Ritual Texts for the Afterlife: Orpheus and the Bacchic Gold Tablets
Ritual Texts for the Afterlife: Orpheus and the Bacchic Gold Tablets (2013) by Fritz Graf and Sarah Iles Johnston provides a comprehensive analysis of a fascinating group of texts. If you’re interested in ancient religion, chances are you’ve come across a reference to the Orphic gold tablets, perhaps described as an enigmatic remnant of a mystery religion or even a lost precursor to Christian concepts of salvation. Graf and Johnston’s study removes the veil of mystery and considers these tablets in a serious, grounded manner, without the unwarranted grandiosity of claiming they are the key to ancient Greek religion or the origin point of Christianity.
The Orphic gold tablets are a set of about 30 texts inscribed in Ancient Greek on gold, recovered from burials. The book begins by printing all the texts in full, in Ancient Greek and in English, providing an invaluable set of primary evidence for those like me who have seen these tablets referenced in fleeting, mysterious terms and just want to know exactly what they are and what they say. The rest of the book consists of chapters discussing the history of scholarship on the texts, their meaning, the myth of Dionysus that seems to undergird them, and their relationship with Dionysus, Orpheus, Orphism, and mystery cults in general.
In (somewhat) short, Graf and Johnston argue the following about the gold tablets: they are inscribed with ritual texts intended to help initiates to a Dionysiac/Bacchic cult navigate the underworld and claim their rightful afterlife. The texts are often called Orphic because some Ancient Greeks credited Orpheus, best known for his ill-fated attempt to retrieve his love Eurydice from the underworld, with establishing the best-known rites that honor the god Dionysus. Graf and Johnston argue that the holders of the golden texts were initiates to a Bacchic “mystery” cult, so called because knowledge of the rituals was restricted; the English word “mystery” ultimately derives from the Ancient Greek for “initiate.” This mystery cult revolved around a myth in which the child Dionysus, the son of Zeus and Persephone (unlike more mainstream Greek myth, where his mother is Semele) is murdered by Titans before he can take his rightful position as ruler of the world and inaugurate a new golden age (this myth is the subject of the book Dionysus Slain). Zeus destroys the Titans in vengeance and human beings are born from the ashes of their corpses. Based on the extant texts, Graf and Johnston argue that adherents to this cult believed they must therefore atone to the underworld goddess Persephone for the murder of her son that created them, and by atoning they could achieve in death the blessed existence that Dionysus would have brought to the living world if not for his untimely murder. The authors also argue that this mystery cult was created in purposeful imitation of the very popular and secretive Eleusinian Mysteries, which centered around the goddesses Demeter and Persephone. While the Eleusinian Mysteries were tethered geographically to Eleusis, the Orphic/Bacchic mystery rites could take place anywhere. And by casting Persephone as Dionysus’s mother, these rites sort of a next generation-style reboot of the prestigious Eleusinian Mysteries, celebrating Persephone and her son instead of Persephone and her mother.
If this all sounds a bit complex and you’d prefer a quick, determinative answer on what exactly Orphism is and what these tablets mean, you won’t find it in this book. Not for any fault of the authors, however; such clear answers simply don’t seem to exist for Ancient Greek belief systems. While mythology books and famous epics like the Odyssey and the Iliad have led many of us to believe that the Ancient Greeks had a single set of myths everyone agreed upon, the reality is infinitely more complex. Every local region, every village, had its own ever-shifting constellation of gods and heroes, and beliefs ebbed and flowed and changed over the decades and centuries.
The book is at its least compelling when it slogs through these kaleidoscopic cosmologies of belief, throwing endless lists of locations, eras, and names of authors, texts, and gods at the reader, not to mention alternate names for gods and epithets to those alternate names. It can, at times, feel impossible to keep up, keep everything straight, and remember that Erikepaios was a name used for Dionysus at Hierokaisareia in Lydia, but Erikepaios also appears alone in Orphic texts that have connections to local Bacchic mystery cults in nearby Smyrna, where Dionysus goes by Bromius (and all this just in two sentences on page 155!). And while I appreciate Graf and Johnston’s insistence that these texts and beliefs should not be understood solely through a Christian lens, I am still left wondering about the apparent similarities to Christianity in the mythology and soteriology surrounding the slaying and rebirth of Dionysus. How many other religions demand their adherents atone for an “original sin” that occurred at the beginning of humanity in order to achieve salvation in the afterlife? But regardless of the many questions it must leave unanswered, Ritual Texts for the Afterlife is still an ideal book for those hoping to gain greater understanding of the gold tablets, Orphism, or Bacchic mystery cults.
The accompanying image is © The Trustees of the British Museum, released under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. It depicts a gold tablet with a typical “Orphic” inscription instructing the soul how to proceed in the underworld; this is the tablet referred to as number 2 in the book. Graf and Johnston identify this tablet as coming from a 4th century BCE grave in Petelia (southern Italy), but the British Museum dates it as 3rd – 2nd century BCE.
A gold tablet inscribed in Ancient Greek with a typical Orphic inscription, dated to the 4th century BCE by Graf and Johnston and the 3rd – 2nd century BCE by the British Museum.