Orphics in Our Midst

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One winter day near Thessaloniki in 1962, two archaeologists excavating a fourth-century BC Macedonian nobleman’s tomb made a unique and extraordinary find: a papyrus roll. This in and of itself is already unusual, as all other papyri to survive from antiquity were found in Egypt, whose sands have afforded the perfect preservation environment for the fragile material (two others have been found outside of Egypt, only to crumble forthwith upon discovery). 

But the contents of this papyrus, once its fragments were assembled and deciphered, proved even more extraordinary than the sheer fact of its survival: This was a philosophical allegorical commentary on an Orphic hymn. Dealing with the nature of the soul and conditions under which it might yet elude death, it was an appropriate text to place in a tomb. Considering the difficulties involved in understanding any Orphic texts, it’s also appropriate that it was a commentary, rather than the hymn itself, that was buried with the unknown gentleman. When it comes to understanding important matters correctly, better safe than sorry.

I first encountered this document, named the Derveni papyrus, on the first day of a graduate seminar in Greek papyrology that I took nearly twenty years ago. The scribe’s hand is legible enough to allow baby papyrologists to cut their teeth on deciphering the script. But reading the words here is the least of anyone’s worries. The Derveni papyrus is a gateway into a world of psychedelic mushrooms, dripping acid, and the wildest search for the true world soul or at least the divine self somewhere deep within your mortal body—metaphorically speaking, probably, but one never really knows with the Orphics and their ilk. 

Really, the Greeks and various other ancient pagan groups—from the Indus River Valley to Mesopotamia and across the Mediterranean—could be weird, but what has been insufficiently noted before is that they were weird in remarkably similar ways, philosophically speaking. So argues theologian Michael Horton in his new book, Shaman and Sage: The Roots of “Spiritual but Not Religious” in Antiquity. 

Horton urges us to look at ancient paganism in greater detail than Christians have so far. Typically, we are prone to think in simplistic terms of polytheism or paganism as the worship of many gods and monotheism as that thing we do, having inherited it from the Jews. And yet, ancient pagan religions are fascinating in much more complicated ways than we ordinarily think, once we look more closely. Myths of divine rebirth, dismemberment or other violent death, and reincarnation abound, as do questions about the complexities of the relationship of the human and the divine. 

What are people for? What are gods for? Are all gods manifestations of one being, and how do the various parts of this one being all connect to each other? On a related note, what is the nature of the soul, and under what conditions does it, unlike the inconveniently fleshly body entrapping it, become immortal? But the real question you’re here for is: What does any of this have to do with Christ—and, therefore, with us, modern believers? In other words, why should Christians today care about the Derveni papyrus, those weird Orphic followers, and the plethora of other no less strange sources about complicated shamanistic beliefs and practices across ancient Eurasia? 

This last is the question that Horton sets out to answer in his book. This admittedly hefty volume does not present a complete answer, though: This is just the first book in a planned trilogy. 

Horton explains the need for this project in Anno Domini 2024 by pointing to some unfortunate trends in the contemporary religious landscape: “58 percent of eighteen- to twenty-four-year-old Americans believe that astrology is scientific. The number of US adults who believe in astrology is greater than the combined membership of all mainline Protestant denominations.” I will hazard to guess, in fact, that plenty of members of mainline Protestant denominations believe in astrology too, even as I’ve met some who do not believe in the resurrection.

In our world of “Great Dechurching” these are sobering reminders that “Spirituality without religion is not just a vapid weigh station to atheism, particularly when most atheists affirm some sort of spiritual reality. Not even in post-Christian Europe is scientific naturalism the victor over religion. Instead, beliefs that would have been considered superstitious by Christians and scientists alike are considered scientific.” 

But, Horton argues, while this is a modern and post-Christian story, it’s an ancient and pre-Christian one too. So back we go to the Orphics, the people who had written the Derveni papyrus and the hymn on which it comments. Horton cautions: “The history of Western civilization cannot be reduced to Orphic philosophy and Hermetic magic. Yet it cannot be understood without it. The so-called Axial revolution was not something that happened once upon a time in the sixth century BCE. Rather, it has always been the native religion of Western culture. Challenges to the public religion of Athens and of Christendom have always asserted the ‘Religion of the One’—the perennial tradition of the One as everything and everything as the One.”

In other words, too often, perhaps without even realizing it, ancient mystics and pagans are remarkably (and disturbingly) similar to modern religious skeptics. 

Horton proceeds to offer a superbly researched chronological gallop through the spiritual beliefs from the Mesopotamian world of Gilgamesh and Achaemenid Zoroastrianism to the growth of beliefs, stories, and cults surrounding the single most influential figure in this book: the Greek mythical bard Orpheus.

In Greek mythology, Orpheus lost his wife, Eurydice, to snakebite. The gods granted him a favor: he could descend to the underworld, claim her, and bring her back to the world of the living. Except he looked back at her during the march back, and as consequence, lost her forever. In myths about his later life, the frenzied worshippers of the deranged wine god Dionysus tore Orpheus apart as part of ritual. 

Over time, both Orpheus and Dionysus became connected to mystery cults in the Greek world and the larger Mediterranean orbit, both together and separately, as various groups were navigating beliefs and rituals about the nature of the soul: “From the late seventh or early sixth century, the same artists who gave life to Dionysus were captivated by the Thracian singer. Calling Orpheus ‘the father of songs,’ the great lyric poet Pindar is taken with the doctrines of the body as a prison of the soul, reincarnation, and the hope for eventual disembodiment.” 

We find figures like Orpheus evolve from mere shamans into sages too—as stories around them are told by philosophers and become the foundation for further philosophical ideals about the nature of the soul and the body. One of the most recognizable names in this story is Pythagoras—of the Pythagorean theorem fame—who was a mystic philosopher as well as a mathematician. (If you have always hated math because it felt like the enemy of your soul, you may have been on to something) 

By the time we get to Plato, “It is a modern anachronism… to picture the Greek enlightenment as a retreat from religion; rather, it was a flight from what we might call organized religion. The goal remained nothing less than salvation of the soul and assimilation to God.” In the process, Plato’s writings reflect throughout the continued influence of Orphic beliefs in practice. 

But it’s not just the pagans whose spiritual journeys revolve around various permutations of Orphic philosophy. The story starts getting arguably even trippier once we get to Jewish and early Christian thinkers who incorporated Orphic elements. We meet Philo of Alexandria, a contemporary of Jesus, whom Horton nicknames “Orphic Moses,” and who himself referred to Plato as “Greek-speaking Moses.” Among Philo’s particularly obvious Orphic beliefs is his interpretation of Abraham’s life: “Abraham’s migration is a cycle of descent and return, an eternal journey between two worlds. Thus, his interpretation of scripture was much like Plato’s Orphic interpretation of Odysseus’s departure and return to Ithaca and Plutarch’s exposition of the myth of Isis and Osiris. The end is always like the beginning.”

The end result is a different sort of Judaism, Horton notes, and “something completely foreign to Hellenists: descending into ourselves in order to despair of finding God there, so that we will cast ourselves upon the God who is outside of our soul. For the rest of the journey to God, Philo interprets biblical narratives as quarries for what is in the main the Orphic-Plato cosmogenic myth.”

The interest in philosophy as an art and a science, but also sheer magic, continued into the Roman Empire. The time of turmoil in the third century—what historians call the Third Century Crisis—inspires, unsurprisingly, a new manifestation of the shaman-type figure to whom despairing souls could turn. This is Hermes Trismegistus, whose mysticism fascinated such Christian witnesses as Clement of Alexandria. 

Not surprisingly, the Hermetic movement also influenced Neoplatonism, the new incarnation of the Platonic school in the Late Roman Empire—which included a Christian element, the Christian Neoplatonists. Horton explains the various groups’ interest in Hermes the magician: “There is a lot of theology in the Corpus Hermeticum and theurgic Neoplatonism, but the main interest is in doing and not dogma. Magicians were utopians, wanting to bend the rules of fate. They were the vanguard of natural scientists because they wanted to change nature, not just to understand it.” 

If you (like me) have ever noticed the strong Neoplatonist flavor in the Gnostic movement, you will find Horton’s analysis helpful in explaining the myriad ways in which the different Gnostic sects appropriated and reinterpreted Orphic and Hermetic views, all while displaying several common beliefs. First among these is that “The true God is unknowable and beyond the hierarchy of being and yet identical to one’s deepest self.” As in straight-up Orphism, there is also a hierarchy of worlds: “The lower world was created by an inferior and evil ruler.” Finally, and most recognizable Orphic trend is: “Gnostics curved the historical events of Jesus’s incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, bodily ascent, and return at the end of the age into a circle of Orphic descent-and-return.”

It is perhaps unsurprising that such a blender-smoothie-theology approach that the Gnostics and at times also other Christian Platonists (like Origen) brought to marry Orphism with Christianity, rankled not only orthodox Christians but also some pagan critics of Christianity, like Porphyry. He was particularly scandalized with “the doctrine of the resurrection of the body.” Isn’t this a rejection of the Platonic—and Orphic—emphasis on the truth of the soul first? Appropriately enough, Augustine later finds rejecting Platonism key in strengthening his faith in Christ. 

In the book’s final chapter, Horton offers a bird’s-eye overview of Orphic-Hermetic ideas in the Byzantine world and beyond. These ideas preview, I assume, the two volumes in this series that are to come. Horton concludes: “wherever we discern a quasi-docetic eschatology that leaves the body and the visible world behind, we are in an Orphic rather than biblical atmosphere. This includes an emphasis on “God” as a cipher for the “Whole” and a subordinate Christology that privileges the logos asarkos (meaning, Word without flesh) in eternity over and above the logos ensarkos (meaning, the Incarnate Word) in time. And that, I suggest, is the nucleus of what it means, at least in a formerly Christian civilization, to be spiritual rather than religious.”

I have noted before that there are two types of ancient historians: Those who emphasize the differences between people in antiquity and us; and those who lean on the similarities of the human experience. Horton makes in this book a convincing argument for the latter, when it comes to matters of spirituality. We as a species are remarkably less creative than we might like to think. We are also remarkably self-centered by nature—thence the desire of every self-proclaimed shaman and sage to find, ultimately, the spiritual or the divine within. It is convicting to read over this intellectual history that Horton brings together to show how natural to us is the desire to make ourselves into our own gods. 

Therein lines the theological value and application of this survey of intellectual history of Orphism and similar spiritual beliefs throughout antiquity. Christianity was distinctive and unusual among these beliefs that existed all around it. And yet, even for some believers, the temptation was irresistible to try and reconcile Christianity with the mysticism that was practically in the air and the water all around. I did not look at philosophical ideas in my own examination of cultural Christians in the early church. But Horton reveals this tale of cultural Christians in the spiritual realm—just as for many non-Christians, such superstitions in antiquity were their main religion, just as they are for so many non-Christians today. Paganism, it turns out, was anything but simple.

The book is superbly researched—Horton is the undisputed master of both primary and secondary source material. He has done the impossible here, presenting the story of both the massive millennia-old intellectual forest and its many trees in exquisite detail. This book is no fast-paced beach read, but it will be well worth the time you spend with it.