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Updated: July 21, 2025
"Among letters I am the vowel A." "Among seasons I am spring." "Of the deceitful I am the dice." The late Dr. Mullens calls attention to the fact that the Orphic Hymns declare "Zeus to be the first and Zeus the last. Zeus is the head and Zeus the centre." In these three similar forms of description one common principle of supremacy rules.
Something parallel to this vision appeared, no doubt, in the ancient Orphic epics, which told of the centaurs, the old hippanthropes, those Titans with human heads and equestrian chests who scaled Olympus at a gallop, horrible, invulnerable, sublime gods and beasts. Odd numerical coincidence, twenty-six battalions rode to meet twenty-six battalions.
He did not so much write articles upon the health of his mistress as deliver Orphic sentences. He was in one her physician, her spiritual director, her man-at-arms. Public allusions to her were greeted with his emphatic assent in a measured pitch of the voice, or an instantaneous flourish of the rapier; and the flourish was no vain show.
In the earlier as well as the later literature of Greece we find traces of Pantheism, while the Polytheistic worship, which universally prevailed, was its natural product and appropriate manifestation. The ancient Orphic doctrines, which were taught in the Mysteries, seem to have been based on the oriental idea of Emanation.
So, if I pray for length of days, It is not in the barren pride That looks behind itself, and says, "The Past alone is deified!" Nay, humbly, shrinkingly, in dread Of fires too splendid to be borne In expectation lest my head Be from its Orphic shoulders torn I wait, till, down the eastern sky, Muses, like Maenads in a throng, Sweep my decayed traditions by, In startling tunes of unknown song.
Recent research discredits the theory that metempsychosis was an important feature in the earlier religion of Egypt or among the Druids . But it played a prominent part in the philosophy of Pythagoras and in the Orphic mysteries, which had some connection with Thrace and possibly also with Crete.
It was by a contradiction that the first Greek philosophers affirmed immortality, by abandoning natural philosophy and intruding into theology, by formulating not an Apollonian but a Dionysiac and Orphic dogma. Recall the Phædo of Plato and the neo-platonic lucubrations.
Once a lady took him for a carriage ride, and on learning from the footman that they were seven miles from home he was so displeased that he refused to utter a single orphic on the way back; and further, the story is that he never after entered a vehicle, and living for thirty years was never again so far from the lodging he called home.
The difference is that in the Christian revelation and in the Orphic Hymns there is dignity, while in Krishna's discourse there is frivolous and vulgar particularity. Let us notice a few examples of the alleged parallels more particularly. This is compared with 1 Corinthians x. 31: "Whether therefore ye eat or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God."
The fragments of the Orphic hymns, and those of Linus and Musaeus, show these poets entertained sounder notions of the Supreme Being than many philosophers of a later date. There are lyric fragments yet remaining that bear striking resemblance to Scripture." So, says Bishop Horne, "The poetry of the Jews is clearly traceable to the service of religion.
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