hymns and theogonies (mostly fragmentary or late); the Derveni Papyrus (c.340 BCE, the oldest surviving European manuscript, an allegorical commentary on an Orphic poem); the gold leaves; Pythagorean material preserved second-hand in Plato, Aristotle, Iamblichus and Porphyry.
Its branches
Feeds Platonism, Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, Hermeticism and, indirectly, all subsequent Western body-soul dualism.
Of note
If you want to know why Western Christianity talks about an immortal soul escaping the body — an idea absent from the Hebrew Bible, which speaks of bodily resurrection — the answer runs through this entry.
Its timeline
- c.570–495 BCE Pythagoras; the Croton community, which briefly governed the city and was then violently destroyed.
- c.5th c. BCE Earliest gold leaves.
- c.340 BCE Derveni Papyrus, carbonised on a funeral pyre and recovered in 1962.
- c.399–347 BCE Plato absorbs the immortal soul, its imprisonment in the body, transmigration and post-mortem judgment, and makes them respectable philosophy. This is the transmission route that matters.
- c.3rd c. CE Neoplatonism carries the package forward.
- c.4th–5th c. CE Christian theologians inherit the immortal soul from Plato rather than from the Hebrew Bible, where it is not to be found.
Sources
Not yet checked against named sources. This entry is the house's reading; until it is checked, treat each claim as unverified. Correct it, with a source.