United States or Angola ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
His teeming brain took in raw suggestions and threw off the completed product in the form of epigrams, phrases, orphics, symbols. To have caught these crumbs of truth that fell from the rich man's table might have placed many a penny-a-liner beyond the reach of mental avarice. One man, indeed, swept up the crumbs into a book that is not half crumby.
And what happened next, my children, whether it be true or not, stands written in ancient songs, which you shall read for yourselves some day. And grand old songs they are, written in grand old rolling verse; and they call them the Songs of Orpheus, or the Orphics, to this day.
Diogenes is said to have asked whether the robber Pataecion was better off in the other world than the hero Epaminondas, because the former had been initiated, and the latter had not. But Orphism, though liable to degradation, purified and elevated the old Bacchic rites. As Miss Harrison says, the Bacchanals hoped to attain unity with God by intoxication, the Orphics by abstinence.
Let us think of Buddha, the liberator; of the Orphics worshipping Dionysos-Zagreus, god of the innocent who suffer and will be avenged; of Xenophanes of Elea who had to witness the devastation of his fatherland by Cyrus; of Zeno tortured; of Socrates put to death by poison; of Plato dreaming during the rule of the Thirty Tyrants; of Marcus Aurelius, sustaining the empire whose decline was at hand.
And what happened next, my children, whether it be true or not, stands written in ancient songs, which you shall read for yourselves some day. And grand old songs they are, written in grand old rolling verse; and they call them the Songs of Orpheus, or the Orphics, to this day.
Word Of The Day