The Doctrines of the Orphic Mysteries, with Special Reference to the Words of Anchises in Vergil's Sixth Aeneid 724-51

George Norlin

The Doctrines of the Orphic Mysteries, with Special Reference to the Words of Anchises in Vergil's Sixth Aeneid 724-51The Classical Journal

Vol. 3, No. 3 (Jan., 1908), pp. 91-99

p 91 The discovery of gold tablets buried with the dead has lead to the reading of Orphic as the mystic ides of Orphic-

Pythagorean psychology and eschatology

p92 the 6th  book of Aeneid , some from the 4th C BCE

and Proclus Neoplatonism establishises the kinship of  mystic ideas between Empedocles, Pindar and Plato on metempsychosis and eschatology from a common Orphic source.

The first mystic doctrine is the birth of Zagreuse, son of Zeus, who is lain by the titans whom Zeus attacks with a thunderbolt  and from their ashes springs the human race- born between sacred and profane, earth and the heavenly, carnal and spiritual,  and pure and impure, divine and immortal

 p 93 but they inherit the guilt of the titans and so must suffer for this sin. The punishment is metempsychosis, with the body a tomb like prison. living on the cave like earth as a cycle of a wheel of life. Some will be reincarnated to ever lower forms and some to higher forms until they are a god., in an indefinite cycle or at least 10,000 years.

p 94 the wicked are sen to  Hades for temporary suffering for purification for some thousands of years, the good to Elysium in Hades. After three times in Elysium of Hades the soul is returned to be with the gods.

p 95 the Stoic ideas was not metempsychosis but the soul as begot from a spark from the gods and it was tainted while on earth- so it had to go to Hades to purify itself so it could return to the heavenly fire.