The Orphic Hymns, by Patrick Dunn

followed her into the underworld, the realm of Hades, where he played for Plouton, the god of the dead. He played so well that Plouton wept iron tears and granted Orpheus’s request to have her back for the full span of her life, but on one condition: he must not look at her until they had departed the realm of Hades. She followed him up the steep ascent, but once he stepped out into the light, he could no longer resist and looked behind him. But she was still in the darkness of the underworld, and now he had broken the condition. She was taken from him one last time. In grief he wandered the world until he encountered a group of women maddened in the worship of Dionysos. These Mainades, as they were called, tore him limb from limb. The Mousai gathered up his limbs and buried them; where they laid them, oracles sprang up.

His head, by some accounts, washed up on the isle of Lesbos, where it prophesied after death.

The Orphic cult found this myth inspirational for its concept of descent and return from death. Their mystery rites may have contained some element of reenactment of this myth. The central god of Orphism, perhaps surprisingly considering his role in the myth, is Dionysos, god of wine. Stories of women maddened by his worship were common. Called Mainades or Bakchai, these followers of Dionysos were sometimes regarded as a danger, capable of tearing a man apart and consuming his flesh. Euripides’s play The Bakchai, recounts the death of the blaspheming King Pentheus, who is killed by his own mother in a Bacchic frenzy.

There were indeed celebrations of Bakchos that involved dancing, drinking, and frenzied states of enthusiasm, and perhaps even the consuming of raw meat in honor of the god. But much of what we know about these Bacchanalia comes from sources critical of the practice, so it is impossible to know what is and what is not propaganda or slander.

It is interesting that many of the criticisms of Bacchic mystery religions involve the same allegations laid, even at the same time, against Christianity: cannibalism, frenzy, madness, drunkenness, sexual license, and so on.

Also feeding into the stream of Orphic religious practices was the probably older mystery religion of Demeter of Eleusis. In this myth, recounted in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, the god of the under2 • Introduction to the Orphic Hymns