Poetry, Afterlife, and the Mysteries
This bold address to Persephone, dread mistress of the underworld, and her divine court appears, etched in gold metal, on three funerary tablets from Thurii in Southern Italy that date to the fourth century BC.Footnote 1 More than thirty similar inscribed gold leaves in total have been found deposited in graves of Dionysiac mystery initiates of the Late Classical and Hellenistic periods. They feature brief poetic texts, mostly in dactylic hexameters, making promises, boasts, and declarations for the afterlife. (A representative group of texts is appended to the end of this Introduction.) Though their specific contents vary, all reflect a shared set of extraordinary postmortem hopes: some guide initiates through the underworld, others pronounce them heroes, and some even assign them a place among the gods. They come mostly from the geographic periphery of the Greek world: principally from Western and Northern Greece and Crete, with a few from the Peloponnese. Their number continues to be augmented by new finds.Footnote 2
Many of these tablets, including the earliest, bear verse inscriptions, primarily in hexameters but interspersed with rhythmic non-hexameter language. Their texts frequently echo epic diction and style. The poetic aspect of the gold leaves is occasionally acknowledged, but rarely attracts more than passing attention.Footnote 3 When scholars juxtapose the tablets with more familiar poetic tradition, this is often done to draw a contrast between mysteries and the concerns of early Greek poetry. This book argues to the contrary that the tablets reflect not just verbal borrowings from epic hexameter diction, but an intense participation in the deeper thought patterns and ideological structures of early Greek poetry.Footnote 4 The tablets’ central themes can especially be understood as developments of the practice and ideals of Greek poetic performance culture. The three lines from Thurii quoted above already incorporate several verbal and conceptual elements derived from early Greek poetry: the boast of lineage, the claim of fellowship with the gods, and the portrayal of the initiate as a member of a privileged group all echo traditional poetic themes. The tablets also reflect an interactive dynamic analogous to that of poetic performance, in which individual performers gained credibility in the eyes of their audience and groups imagined a continued existence for themselves after death. Various modes of ritual authority and authorization no doubt played a role in private mysteries: but poetic tradition furnished Bacchic cults with their principal themes, imagery, and ideological profile and supplied much of the framework for their performance practice.
This approach opens the tablets to a range of new interpretations. It also provides a model both for the activity and expertise of initiators and an explanation for the frequent inconsistency and ambiguity in the tablet texts. Aspects of the gold leaves that have puzzled scholars become less puzzling, or puzzling in more illuminating ways, when the tablets are examined within their native performance context. As will soon become clear, this focus on poetic background brings much-needed light to the vexed question of the social context of private mysteries. The remainder of this Introduction will lay out the theoretical and evidentiary foundations of this approach, especially in relation to recent advances in scholarship on the gold tablets and private mystery religion.
Figure 0.2 Thessaly gold leaf (OF 484; fourth century BC).
Bacchic Mysteries: What Do We Know?
It is now accepted, after much debate, that the gold leaves derive from Bacchic mystery cults.Footnote 5 Dionysos in early Greece, in addition to his well-known connections with wine and theater, was a god of mystic initiations (teletai, mysteria) that promised life after death. Bacchic mysteries are mentioned as early as Herodotos and Euripides.Footnote 6 The legendary Thracian singer and poet Orpheus was recognized as the proto-founder of mysteries, and written Orphic hexameter poems served an authorizing role in private as well as sanctuary-based initiations. For this reason these cults often carry the label “Orphic” or “Orphic-Bacchic” in modern discussions.Footnote 7 Dionysos and Orpheus play an underworld mystagogic role in South Italian vase paintings of the fourth century, and a set of inscribed fifth-century mystic bone tablets unearthed from Pontic Olbia imply a similar cultic role for both the god and the singer.Footnote 8
Unlike the sanctuary-based mysteries at Eleusis and Samothrace, however, Orphic-Bacchic initiations were private rituals performed by individual ritual specialists for individual clients or small groups. Plato’s Republic paints a vivid, if hostile, picture of such rites and their practitioners. Itinerant ritual practitioners, in his description, go to the doors of the wealthy peddling various services for a fee: sacrifices and incantations to ward off divine punishments for unjust deeds, curses and spells to injure one’s enemies. To bolster the credibility of their services, they cite verses from Homer and Hesiod. Using the poetic authority of Orpheus, they also claim to purify their clients and preserve them from postmortem sufferings through rites of mystic initiation (2.364b–365a):
And they produce a babble of books by Mousaios and Orpheus, descendants, as they claim, of Selene and the Muses, according to which they make sacrifices; and they persuade not only individuals but even cities that they really can have release and purification for their wrongdoing through sacrifices and playful delights while they are still alive and equally after death. These they in fact call initiations, which release us from evils in the next world, while terrible things await those who neglect their sacrifices (trans. Loeb).Footnote 9
Theophrastos mentions Orpheus-Initiators (Orpheotelestai) to whom a superstitious man might be expected to pay frequent visits.Footnote 10 The Derveni Papyrus, a fourth-century scroll containing a fifth-century commentary on a still earlier Orphic theogony, corroborates many details from our other Late Classical evidence. In this text, an unidentified commentator gives an allegorical exegesis of the Orphic poem and critiques the practices of other private initiators. The Derveni author testifies both to the authorizing role of Orphic poems in private initiations and to the variety of uses to which such poetry could be put (on which more below).Footnote 11
Though our sources testify to a variety of content among Orphic-Bacchic cults, they also indicate a basic coherency of themes and concerns. Participants are portrayed as adherents of extreme ritual purity, sometimes abstaining from meat. They claim great antiquity for their rituals by connection with Orpheus and posit strange myths and afterlife beliefs (though often these are variants or elaborations of traditional themes).Footnote 12 The same emphases on purity and afterlife appear in the gold leaves. In these and other respects, Orphic-Bacchic phenomena show interaction with early Pythagoreanism, and the two persuasions are sometimes difficult to distinguish.Footnote 13 Bacchic cults likely featured certain characteristic mythical narratives and themes, though specifics are uncertain (on which more momentarily).Footnote 14 The gold tablets, despite the variety of their contents, reflect largely the same cluster of concerns. All groups of tablets aim to secure for initiates an exceptional or differentiated condition in the afterlife. Several emphasize purity. Nearly all describe or imagine an encounter with powers of the underworld. Some include mystic passwords (symbola) that operated as safe-conduct passes for the deceased. Tablets of different sites and text groups also articulate a kinship connection with the gods.Footnote 15 These themes are all developments of mainstream religious concerns, though their specific emphases and modes of expression vary across the corpus of tablets. Footnote 16
Ritual and Poetry: Cult as Performance Context
Recent decades have seen major shifts in our understanding of Orphism, prompted both by new evidence and by refinements of methodology. Four such developments are critical to the approach of this book: first, the reevaluation of the so-called Zagreus myth and its centrality to Orphic-Bacchic cult; second, the redefinition of Orphism as a scattered practice of individual experts rather than a coherent religious sect; third, the appearance of the Derveni Papyrus (noted above), which shows the role of poetic performance in Orphic tradition; and fourth, the analysis of Orphic-Bacchic cults as a practice of bricolage. Though it is expedient to present these developments sequentially, it will be clear that they are all aspects of a single turn in scholarship – that is, a centrifugal turn away from a uniform model of Orphism toward the manifest variety of Orphic-Bacchic cult phenomena in local contexts.Footnote 17
Remodeling Orphism: The Zagreus Paradigm and Its Limits
Not long ago, it would have been uncontroversial to define Orphic cults in terms of the so-called Zagreus myth or myth of Dionysos related in Orphic poetry. Domenico Comparetti in the late nineteenth century posited this as the defining myth of Orphism, and this interpretation continues to be carried forward in some scholarship.Footnote 18 According to this myth as it appears in later sources, Dionysos was the son of Zeus and Persephone; he was to succeed Zeus, but the Titans (perhaps with Hera’s encouragement) dismembered him and devoured his flesh; to punish them, Zeus incinerated the Titans with his thunderbolt, and from their ashes rose humanity; Dionysos was reconstituted or revived; as a consequence of their origins, the human race bears inherited guilt for the Titans’ murder of Dionysos, as well as inherited divinity from the flesh of Dionysos. Orphics performed propitiatory rituals for Dionysos and his mother Persephone to gain a better afterlife and release from punishment. All these mythic and cultic elements, Comparetti and his successors have claimed, are present or alluded to in the texts of the gold leaves. The myth in extended form is first narrated by the Neoplatonist commentator Olympiodoros in the sixth century AD, but elements appear in earlier sources.Footnote 19 On the interpretation of Comparetti, the gold tablets refer consistently to a specific myth and set of ideas and ritual practices derived from it.
The Zagreus myth is now a focus of debate, with Radcliffe Edmonds leading a challenge to the Comparettian model. Edmonds contends that the myth itself is a construct of modern scholarship that is not genuinely ancient or reflected in the tablets.Footnote 20 As with Pythagoreanism, much evidence for this Orphic myth comes via Neoplatonist intermediaries such as Olympiodoros, and these have imposed their own systems of thought on the earlier tradition.Footnote 21 In addition, modern scholars have applied Christian categories in ways that have distorted the evidence for Orphism and other ancient mystery cults. As Edmonds shows, early twentieth-century descriptions of Orphism were shaped by polemics between Protestant and Catholic Christianity.Footnote 22 The definition of Orphism in propositional terms – as a religion built around a narrative of a god who dies and is resurrected, based on sacred texts, and with doctrines of original sin and postmortem punishment, whose worshippers are united in distinctive beliefs and lifestyles – reflects a move among nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholars to imagine Orphism as a proto-Protestant reform movement in early Greek religion.Footnote 23
Though most scholars are reluctant to accept Edmonds’s outright rejection of the Zagreus myth, many of his basic critiques are valid. The Comparettian model’s virtue lies in its elegant unification of fragmentary material; but Edmonds argues persuasively that the resulting coherency of the interpretation derives more from the model than from the evidence itself.Footnote 24 Edmonds proposes instead to describe Orphism under a Wittgensteinian “family resemblance” definitional scheme. The label “Orphic,” thus understood, signifies no specific myth or doctrine, but rather was used in ancient religious discourse either to denote the poetic authorship of Orpheus or to label ritual practices for their extraordinary purity, sanctity, antiquity, or strangeness.Footnote 25 Edmonds’s approach counters the tendency to define Orphic phenomena in terms of their assumed divergence from mainstream religion – what he terms the “Orphic Exception.” This family-resemblance approach also allows for cult phenomena not explicitly attributed to Orpheus, including the gold leaves, to be described as “Orphic” without presumptively assigning to them any underlying belief system.
Edmonds’s approach is also responsive to the current state of evidence, which is much changed since Comparetti. Though aspects of Comparetti’s model, especially the role of Dionysos, have been vindicated by subsequent finds, the accumulated evidence for Bacchic cult is now much more difficult to explain through a single myth or set of beliefs. The tablets are now accepted as products of Bacchic cults, but divinities other than Dionysos and Persephone make appearances as well.Footnote 26 The fifth-century Orphic bone plates found in Olbia articulate a cultic link between Orpheus and Dionysos, but they are found in a sanctuary rather than a burial context.Footnote 27 The Derveni Papyrus, too, offers insight into private mysteries and their internal dynamics during the Classical period: yet neither the poem nor the commentator mentions Dionysos in the surviving text, and the author’s interest in poetic performance, pre-Socratic physics, and allegorical exegesis again reveals a complex engagement with his intellectual surroundings. While the newer evidence does not support the extreme skepticism of the last century, it has not wholly confirmed the views of Comparetti and his successors. Rather, discoveries have repeatedly pointed in directions unanticipated by the Comparettian model. Edmonds’s multi-factor and non-belief-based approach to Orphism is well suited to the heterogeneous phenomena it seeks to describe.
At least two important consequences follow. First, even if Edmonds’s rejection of the Zagreus myth is not accepted in its most extreme form, it is still not necessary to take the myth as an indispensable explanatory key. Even if, as seems probable, some tablets allude to the myth,Footnote 28 it need not have played an essential role in all or most Bacchic cults. Edmonds is also correct, in my view, in questioning the centrality of specific doctrines, including those derived from the Zagreus myth, in Orphic-Bacchic cults. It cannot be assumed that religious practices are simply an “expression” of a preexisting a system of beliefs. Removal of the Zagreus myth from its privileged position in the discussion of Orphism, and its replacement by other definitional criteria, allows Orphic phenomena to be studied through a range of analytic lenses without presuming any uniform set of beliefs.
Second, Edmonds’s multi-factor definitional model describes a form of cult that is consistent in core concerns – purity, eschatology, myth, strangeness, etc. – but variable in its realization of those themes. Such an approach corrects for the tendency to impose textual or narrative uniformity on the gold leaves. M. L. West and Richard Janko, for instance, have used stemmatic theory to reconstruct a textual archetype of the B group, while Christoph Riedweg has interpreted the gold leaves as segments of a master hieros logos.Footnote 29 While such methods have undeniable heuristic value, much is lost when the gold leaves are treated as expressions of a single myth, narrative, text, or belief system. It is precisely those aspects of the gold leaves that situate them in the realm of ritual practice – their textual variation, narrative form, and materiality – that tend to be smoothed out and erased by the centripetal approaches of much past scholarship. Edmonds’s polythetic model allows for a cult that is united less by its specific ideas than by its overall aims and concerns. Thus, for example, the initiate in many tablets wins immortality by claiming a kinship-connection with the gods; but this consistent idea finds different, even contradictory, articulations across the corpus. The Zagreus myth served, in my view, as a part of their conceptual repertoire for articulating the initiate’s special connection to the gods: but this does not mean that it is invariably present in the tablets. Even where present, it would have been only one among several narratives and symbols that could achieve the same effect.Footnote 30
Craft vs. Sect: Orphism as Performance Genre
The inconsistent content of Orphic-Bacchic mysteries stems from the mechanisms by which such cults were propagated. Even before Edmonds’s recent work, Walter Burkert initiated an important interpretive turn in his 1982 essay “Craft Versus Sect: The Problem of Orphics and Pythagoreans.” Burkert here tackled the problem of disentangling Orphic and Pythagorean phenomena in ancient sources. While evidence exists for communities and individuals who assumed a Pythagorean identity, Burkert observed that this does not hold for Orphic cult phenomena. Rather, the cultic authority of Orpheus attaches to itinerant ritual experts – healers, magicians, diviners, and initiators – who offered services to clients, often for a fee, on an individual basis.Footnote 31 This dynamic manifests itself both externally, in ancient testimonia, and internally, in the variations of the gold leaves and the polemical language of the Derveni Papyrus. The Derveni commentator warns readers against trying gain wisdom “from someone who makes a craft out of sacred rites” (παρὰ τοῦ τέχνην ποιουμένου τὰ ἱερά, col. xx 4): the commentator himself seems to be a professional seeking to out-flank his competitors (see below). Though Orphism shares thematic affinities with Pythagoreanism, it always takes the form of a craft (techne) practiced by specialists for local clients. It does not represent a coherent sect or movement with a body of beliefs or even self-identified adherents.
Burkert’s craft-sect distinction has earned wide acceptance (and is already reflected in the sketch of Orphism earlier in this chapter). This model’s ramifications, however, continue to be debated. The “craft” definition underlies Edmonds’s polythetic approach, but other scholars follow Burkert’s lead to different conclusions.Footnote 32 Regardless, Burkert’s account offers the best explanation for the variety in Orphic phenomena, including textual variations among the gold leaves. Individual initiators competing among themselves to attract clients would be expected in the end to produce a variety of practices, heterogeneity of ideas, and inconsistency across different areas and social contexts. Each private initiator would have had every incentive to differentiate himself from others – to show, in entrepreneurial fashion, that his services were distinct from and more valuable than those of his competitors.
Burkert’s craft model also implies a dynamic of interaction between initiators and clients. Unable to point to an impressive sanctuary or the storied antiquity of an institutional cult, as in the prestigious mysteries of Eleusis or Samothrace, private Bacchic initiators would have had to base their authority on other foundations: Orphic texts, emotional appeal, and poetic tradition. Orphic-Bacchic cult was, among other things, a performance genre, in which initiators adopted various poses of authority to win credibility. Initiators would also need to tailor their offerings to the needs and interests of specific clients and groups. In this respect, private mysteries may be compared with healing and medical expertise, which was also premised on individual expert-client interaction, as well as certain poetic genres, in which the singer’s performance required and implied recognition and approval from a specific audience.Footnote 33 (Both of these comparisons will be explored in subsequent chapters.) Such performance dynamics are consistent with the direct evidence of the gold tablets, whose small but significant variations at different sites bear witness to local adaptation.
The craft model also implies a certain social shape for Bacchic initiations. Cults such as those that produced the gold leaves were propagated by individual initiators to individual clients, or to small and short-lived local groups. Such low-level cult phenomena operated mostly outside the gravitational pull of polis religion, and likely drew participants from a wide range of social groups.Footnote 34 Bacchic cults catered to women, and the archaeological context of newer finds increasingly shows that the gold tablets were buried with men and women in roughly equal numbers (or perhaps slightly more often with women).Footnote 35 Even when private initiators seek out wealthy clients – as is to be expected in this performance genre – it is likely that they are not appealing to elites, but rather to wealthy non-elites with elite pretensions. The social environment of the cult would set parameters for the initiator’s performance: within the generic framework of private initiation, the initiator would need to respond to the interests and tastes of specific clients and local groups. The heterogeneous social composition of these groups, and the initiator’s imperative to satisfy specific clients, lead us to expect a messy and inconsistent overall picture of Bacchic cult. In this respect, Burkert’s craft model again fits the evidence. It accounts for the heterogeneity of private initiations, most directly observable in the gold leaves and Derveni Papyrus, to which we now turn.Footnote 36
Poetic Performance: The Derveni Papyrus
The importance of poetry in private mysteries, especially written Orphic poetry, has long been recognized.Footnote 37 The hexameter verses of the gold leaves show verbal and stylistic debts to epic diction, and Classical scholars have increasingly noted the tablets’ engagement with traditional poetic language, imagery, and style. As Sarah Iles Johnston observes, “The tablets’ use of epic diction underscores the extent to which they drew on a large reservoir of shared cultural forms.”Footnote 38 Less appreciated, however, is the importance of poetic performance in Orphic-Bacchic cults, both as practice and as formative concept. Nearly all early Greek poetry was composed for “live” song or recitation before a specific audience. The context of performance not only governed the transmission and textualization of poetry, but also served to delineate genres and to define social groups.Footnote 39 Poetic tradition also supplied a repertoire of techniques that could contribute to performers’ credibility and strengthen their authority in the eyes of an audience. Greek song culture, like the world of private mysteries, also represented a competitive context in which performers were expected to contradict and one-up each other to gain credibility.Footnote 40
Plato and Euripides both mention books of Orpheus in association with private mysteries, and many Classical scholars have historically focused on the prevalence of written poetic texts as a distinguishing feature of such cults.Footnote 41 But private Bacchic cults must also have featured live oral performance. The corpus of gold leaves show evidence of oral as well as written transmission, particularly in their multiform textual character.Footnote 42 Even Orphic books themselves may have functioned mainly as performance media or props.Footnote 43
The role of poetic performance in private mysteries finds unlikely confirmation in the Derveni Papyrus. The papyrus was preserved as part of an ancient burial assemblage: it was found in 1962, carbonized among the remains of an ancient funeral pyre.Footnote 44 The papyrus roll itself dates to the fourth century. The surviving text opens with a commentary on various private rituals (cols. i–vi), such as apotropaic incantations, libations, and offerings to the Eumenides, followed by a lengthy exegesis of an Orphic theogony (cols. vii–xxvi). The commentary likely dates to the fifth century, the Orphic poem to the sixth. The poem, which the commentator quotes liberally enough to enable a partial reconstruction, is a hexameter theogonic hymn to Zeus, relating a non-Hesiodic version of the god’s ascent to divine kinship.Footnote 45 In the surviving text, Zeus swallows the Orphic god Phanes/Protogonos, recreates the cosmos, and (perhaps) has an incestuous union with his mother.Footnote 46 Drawing on Anaxagoras and other early Greek philosophers, however, the commentator reinterprets the poem in terms of Presocratic physical theories. Read in this way, the theogonic poem becomes an allegory for the separation of hot and cold, the recombination of matter under different names, and the cosmic influence of Mind. The commentator’s identity is unknown, but he was evidently a specialist in the private ritual sphere who sought to differentiate himself from his competitors through his innovative interpretation of the Orphic poem.Footnote 47
An important aspect of the commentator’s approach to the poem is his rejection of normal live poetic performance.Footnote 48 For the commentator, live recitation prevents initiates from grasping the poet’s true meaning: “It is impossible,” he says, “to tell the meaning of [Orpheus’s] words when they have just been uttered” ([κ]αὶ εἰπεῖν οὐχ οἷόν τ[ε τὴν τῶν ὀ]νομάτων [θέ]σιν καίτ[οι] ῥηθέντα vii 3–4). Because the poet chose to tell “great things in the form of riddles” ([ἐν αἰν]ίγμασ[ι]ν … [μεγ]άλα, vii 6–7), the poem must be reinterpreted word by word and from beginning to end (vii 7–8, xiii 5–6). The commentator later adds that “it is impossible” for those undergoing initiation “to hear and at the same time understand what is being said” (οὐ γὰρ οἷόν τε ἀκοῦσαι ὁμοῦ καὶ μαθεῖν τὰ λεγόμενα xx 2–3). At one point, the commentator even warns readers that they “must not hear” (χρὴ … οὐκ ἀκούειν viii 9–10) a certain mythical allusion in one line of the poem.
The commentator, with his critical attitude toward “heard” and “spoken” meanings, informs us e contrario that live poetic performance was a normal part of private mysteries. Dwayne Meisner has argued that the early columns of the papyrus, which comment on ritual practices, describe the context in which the theogony of the later columns would ordinarily have been performed.Footnote 49 For the commentator, the essential qualities of live performance – voice, utterance, and hearing – are impediments to his interpretation, and one of his basic aims is to decouple the poem from its performance setting. Orphic-Bacchic cults, then, constitute a poetic performance context, notwithstanding the Derveni commentator’s contrarian preferences: they are an occasion for live song or poetic recitation, offered by a performer for a specific audience, and defined by socially recognized expectations.Footnote 50
The importance of poetic performance in Bacchic cults carries at least two further implications. First, interaction of poetic performers and audiences can serve as a paradigm for the relationship between expert and client in Burkert’s craft model. It is likely, in fact, that initiators used poetic performance conventions. Performers in all poetic genres, public as well as private, needed credibility before their audiences, and poetic tradition offered a repertoire of devices by which the singer could claim such authority. The personalities of early non-choral poets – not just Orpheus, but Homer and Hesiod among others – served as means of self-presentation for rhapsodes, kitharodes, and lower-level performers at the symposium and other private venues. Poetic performance involved a quasi-theatrical mimesis of the legendary poet. In Gregory Nagy’s description, the “poet” is understood as an archetype “recomposed” by the singer in each new performance. The rhapsode performing Homeric poetry, for instance, would also be a kind of Homer impersonator, embodying the authority of his generic archetype in live performance.Footnote 51 Orphic poetry belonged to rhapsodic repertoire in the Classical period and earlier, and the persona of Orpheus served as an archetype for kitharodes and rhapsodes already in the Archaic period.Footnote 52 If, as the Derveni Papyrus implies, live performance of Orphic hexameter poetry was common in private mysteries, then imitation of Orpheus’s familiar poetic personality would have been one of the devices by which initiators established their authority. Other low-level ritual performers may have used poetic archetypes in this way. A fragment from the New Comic poet Diphilos, for instance, features a purifier reciting hexameters in apparent imitation of the mythical purifier Melampos.Footnote 53 It is likely that some Orphic performers – the Orpheotelestai of Theophrastus and the initiators of Plato who brandish books of Orpheus and Mousaios – identified themselves in similar fashion with the legendary Orpheus through poetic performance. In using Orpheus as a performing persona, initiators employed a technique already familiar from early Greek song culture. Poetic conventions, in other words, contributed to the repertoire of Orphic “craft.”
A second aspect of the gold leaves clarified by their poetic performance context is their reliance on polysemous images, symbols, and vocabulary. The theme of memory (mnemosyne) and the use of gold metal, for instance, have proven difficult to explain with precision – not because these items lack significance in early Greek thought, but because they carry numerous potential meanings across several different areas of culture. The more cryptic formulae of the tablets – for instance, “A kid, you fell into milk” (OF 487; cf. 485–6, 488), “I flew out of the grievous, heavy circle” (OF 488), or “I am a child of Earth and starry Heaven” (OF 474–84a) – would have required explanation, and probably would have invited as wide a range of different accounts in antiquity as they have received from modern scholars. Alberto Bernabé and A. I. Jiménez San Cristóbal wisely observe that the textual ambiguity of the tablets is part of their design: “A fundamental cause of this variety of interpretation is … that the expressions in question are suggestive and ambivalent; when they give rise to diverse interpretations we must ask ourselves not whether they mean A or B, but whether they might not mean both A and B.”Footnote 54
Such ambiguities can be understood as aids to performance. Interpretation of poetry was a feature of rhapsodic performance and likely played a part in lower-level genres as well. The rhapsode Ion, in Plato’s portrayal, treats interpretation of traditional poetry as part of the performer’s craft (Ion 530 c). Isocrates speaks disdainfully of “sophists at the Lyceum” who imitate rhapsodic performance of Homer and Hesiod by chanting and offering a choice selection of previous interpretation (Panath. 17–19, 31). In his criticism of the sophists, Isocrates makes clear that exegesis was one means by which poetic performers established authority in the eyes and ears of their audiences. Poetic explanation may have played a similar role in private contexts as well. The same passage of Plato’s Republic that mentions Orphic books also describes initiators appealing to other hexameter poets, citing and interpreting lines from Hesiod and Homer to bolster their own credibility (2.364 c–e). Socrates in Plato’s Meno (81a–c) speaks of priests and priestesses who are skilled in offering explanations of their own rituals: to illustrate the eschatological ideas expounded by such people, Socrates tellingly quotes a fragment of Pindar (fr. 133 SM). The Derveni commentator, who offers an unusual explanation of rituals and an Orphic poem, paradoxically also represents an extension, even an exploitation, of poetic performance convention by his innovative exegesis.Footnote 55
The requirements of performance would have been a major motivating factor behind the ambiguous imagery and verbal formulae found in the gold leaves. The frequent lack of semantic clarity in the tablets – the “both-A-and-B” quality identified by Bernabé and Jiménez San Cristóbal – makes sense if these texts are understood in terms of their performance setting. If the tablets are often difficult to interpret, this is because their texts were not meant to be straightforwardly clear to listeners, but were rather expected to invite or require explanation from performers. In the context of Orphic craft, with its competing individual experts, ambiguous texts would have yielded a variety of interpretations.
This dynamic is reflected in the tablets’ textual variations. Recurring details do not always carry the same meaning: in some tablets, for example, a white cypress in the underworld marks the stream from which the initiate should drink, but in others it marks the stream that must be avoided.Footnote 56 Most early B texts describe the initiate as the “child/son of Earth and starry Heaven” (Γῆς παῖς/υἱός εἰμι καὶ Οὐρανοῦ ἀστερόεντος), which most likely alludes to a shared descent from the primordial ancestors of the gods. This phrase would have called for interpretation. A few tablets, including several of an early date, use a variant of the formula with a very different apparent meaning: “I am a son of Earth and starry Heaven; but my lineage is heavenly” (Γῆς παῖς εἰμι καὶ Οὐρανοῦ ἀστερόεντος, / αὐτὰρ ἐμοὶ γένος οὐράνιον). The hemistich shifts the meaning of the statement from an idea of unity to one of duality, implying that one side of the initiate’s ancestry is emphasized over the other.Footnote 57 In other words, the two variants seem to reflect different interpretations of the same inherited verbal formula. The texts themselves, then, show residue of the variety within the tradition: different meanings could be indicated by slight changes or additions, or could even have been imposed without any variation in the text. In sum, the semantic underdetermination of the tablets and their texts was a feature, not a bug. It enabled performers to differentiate themselves as ritual competitors.
Bricolage: Inconsistency within Tradition
The idea of bricolage offers a useful description of this performance practice and its connection to poetic tradition. This concept, formulated by Claude Lévi-Strauss to account for the development of myth, recognizes that mythical thought “expresses itself by means of a heterogeneous repertoire which, even if extensive, is nevertheless limited.”Footnote 58 Recent scholarship on the gold leaves has used this concept to investigate the tablets’ relation to Greek mythical tradition, though scholars have varied in the conclusions they have drawn using this analytical tool.Footnote 59 Relatively neglected, however, has been the performance dynamic implied in Lévi-Strauss’s category. Mythical thought is constrained by the repertoire of existing stories, symbols, themes that it finds ready-to-hand, but it recombines and reinterprets these inherited elements in unforeseen ways. Thus Lévi-Strauss envisions a typical bricoleur marshalling his equipment with an eye to some new project:
He has to turn back to an already existent set made up of tools and materials, to consider or reconsider what it contains and, finally and above all, to engage in a sort of dialogue with it and, before choosing between them, to index the possible answers which the whole set can offer to his problem. He interrogates all the heterogeneous objects of which his treasury is composed to discover what each of them could “signify” and so contribute to the definition of a set which has yet to materialize but which will ultimately differ from the instrumental set only in the internal disposition of its parts.Footnote 60
In this description, bricolage involves a truth to traditional elements, even an insight into their potential meaning. In surveying the contents of an inherited repertoire, the bricoleur must “consider or reconsider what it contains,” recognizing and activating latent potential in his existing materials. Bricolage itself can be understood as a mode of poetic tradition, or at least describes one way in which tradition unfolds. A poetic bricoleur, who must work with a particular audience in mind, must also be faithful to the contents of his repertoire if his innovative product is to be credible to its intended audience. Persuasive use of traditional materials is part of his authority. Depending on the audience’s expectations, success may even depend on an imaginative feel for received materials and creative application of them to a given purpose.
The model of bricolage implies that any piece of evidence for a myth or theme within the tradition must first be interpreted in terms of its own context, since specific images and expressions change meaning from one use to another within a tradition.Footnote 61 Conversely, where the scope of inquiry is widened to encompass not just any one piece of evidence but the tradition as a whole, this tradition must be understood not as a system of thought but as a performing repertoire. The tradition is a storeroom of themes and materials that performers can select, adapt, and reinterpret to suit their audiences’ needs and tastes. The coherency of the tradition derives not from the inherited materials themselves, but from the reality of performance, which in each new iteration must present the inherited repertoire in a way that its audience will find meaningful and valid.
The challenge for an analysis of the tablets is to give a coherent account of an inherently inconsistent phenomenon. The category of bricolage offers a basis for such a description of Orphic-Bacchic cults – not only in terms of their interaction with poetic and mythical tradition, but also of their performance dynamic and their inconsistency of content. The task is not to set out the tenets of initiates’ supposed belief system, but rather to map out the potential symbols available to them and the ways in which this repertoire was used. Where possible, the selections made by specific performers should be analyzed both individually and in relation to the larger repertoire. In the case of the gold leaves, bricolage describes both an inconsistency within tradition and a connective tissue of performance practice that gives the tradition its overall shape.Footnote 62
Shape of the Argument
While this book naturally addresses several questions that occupy contemporary scholarship on Orphism, its approach seeks less to resolve such problems than to reconsider the terms in which they are usually posed. The status of the Zagreus myth is a case in point. I do not follow Edmonds’s total rejection of the myth, as in my view several of the tablets cannot be understood without reference to it. At the same time, I side with Edmonds against his critics that the Zagreus myth and its associated doctrines have been assigned an exaggerated and largely unwarranted importance.Footnote 63 Emphasis on the Zagreus myth has tended, among other things, to foreclose other fruitful approaches to the tablets. Even allowing that the Zagreus myth belonged to the mix of ideas available to ancient initiators, the gold leaves and other aspects of Bacchic cults can often be more satisfactorily interpreted in other ways. I also concur with Edmonds’s rejection of the “Orphic Exception”: the approach of this book recognizes a dense interaction between mystery cults and other aspects of Greek culture. Far from being an exotic or anomalous phenomenon – “a drop of foreign blood” (ein fremder Blutstropfen) in the Hellenic circulatory system, as Erwin Rohde positedFootnote 64 – Orphic-Bacchic cult comprises a stew of themes, ideas, and practices drawn from other areas of Greek cultural activity.
This book’s focus is the gold leaves, not “Orphism” as such. In consequence, several important questions that appear front-and-center in many studies of the tablets – the attribution of their texts to Orpheus, presence of the Zagreus myth, interaction between private cults and the institutional Eleusinian Mysteries, and so forth – are largely bracketed off. My objective has been to examine the tablets as a practice without presumptively assigning them to any distinctive belief system, be it “Orphic,” “Pythagorean,” or “Orphic-Pythagorean,” that would leave them generically isolated. To avoid circularity, I also do not take it as given that the tablet texts derive from Orphic poems. Though in my view this is likely, the source or speaking voice of the verses inscribed on the tablets is too indefinite for attribution to Orpheus to serve a load-bearing role in any interpretation. The tablets themselves, approached with minimal presuppositions, must be the methodological starting point. Even if they cannot be traced to any single textual origin or reduced to any system of belief, however, the tablets reflect a unity of practice, even across their geographic dispersal. Thus, while I take into account the tablets’ local contexts and groupings, my overall framework is a synchronic one, and my ultimate aim has been to treat the tablet tradition as a coherent, albeit inconsistent, whole.
The chapters are intended to be read in sequence. The first examines the theme of memory (mnemosyne) in the gold leaves. Several texts describe the initiate’s postmortem journey to the chthonic waters of memory. The role of memory, however, and its benefits for the initiate have never been adequately explained. I argue, contrary to Jean-Pierre Vernant’s structuralist interpretation, that the theme of memory in the tablets is decisively influenced by poetic tradition. In particular, memory denotes a dynamic of ritual and poetic performance by which the initiate overcomes the limits of mortal existence. The poetic language of memory is multivalent, however, and the chapter traces its development in three interrelated paths. First, the tablets echo epic diction of remembering, most common in Hesiod, where the poet’s command to remember seals his advice to an addressee. At least one tablet blends this formulation with hints of a more innovative pathogenic or experiential conception of memory, extending a traditional poetic idea of memory to incorporate the initiate’s transformation of identity in ritual. Second, the tablets may be read alongside descriptions of poetic memory in Theognis and Sappho, who link the promise of memory to participation in a performing group. Like the models of the poetic group in each case – the male symposium for Theognis, the female poetic circle for Sappho – the gold leaves imagine the initiate’s salvation in analogous terms as the fruit of membership in a privileged group of ritual and poetic performers. Third, the chapter addresses the social dimension of the tablets’ eschatology. The “positive” afterlife and individual emphasis of the tablets is often set in contrast with the “negative” eschatology and social focus of poetic tradition, especially in Homer. This, however, misreads both the gold leaves and poetic tradition. Uses of eschatological themes in Sappho and Pindar demonstrate that traditional poetry did not always distinguish individual from social memory. The poetic parallels all imply that the theme of memory in the gold leaves reflects a dynamic of intra-group performance that assures the initiate’s salvation. At the same time, the variable handling in the tablets of the proper name and other conventional markers of identity for the deceased shows a variety in the practice of memory as well as flexibility in handling the poetic theme of mnemosyne.
The second chapter develops this argument further with a generic comparison between the tablets and inscribed verse epitaphs. Unlike funerary epigrams, the gold leaves are not presented to a reading public: intriguingly, however, the tablets articulate the initiate’s exceptional postmortem status in ways that show remarkable stylistic affinity with grave epigrams. The portrayals of the deceased and communicative language in the gold leaves echo the verbal strategies of epigrams, which ensure the deceased’s postmortem preservation by establishing a bond with an abiding social structure and identifying him with a special community of exceptional dead. In this respect, the role of the cult group in the tablets is analogous to that of the elite household in private epitaphs of the Classical period. The gold leaves and epigrams draw in analogous ways on a common poetic repertoire to portray a privileged group as exceptionally capable of assuring immortality for its deceased member.
The third chapter evaluates the tablets as a material practice in relation to phenomena that are usually labeled “magic.” Beginning with Comparetti, scholars have argued whether the gold leaves should be considered “amulets.” This debate, however, has largely served as a stand-in for the question of the tablets’ status as material objects, which has been distorted by use of terms and categories connected with magic. The approach known as “material religion” – a method that prioritizes material aspects of religious practice without presuming any underlying beliefs – offers an alternative way to consider the tablets as physical objects without the presuppositions imposed by magical vocabulary. Viewed through this lens, several aspects of the gold tablets come into clearer focus. The tablets interact closely with the oral verse genre of ritual hexameters or incantations (epoidai). This genre, painstakingly mapped out by Christopher Faraone, leaves traces in both literary texts and the epigraphic record and represents an area of early poetic tradition that is only indirectly accessible in surviving sources. Incantations were a regular feature of Greek medicine, and the expertise of healers offers an analogy for performer–audience interactions in Bacchic cults. Both physicians and initiators offered services on an individual basis, and both used ritual hexameters as devices of authoritative self-presentation for potential clients. Incantations characteristically involve a close relationship between vocal utterance and material objects, and in this respect the gold leaves can be contextualized with a growing corpus of inscribed hexameter incantations (Ephesia Grammata) that have come to light in Southern Italy, Sicily, and Crete. The material approach also opens up comparison with inscribed lead curses, which are handled and deposited in ways similar to the gold leaves. Though different in both metal and function from the Bacchic tablets, the practice of lead curses established a material grammar of communication with the powers of the underworld that was exploited by the makers of the tablets.
The final chapter turns to gold metal and its meaning in the tablets. Gold can be understood as a material counterpart to the theme of memory, that is, as a multivalent symbol open to different interpretations by different initiators. The background of poetic tradition, however, points to three areas in which gold metal would have been especially meaningful to the makers of the tablets: mythical, ritual, and economic. In early Greek poetry, gold marks the gods and divine life, and the metal of the tablets reinforces the initiate’s claims of divine identity and fellowship. In addition, however, gold plays an important ritual role in the heroic funerals of epic, signifying transformation of the mortal hero into a durable object of culture. The metal of the tablets would then reflect a transposition of the heroic funeral into a mystic context, with gold symbolizing the initiate’s transformation into an immortal being.
Both these poetic meanings, however, are complicated by gold’s economic significance. Economic metaphors have played a major role in discussions of private mysteries, both in antiquity and in modern scholarship. Ancient critics degrade such cults by presenting them in terms of monetary transaction. David Morgan’s idea of “sacred economy,” or the description of religions in terms of transactional metaphors, offers a useful lens through which to evaluate this aspect of the tablets’ use of gold metal. I argue that the makers of the tablets sought to forestall the idea of involvement in monetized economic exchange, imagining the initiate instead as part of a privileged or quasi-elite network. Despite its potential ambiguity, gold metal would have symbolically bolstered presentation of the initiate as part of a sacred economy modeled after elite exchange.
The two terms in this book’s subtitle – memory and performance – mark the conceptual poles of its argument. Memory signifies the tablets’ engagement with traditional poetic language, themes, and ideologies. This, I argue, is the primary meaning of the language of memory in the texts themselves. The tablets can also be understood in modern theoretical terms as a practice of memory, insofar as they belong to a social process of imagination by which the group rearticulates the initiate’s postmortem identity. Performance designates practices of live poetic interaction that enabled the transmission of early Greek poetry and shaped its diction, imagery, themes, and systems of values. The category of performance spotlights the interaction between performer and audience that was characteristic of Greek song culture and which served as a predicate for the interactive dynamic of private mysteries. Performers in other poetic genres, ranging from public performances by rhapsodes and kitharodes to more private setting of the symposium, won credibility by drawing on the traditional repertoire and performing or interpreting it to appeal to their audiences. The officiants of private mysteries drew from the same repertoire in analogous fashion and with similar motivations. The gold leaves, with their common elements but also inconsistencies, document interactions between performers and audiences in private cults. Approaching the tablets as products of Greek song culture also offers a lens on the more familiar aspects and texts of poetic tradition. To place the tablets in a poetic performance context requires not only a reevaluation of the tablets themselves, but also an expanded understanding of poetic tradition that encompasses a wider range of phenomena than is usually understood by the phrase.
In addition, the model of poetic performance offers a corrective to past interpretive approaches that have distorted or overlooked the social dimension of the tablets and their cults. The pseudo-Christian model of Orphism in the nineteenth and early twentieth century yielded an exaggerated image of community, even imagining a chimerical “Orphic Church.”Footnote 65 This view has been rightly rejected. However, the present interpretation permits a different description of mystic community that avoids the errors and exaggerations of the past while taking seriously the social realities of the Bacchic cults as presented to us in ancient evidence.Footnote 66 Poetic tradition allows for the real and imaginary aspects of the tablets to be distinguished and their interrelation to be better understood. Here, as in other respects, the gold leaves reveal a great deal about their social dynamics if approached without presuppositions as to their belief system. Like sympotic songs, the tablet texts articulate an ideal of community. Both are imaginary ideals: representations of mystic community in the tablets and other sources are not snapshots of real life, any more than the portraits of elite symposia in Theognis or Xenophanes. Yet these products of imagination in each case point toward the social reality in which they were generated and for which the imagined ideal performed meaningful social work. While we have much more corroborating information about the participants in symposia than about Bacchic mystery initiates, a focus on poetic performance can begin to situate the question of the gold leaves’ social context on firmer ground as part of a tradition whose ideas, concerns, and clientele are more familiar to us.
For enumeration of the gold leaves, I follow Alberto Bernabé’s Teubner edition, in which the tablets appear as OF 474–96; where convenient, I have also referred to the A and B textual groupings of Zuntz.Footnote 67 I have generally followed Bernabé’s Greek text of the tablets, though in some instances I have preferred a different reading or more conservative presentation of the text (including allowing metrical and other irregularities to remain as inscribed). The gold leaves present numerous textual problems, and I have as a rule discussed such questions only where directly relevant to the argument. English translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. Citations of ancient authors use abbreviations from the Oxford Classical Dictionary (Fourth Edition) and the Greek-English Lexicon of Liddell, Scott, and Jones (Ninth Edition).
