Now that new texts brought to light within the past decade have restored Dionysus to the role once posited for him in the texts of the Orphic gold leaves, it is time to re-examine those enigmatic texts as being in some sense poems themselves. All significant advances on these texts have been made by assuming that their archetypes were in poetic form, used standard epic diction, and made sense. Yet no one has succeeded in explaining why these texts should have been in poetic form in the first place. Most scholars have been content to see these texts primarily as parasitic upon early hexametric poetry for their formulaic phraseology. That is to say, the compositors of these texts are believed by and large to have drawn rather arbitrarily or slavishly and mechanically upon earlier poetry for the form and language of these texts, producing at best a derivative hodge-podge of formulae pirated from the language of earlier, canonized poems.

I want to argue in this paper that this view is fundamentally flawed. The one feature shared by all the texts alike is that they prescribe actions to be performed and words to be spoken by an unnamed addressee in response to the utterances of an underworld speaker. I will argue that these utterances can be seen as a function of a real or imagined performative context: that is to say, that they presuppose a scenario of enacted drama and contain their own dramatic structure, in which the enactment of ritual is linked to the performance or inscription of a poetic text.

Center and periphery are problematic terms and may be misleading, especially when applied literally to areas and metaphorically to ideas of the ancient Greek world, because center and periphery imply power and influence exerted and sustained. An area or city-state that may have been a periphery may gradually become a center and vice versa. The engraved gold lamellae and epistomia are a case in point. The texts engraved on these artifacts express ideas that are usually characterized as peripheral to the central Olympian ideology and culture, whereas the provenance so far of these artifacts indicates that the periphery of the Greek world is privileged over the center: Macedonia, Thessaly, Crete, the Peloponnese, Magna Graecia. This is only partially true, however. Crete and Macedonia, located at the southern and northern borders of Greece, eloquently present the problematics of the terms center and periphery. Macedonia is a periphery before Philip and Alexander but with their leadership becomes a domineering center during the Hellenistic period and then gradually changes into a peripheral center. Crete, because of its geographical position in the middle of the wine-dark sea (Odyssey 19.172–173), is one of the centers during the Minoan civilization, but becomes a periphery during the classical period, although its laws and customs continue to exert influences. During the Roman and especially the Imperial periods, however, Crete becomes again one of the peripheral centers.

OFFICIAL RELIGIOUS DISCOURSES AND MYSTICAL DISCOURSES

French anthropologists studying ancient Greek religion have readily interpreted the theological re-elaborations and religious practices of the Pythagoreans and the Orphics in terms of inversion and subversion: inversion of the path of cosmo- and theogonic creation to return from multiplicity and disparity to unity; subversion of the official sacrificial acts of animals through different forms of vegetarianism. Generally considered as autonomous systems of signification, the corresponding texts have been cut off in their reading and interpretation by modern readers from the circumstances of their production and performance. The attention brought to long poems seen as literary texts has often been accompanied by a certain disregard for the discursive practices of the “sectarians” themselves. In these practices, spoken words often held value as acts of worship, being accompanied by written records which have been restored to us with surprising regularity as the excavations progress, particularly from funerary sites.

Among the texts deposited near the remains of the deceased, there are two that are both from a similar time period (end of the fourth century) and from neighboring locations (Macedonia/Thessaly). One is the well-known “Derveni Papyrus,” excavated in 1962 from a cist-grave of a soldier near Thessaloniki and whose official publication is now finally completed; and the other is the pair of gold lamellae found in 1985 in a grave for a woman on the site thought to be ancient Pelinna.

I first came across the intriguing pieces made of gold in a seminar run by Walter Burkert in the winter semester 1978/79. Ever since then the scenery evoked on these strange little burial offerings, with all its highly suggestive details, has cast a spell on me: the House of Hades, with two springs off to the right; next to one of them a radiant cypress, over the other (the one fed by the Lake of Memory) guardians posted; moreover the soul, perishing from thirst: its dialogue with the guardians; a sacred path on which μύσται and Βάκχοι are treading (heading wherever they may), and so forth.

The various fragments of pictures and thoughts certainly stimulate our imagination and may induce one to sense a higher concept. However, uninitiated as we are, it is already difficult for us to clear up the puzzling ambiguity of single utterances – let alone to bring together all these elements into a coherent unity, or, as semioticians would put it, to create ‘monosemy’. Moreover, a comprehensive interpretation of these documents is hampered by the fact that even pure philological work in this case rather quickly seems to come to its limits. Already at a first glance, some of the leaves so far published display a closer relationship. This observation led Günther Zuntz, in his fundamental edition and philological exegesis of 1971, to distinguish between groups A and B. (I will leave aside in this place the isolated and quite peculiar C1 leaf, which has provoked different interpretations: while some scholars believe it to contain a magical text, others would look at it as a mystical item, in which the initiated could recognize, in the middle of meaningless characters, names and epithets of gods of the initiation, as well as some mystic formulas.

By virtue of both their context and their content, the “Orphic” gold plates occupy a singular place among the religious texts of the classical and early Hellenistic world. Deposited in tombs in sites as far afield as southern Italy, Thessaly, and Crete between the end of the fifth century bce and the second century ce, these thin pieces of gold foil served as a vademecum for the deceased, containing instructions on how one should negotiate his or her entry into the other world: as such, they constitute our sole extant examples of genuinely mortuary texts – i.e., texts intended primarily to aid a deceased person in attaining a blissful afterlife – in the Greek cultural sphere. Equally significant is the milieu within which the laminae appear to have circulated. The rarity of these mortuary texts as grave goods in the Greek world, as well as their wide geographical distribution, make likely the hypothesis that they reflect the post-mortem beliefs and aspirations of a particular group, whose membership was mobile and far-flung. While long-standing scholarly convention has dubbed the gold plates as “Orphic,” the south Italian provenance of the older exemplars, as well as some of the imagery in the texts, has led some commentators to suggest that the tablets might have circulated in a Pythagorean milieu. On the other hand, the reference to “mystai and Bakkhoi” in one of the laminae and the statement of the deceased in others that “Bacchios himself” has “released” him or her point incontestably to an association with Dionysiac mysteries.

NEW LIGHT FROM OLD TEXTS

“You have turned into a god, from the man you were”: The deification of man explicitly formulated in some gold leaves introduces such a radical novelty into the Greek religious panorama that these plates have naturally piqued the interest of scholarship for the last century and a half. It may thus seem adventurous to risk any new thoughts on them without submitting some new evidence which might fill the still enormous holes surrounding their interpretation. Yet it might prove useful to look at the scenes depicted in the already published leaves, which are dialogic in a great part, from the point of view of some texts which, perhaps precisely because of their celebrity as portraits of the traditional conceptions of life and death, have not yet been linked with them: I am referring to the dialogues of the heroes of the Homeric poems, in which notions very relevant for the understanding of the leaves, such as kleos, genos or xenia have their canonical expression. Admittedly, these dialogues are far from the gold leaves in their handling of these concepts, as in many other respects. But they offer some structural and formal parallels with the dialogues of the soul and the guardians and deities of the Underworld which suggest that the leaves are following the same poetic patterns that inspired the Homeric dialogues.

INTRODUCTION: THE DEBATE OVER THE RELIGIOUS CONTEXT OF THE LEAVES

When the first of the gold leaves, that of Petelia, was published in 1836, the studies on the history of religion considered the existence of Orphism a well-established fact, which led that leaf to be interpreted as Orphic, just as happened with the other gold leaves which appeared in subsequent years.

The hypercritical skeptical reaction started by Wilamowitz questioned the Orphic character of these documents, and the authority of the illustrious German philologist meant that the issue was left aside for many years. However, not even in the most skeptical times have the leaves been convincingly assigned to another known religious movement, and it has become usual to call them “Orphic” with resigned inverted commas.

There has been one attempt, by Pugliese Carratelli, to distinguish two types of leaves which would come from two different religious contexts:

1. (a) Those in which Mnemosyne gives instructions based on memory and the recognition formula “I am a son of Earth and starry Heaven.” In those leaves there are no allusions to the divine status of the deceased, nor are Persephone, Eucles, Eubuleus and the other immortal gods mentioned, but only the “king of the Underworld”. The aim of the mystai is to go through “the sacred way over which the other mystai and bakkhoi go forward in glory.” Pugliese Carratelli calls these leaves “Mnemosynial” and thinks they are Pythagorean.

2. […]

“Who are you?” ask the unnamed guardians, as the deceased begs for the water of Memory. “Where are you from?” From the discovery of the first gold lamellae in the nineteenth century to the most recent discoveries, scholars have asked much the same questions about the tablets themselves: Who are the people who chose to have these enigmatic scraps of gold foil buried with them in their graves? Where do these texts come from? How can we reconstruct the religious context of these mysterious texts?

Recent discoveries have prompted scholars to examine from new theoretical perspectives both the contexts in which the tablets were produced and the structures of the texts themselves. This collection brings together in English a number of previously published and new studies of the “Orphic” Gold tablets, with the goal of making accessible to a wider audience some of the new methodologies being applied to the study of the tablets. In addition, a survey of the trends in the scholarship and a compilation of the recent bibliography not only provides an introduction to the serious study of the tablets, but also illuminates the place of these tablets within the scholarship of ancient Greek religion.

Orphism did not exist for the ancient Greeks. Even Bianchi, who argued for the opposite conclusion, admitted that a term like “Orphism” must refer to a modern scholarly construct, a category by which we classify certain phenomena of the ancient world. Like any “ism,” therefore, Orphism would have to be a religious phenomenon comprised of the beliefs and practices, texts and artifacts, individuals and social organizations that were, by some definition or other, “Orphic.”

Problems arise, however, because not only modern scholars but also the ancient Greeks themselves labeled certain things as “Orphic,” and, as is the case with the term “magic,” the ancient, primary category is not precisely the same as the modern, secondary one. Not only did some ancient authors choose Orpheus as an authoritative pseudonym for their own compositions, but other ancient commentators also labeled certain texts, ideas, rites and so forth as Orphic, either for praise or for blame. As Linforth showed over sixty years ago, if we take merely those things explicitly sealed by the ancients with the name of Orpheus or the adjective Orphic, we cannot reconstruct a coherent religious movement founded upon specific central doctrines, manifested in particular social organizations, or engaged in activities peculiar to its members. In the years since Linforth, however, scholars have objected that, if we abandon the idea of Orphism as a coherent religious movement, we have no other alternative for a coherent religious movement that would explain the evidence.

INTRODUCTION

The books ascribed to Orpheus must have been legion already in the fifth century. The Euripidean Hippolytus, whom his father regards as a vegetarian and an ecstatic, is said to have Orpheus as a Lord, “to rave and to follow the smoke of many writings”; and Plato knows religious specialists who made use of “a hubbub of books by Orpheus and Musaeus.” Much later, in the prologue of his own Argonautika, Orpheus gives an impressive list of what he is about to sing – a theogony, starting from Chaos, Nyx, and Phanes, followed by the narrations about Demeter and Persephone, her relationship to Zeus and her μέγα πένθος, about the myths and the cults of Cybele, the Corybants and the Cabiri, of Praxidice, Aphrodite and Adonis, Isis and Osiris, and the oracles of Nyx about Bacchus, but also about divination through dreams and signs, purification, “supplications of gods and gifts to the dead”; finally a report of what he himself had seen in his travels, his descent into Hades and his visit to Egyptian Memphis, which must mean eschatology on the one hand, magic or theurgy on the other. This sounds impressive, and in some respects enigmatic – and that is just Orpheus' intention: all these, he says, are “frightful songs for mortal men, secrets without fear only to the initiates”: Orpheus is the Great Initiator.