Orphĭca
（
τὰ Ὀρφικά).
Orpheus (q.v.) gave his name to a kind of monastic order which sprang up in later times
in Greece calling themselves
οἱ Ὀρφικοί, who, under the
pretended guidance of Orpheus, dedicated themselves to the worship of Dionysus. They performed
the rites of a mystical worship; but instead of confining their notions to the initiated, they
published them to others, and committed them to literary works. The Dionysus with whose
worship the Orphic rites were connected was Dionysus Zagreus, closely connected with Demeter
and Cora (Persephoné). The Orphic legends and poems related in great part to this
Dionysus, who was combined, as an infernal deity, with Hades; and upon
whom the Orphic theologians founded their hopes of the purification and ultimate immortality
of the soul. But their mode of celebrating this worship was very different from the popular
rites of Bacchus. The Orphic worshippers of Bacchus did not indulge in unrestrained pleasures
and frantic enthusiasm, but rather aimed at an ascetic purity of life and manners, abstaining
from meat, though not from wine, dressing in white, practising frequent purifications,
expiations, and incantations, and professing a creed, in which the doctrine of the
transmigration of souls (metempsychosis) held an important place. This sect degenerated by the
time of the early Roman Empire into a mere fraternity of jugglers, and died out finally amid
general contempt.
All the part of the mythology of Orpheus which connects him with Dionysus must be considered
as a later invention, quite irreconcilable with the original legend, in which he is the
servant of Apollo and the Muses; but it is almost hopeless to explain the transition.
Connected with the Orphic cult is the so-called Orphic literature. Many poems ascribed to
Orpheus were current as early as the time of the Pisistratidae. (See
Onomacritus.) They are often quoted by Plato, and the allusions to them
in later writers are very frequent. The extant poems, which bear the name of Orpheus, are the
forgeries of grammarians and philosophers of the Alexandrian School; but among the fragments,
which form a part of the collection, are some genuine remains of that Orphic poetry which was
known to Plato, and which must be assigned to the period of Onomacritus, or perhaps a little
earlier. To the original portions, which grew under the hands of the Orphici into a vast
literature, were added also interpretations and liturgies by the Pythagoreans, some of whose
doctrines were akin to those of the Orphic brotherhood. Aristotle and even Herodotus attacked
the pretended antiquity of the Orphic works, yet the myths and songs retained their acceptance
as antiques down to the third and fourth centuries A.D., when we find them quoted by the
Fathers. The Orphic literature, which, in this sense, may be called genuine, seems to have
included hymns, a theogony, oracles, etc. The principal productions which have come down to us
are:
1.
Argonautica, an epic poem in 1394 hexameters, giving an account of the
expedition of the Argonauts;
2.
Hymns, eighty-seven or eighty-eight in number, in hexameters, evidently the
productions of the Neo-Platonic School;
3.
Lithica (
Λιθικά) treating of properties of
stones, both precious and common, and their uses in divination;
4.
fragments, chiefly of the
Theogony (
Θεογονία), which show the influence of Hesiod. It is in this class that we find
the genuine remains of the literature of the early Orphic theology, but intermingled with
others of a much later date. There are also a number of other poems, of which a list is given
in Christ's
Griechische Litteraturgeschichte (pp. 658, 659).
On the Orphic brotherhood, see especially
Lobeck's Aglaophamus
(1829); Gruppe,
Die Griechischen Kulte und Mythen, i. 612-674
(1887); Maury,
Les Religions de la Grèce Antique,
iii. 300-337
(1859); Lenormant in the
Gazette
Archéologique for 1879, pp. 18-37; and
Gerhard, Orpheus und
die Orphiker (1861). On the Orphic literature, see Hermann's
Orphica (1805);
Tyrwhitt's Lithica
(1781);
Abel's Orphei Lithica (1881); id.
Orphica (1886);
Kern, De Orphei, Epimenidis,
Pherecydis, Theogoniis (1888);
Buresch, Klaros
(1890); and Rohde in
Psyche, ii. 395 foll. See also the article
Mysteria.
