For example, Pythagoras was re-enacting Orpheus although he was not Orpheus’ natural son (see Gregory Nagy’s Homer the Preclassic, E§116). The whole humanity is potentially in connection with Orpheus just like the Orphic Zeus contains everything and is contained by everything. One self’s connection with Orpheus depends on will and on undertaking of a re-birth ritual, not on blood. Lineage in the Orphic tradition is only ritual and is only a matter of initiation. There are no Orphēidai like the Homēridai of Chios. Moreover, there is no historical family tradition in Orphism unlike in the Homeric tradition. But Orphism has already overcome the idea that the sole material ritual could work as a sufficient means for salvation. The life of soul, according to Plato, is overall an adequate relationship to itself, which is called intellection (nous Sophist, 249a Laws X). Such a mental power makes the soul able to escape an ever-lasting re-birth and re-death cycle, just like the anamnèsis in Plato does, athough the divine part of soul is identified only with rationality in Plato, and no longer with any vitalizing spirit correlated with body. This soteriological interpretation of the role payed by memory is confirmed by the cyclical sequence bios thanatos bios found in the Olbia bones fragments (OF 463.1 Bernabé). Orphism does not deny the authority of Homeric or Hesiodic tradition, which makes immortal the names of heroes, but Orphism gradually transfers it inside the soul and thus discovers a new level of immortality, which concerns the ego and is independent from the surviving part of human society, just like the common immortality of soul demonstrated by Plato in the Phaedo does paradoxically not prevent certain souls being more subject to death than other ones (see for example the end of the Timaeus, 90c)! In certain “Orphic” gold tablets, Mnemosyne is not invocated in order to keep alive an oral tradition through succesive generations but for an individual soul to re-assume its own divine origin. Authentic Orphism may indeed be defined as the cultural process - neither a fixed doctrine nor an organized church - that leads from the positive valuation of an external memory concerning epic or theogonic old paterns, working as a condition of the kleos aphthiton for heroes and poets, toward the positive valuation of the internal memory which is conceived off as bringing the philosopher’s soul in touch with eternal realities. It just has to be put in a dynamic perspective instead of a static one. "According to this paper, the Athenian Neoplatonic idea that there was a deep accordance between Orpheus, Pythagoras and Plato about the method and the definition of soul salvation (see Syrianus) is not fully erroneous.
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