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Updated: June 21, 2025
The Orphic societies of Greece seem to have been peculiarly ascetic, taking no animal food save raw flesh from the sacrificed ox of Dionusos.
As a lyrist he is unsurpassed, I venture to say unequalled, if we take into view the whole wide range of his performance in this kind, from the ballads, the best-known of his smaller poems, and those light fugitive pieces, those bursts of song which came to him without effort, and with such a rush that in order to arrest and preserve them he seized, as he tells us, the first scrap of paper that came to hand and wrote upon it diagonally, if it happened so to lie on his table, lest, through the delay of selecting and placing, the inspiration should be checked and the poem evaporate, from these to such stately compositions as the "Zueignung," or dedication of his poems, the "Weltseele" and the "Orphic Sayings," in short, from poetry that writes itself, that springs spontaneously in the mind, to poetry that is written with elaborate art.
He is thinking, not of the context in Plato, but of the contemporary Pythagorean philosophers and their wordy strife. He finds nothing in the text which he does not bring to it. He is full of Porphyry, Iamblichus and Plotinus, of misapplied logic, of misunderstood grammar, and of the Orphic theology.
Unlike the popular worshipers of Bacchus, they did not indulge in unrestrained pleasure or frantic enthusiasm, but rather aimed at an ascetic purity of life and manners. It is difficult to tell when this association was formed in Greece, but we find in Hesiod something of the Orphic spirit, and the beginning of higher and more hopeful views of death.
He is about to commence his discourses on the Parmenides, that book in which we generally now consider that Plato has been most untrue to himself, and fallen from his usual inductive method to the ground of a mere e priori theoriser and yet of which Proclus is reported to have said, and, I should conceive, said honestly, that if it, the Timaeus, and the Orphic fragments were preserved, he did not care whether every other book on earth were destroyed.
Legend says that little Andy, once, at seven years of age, when it came his turn to give a verse from the Bible, handed in this: "Let every tub stand on its own bottom." But as the quotation was not exactly acceptable, he tried again with this: "Take care of the pence and the pounds will take care of themselves." Thus do we see that the orphic habit was already beginning to germinate.
It was as if she believed that when left to her guidance, allowed to spin around happily in play according to his own benign whims, and following nothing but the occasional orphic music of the ice- cream truck, her son would be a self-contained paradigm of happiness.
It is Walden Pond or Walden Water, as Orphic Alcott used to call it whose virgin seclusion was a just image of that of the little village, until one afternoon, some half-dozen or more years since, a shriek, sharper than any that had rung from Walden woods since the last war-whoop of the last Indians of Musketaquid, announced to astonished Concord, drowsing in the river meadows, that the nineteenth century had overtaken it.
Aristotle tells us that there never was such a person as Orpheus the poet; and it is said that the verse called Orphic verse was the invention of Cercops, a Pythagorean; yet Orpheus, that is to say, the image of him, as you will have it, often runs in my head. What is the reason that I entertain one idea of the figure of the same person, and you another?
The idea of an antagonism seems to have been cardinal in the thought of the Essenes and the Orphic cult and in the Persian dualism. So, too, Buddhism seems to be "antagonistic." On the other hand, the Moslem teaching and modern Judaism seem absolutely to combine and identify the two; God the creator is altogether and without distinction also God the King of Mankind.
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