The Introduction reviews evidence and recent scholarship on private Orphic-Bacchic mysteries of the Classical period. Four recent developments are especially important for the book’s argument: Radcliffe Edmonds’s challenge to the idea of a common Orphic belief system; Walter Burkert’s model of Orphism as a “craft” of competing experts; the Derveni Papyrus, which shows the central importance of poetic performance in private mysteries; and the description of Orphic-Bacchic cults as bricolage, applying the category of Claude Lévi-Strauss. Taking these developments into account, I argue that private mystery cults can be understood as a poetic performance context, and that interactions between experts and clients mirrored the relation of poet and audience in other poetic genres. As products of a poetic performance setting, the tablets can be expected to apply and adapt the verbal and conceptual repertoire afforded by the traditions of early Greek poetry. On this interpretation, the inconsistency and semantic ambiguity of the tablets can be understood as an aid to performance, giving ritual experts flexibility to explain and adapt their performing repertoire in different ways.