by Alexis Pinchard
Talk to be held at the Cagliari Conference of the International Society for Neoplatonic Studies (June 20-24 2012).
According to this paper, the Athenian Neoplatonic idea that there was a deep accordance between Orpheus, Pythagoras... more
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. It just has to be put in a dynamical perspective instead of a static one. 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 philosopher’s soul in touch with eternal realities. 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 remaining 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. 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). 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. The life of soul, according to Plato, is overall an adequate relationship to itself, which is called intellection (nous). But Orphism has already overcome the idea that the sole material ritual could work as a sufficient mean for salvation. Moreover, there is no historical family tradition in Orphism unlike in the Homeric tradition. There are no Orphēidai like the Homēridai of Chios. Lineage in the Orphic tradition is only ritual and is only a matter of initiation. One self’s connection with Orpheus depends on will and on undertaking of a re-birth ritual, not on blood. The whole humanity is potentially in connection with Orpheus just like the Orphic Zeus contains everything and is contained by everything. For example, Pythagoras was re-enacting Orpheus although he was not Orpheus’ natural son (see Gregory Nagy’s Homer the Preclassic, E§116). In the same way, Plato asserts that every human being has seen the Ideas and can remember them by practicing dialectics. Finally, in Orphism, the self-identification of the rhapsode with the mythical proto-poet occurs during the whole life, and not only during the oral performance. This is why there is a real Orphic “way of life” (vegetarian food, nonviolence, saying truth; see Plato, Leges, 782 c-d), and not only an Orphic way of singing. Moreover, since the Orphic poems were written quite early and thus became protected against oral variation, the initiate couldn’t identify himself with Orpheus as a creative poet. The very process of improvisation during an oral performance was forbidden to him. Therefore the ritual and ethic behavior, or the rationalizing interpretation of Orphic poems just like in the Derveni Papyrus, became the only way of re-enacting Orpheus. On one hand Orpheus’ powerful living voice was admitted as definitely remoted in the past, but on the other hand the inner and spiritual life became the most important factor of continuity in the Orphic tradition.
So Orphism might be the analogy-generating tradition in which Plato found the first connection between different kinds of memory and different levels of immortality (see especially Diotima’s speech during the Symposium, 208c-d, 212a). Such a connection was the condition for dialectics, so that it coul not be the result a dialectics. Of course, following Plato himself, modern scholars have accepted this hierarchy as a distinctive feature through which one could isolate Plato from other salvation traditions in Greek culture, as if to conceive off the genuine immortality as an instantaneous return to our metaphysical origin were the special innovation of philosophy. But, as we said, Plato might have just continued the process inaugurated by Orphism, and this process might also be not later than the Homeric poetry. Indeed, on the basis of many data excerpted from comparative poetics dealing with Indian and Iranian sacred poetry, we may assume that such a growing complexity of immortality and memory was a permanent trend in some ancient cultures, synchronically organized rather than diachronically, just like the Neoplaonic thinkers believed.
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![](http://photos.academia.edu/448997/145810/169401/tiny_ida.brancaccio.jpg?1324392870 "<strong>Ida Brancaccio</strong><br/>University of Naples "Federico II""){kind=small}
