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An extensive Orphic literature first appeared at the time of the Persian war, when the remains of the Pythagorean order in Magna Graecia united themselves to the Orphic associations.
One of the old Orphic hymns reads as follows: "The wise love light and not darkness. When you travel the journey of Life, remember, always, the end of the journey. When souls return to the light, after their sojourn on earth, they wear upon their more subtle bodies, like searing, hideous scars, the marks of their earthly sins these must be obliterated, and they go back to earth to be cleansed.
It is a syncretism of mystical beliefs, developed by Orphic and Apocalyptic poets and mystics from Pythagoras and Plato to a group of Hellenistic writers, popularized by the later less logical Stoic philosophers like Posidonius, and gaining in Vergil's day a wide acceptance among those who were growing impatient of the exacting metaphysical processes of thought.
The Orphic Alcott or Plato Skimpole, as Aspasia called him well known in the transcendental history of New England, designed and with his own hands erected a summer-house, which gracefully adorns the lawn, if I may so call the smooth grass-plot at the side of the house.
His back muscles bulged a little under the arms as he stooped and lightly lifted a burden. Another step inside the door, which he shut methodically behind him, and he dumped the burden at a safe distance from the fire. He stood up and fixed us with a solemn eye. None of us moved under that Orphic suspense until, "A woman," remarked George. Miss Willie Adams was her name. Vocation, school-teacher.
Their hopes of this result were founded on Dionysus, from the worship of whom all their peculiar religious ideas were derived. This god, the son of Zeus, is to succeed him in the government of the world, to restore the Golden Age, and to liberate human souls, who, according to an Orphic notion, are punished by being confined in the body as in a prison.
No man is allowed to approach the festival, nor to be in the house during the celebration of the rites; but the women by themselves are said to perform many rites similar to the Orphic in the celebration.
Gloria at twenty-six was still the Gloria of twenty; her complexion a fresh damp setting for her candid eyes; her hair still a childish glory, darkening slowly from corn color to a deep russet gold; her slender body suggesting ever a nymph running and dancing through Orphic groves.
As it is, Mark takes his own, just as Socrates did from Mr. and Mrs. Pericles. Aye, or as did Bronson Alcott, who once ran his wheelbarrow into the well-kept garden of Ralph Waldo Emerson. The Orphic One was loading up with potatoes, peas, beans and one big yellow pumpkin, when he glanced around and saw the man who wrote "Self-Reliance" gazing at him seriously and steadily over the garden-wall.
Amongst the sex-tormented priesthood of the Roman communion in particular, ignorant of the extreme practices of the Essenes and of the Orphic cult and suchlike predecessors of Christianity, there seems to be an extraordinary belief that chastity was not invented until Christianity came, and that the religious life is largely the propitiation of God by feats of sexual abstinence.
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