Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 21, 2025
Think of Crass digging for head-lines." St. George rose abruptly. Amory was delicious, especially his drawl; but there were times "Print it," he exclaimed, "you might as well try to print the absolute." Amory nodded. "Oh, if you're going to be Neoplatonic," he said, "I'm off to hum an Orphic hymn. Isn't it about time for the prince? I want to get out with the camera, while the light is good."
The Pythagorean and the Orphic rules of life were well known throughout antiquity, and were probably obeyed by large numbers. The rule of continence was far less strict than in the Catholic 'religious' life; but Empedocles, according to Hippolytus, advised abstinence from marriage and procreation, and the tendency to regard celibacy as part of the 'philosophic life' increased steadily.
In Greece, after Eschylus and his stupendous deities, came Sophocles, who restrained them with a calm wisdom, and Euripides, who made them human, but still the mysterious Orphic deities remain and stir us when reading the earlier page. Mr. O'Grady would not have the Red Branch cycle cast in dramatic form or given to the people.
Among several different peoples, and apparently in each independently, the idea arose that the divine manifests itself in the world of phenomena and is recognizable only therein. Such a view appears in India in the Vedanta philosophy, and in Greece a little later it is more or less involved in Orphic theories and in the systems of several philosophers.
The Nietzschean idea of eternal recurrence is an Orphic idea. But the idea of the immortality of the soul was not a philosophical principle.
This dualism with its accompanying asceticism is to be found in the Persian religion, in India, in later Jewish thought, in the Orphic cults of Greece and even in Plato. It entered into Christianity as naturally as science does into our outlook to-day. All through the early years of the Christian era, and during the Middle Ages, this contrast existed and controlled ethics.
Though the pagan philosophy had been much discouraged at Alexandria by the destruction of the temples and the cessation of the sacrifices, yet the philosophers were still allowed to teach in the schools. Syrianus was at the head of the Platonists, and he wrote largely on the Orphic, Pythagorean, and Platonic doctrines.
The Orphic priests of old Greece most nearly resembled the shamans of the savages.
Still seated on the now half-vacant bench of the monument, he was foundering inside himself in a melancholy that contaminated his bounty as an oil spill a lagoon. The relative silence was interrupted by plaintive, orphic sounds of a flute played by a uniformed high school student who sat stiffly on the steps leading into the monument.
He is male and female, he is the foundation of the earth and of the starry heaven, the breath in all, the strength of fire, the root of the sea, sun, and moon. Zeus is the king, the progenitor of all things." The god Dionysus also is placed by the Orphic writers at the head of the whole process of creation.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking