INTRODUCTION

So boasts the deceased woman of Thurii on a gold tablet buried with her, identifying not only herself, but her antecedents as worthy. This enigmatic tablet, similar to others found throughout the margins of the Greek world, from Thessaly to southern Italy and Crete, has piqued the interest of scholars ever since its discovery in 1879. Although the tablet proclaims the identity and lineage of the deceased woman with whom it was buried, the identity and lineage of the tablets themselves — what sorts of religious phenomena they represent and where they come from — remain largely mysterious. These so-called Orphic gold tablets present one of the most intriguing puzzles in the study of Greek religious beliefs. In all the graves from classical antiquity excavated by modern scholars, fewer than twenty examples have been found of these enigmatic pieces of gold foil inscribed with instructions for the deceased in the afterlife.

In contrast to gold tablets that are simply blank or contain only the name of the deceased or a dedication “To Persephone and Plouto,” the nearly twenty tablets with sizable inscriptions evoke a narrative; they present a piece of the story of the deceased's journey to the underworld and her encounter with the powers there. An analysis of the way in which the myth of the underworld journey is used in these tablets can reveal much about the mysterious religious context in which these tablets were produced.