The Sleepwalkers Read Online Free PDF Page B

head floats down the Hebrus – still singing. It sounds like a cautionary tale; but the tearing and devouring of the living god, and his subsequent rebirth, is a leitmotif that recurs in Orphism on a different level of meaning. In Orphic mythology, Dionysus (or his Thracian version, Zagreus) is the beautiful son of Zeus and Persephone; the evil Titans tear him to pieces and eat him, all but his heart, which is given to Zeus, and he is born a second time. The Titans are slain by Zeus' thunderbolt; but out of their ashes man is born. By devouring the god's flesh, the Titans have acquired a spark of divinity which is transmitted to man; and so is the desperate evil that resided in the Titans. But it is in the power of man to redeem this original sin, to purge himself of the evil portion of his heritage by leading an other-wordly life and performing certain ascetic rites. In this manner he can obtain liberation from the "wheel of rebirth" – his imprisonment in successive animal and even vegetable bodies, which are like carnal tombs to his immortal soul – and regain his lost divine status.
    The Orphic cult was thus in almost every respect a reversal of the Dionysian; it retained the name of the god and some features of his legend, but all with a changed emphasis and different meaning (a process that will repeat itself at other turning points of religious history). The Bacchic technique of obtaining emotional release by furiously clutching at the Now and Here, is replaced by renunciation with an eye on after-life. Physical intoxication is superseded by mental intoxication; the "juice that streams from the vine-clusters to give us joy and oblivion" now serves only as a sacramental symbol; it will eventually be taken over, together with the symbolic swallowing of the slain god and other basic elements of Orphism, by Christianity. "I am perishing with thirst, give me to drink of the waters of memory", says a verse on an Orphic gold tablet, alluding to the divine origin of the soul: the aim is no longer oblivion but remembrance of a knowledge which it once possessed. Even words change their meaning: "orgy" no longer means Bacchic revelry, but religious ecstasy leading to liberation from the wheel of rebirth. 7 A similar development is the transformation of the carnal union between the King and the Shulamite into the mystic union of Christ and his Church; and, in more recent times, the shift of meaning in words like "rapture" and "ravishment".
    Orphism was the first universal religion in the sense that it was not regarded as a tribal or national monopoly, but open to all who accepted its tenets; and it profoundly influenced all subsequent religious development. It would nevertheless be a mistake to attribute too much intellectual and spiritual refinement to it; the Orphic purification rites, which are the hub of the whole system, still contain a series of primitive taboos – not to eat meat, or beans, not to touch a white cock, not to look in a mirror beside the light.
    But this is precisely the point where Pythagoras gave Orphism a new meaning, the point where religious intuition and rational science were brought together in a synthesis of breathtaking originality. The link is the concept of katharsis . It was a central concept in Bacchism, Orphism, in the cult of the Delian Apollo, in Pythagorean medicine and science; but it had different meanings, and entailed different techniques in all of them (as it still does in the various schools of modern psychotherapy). Was there anything in common between the raving Bacchante and the aloof mathematician, the fiddle of Orpheus and a laxative pill? Yes: the same yearning for release from various forms of enslavement, from passions and tensions of body and mind, from death and the void, from the legacy of the Titans in man's estate – the yearning to re-light the divine spark. But the methods of achieving this must differ according to the person. They must be graded according to the