ABSTRACT
Having looked at the earlier Greek and Israelite ideas about the soul and conceptions of the afterlife, we will now face the question when and why the soul was ‘upgraded’ in ancient Greece. An important stage in this process was the rise of the doctrine of reincarnation,1 of which the earliest representatives were Pythagoras and the Orphics, until very recently a somewhat obscure Greek ‘sect’. The evidence about Pythagoras has long been familiar; he himself is the subject of a definitive study by Walter Burkert,2 and recent years have hardly provided any surprises in giving us new texts.3 However, in the case of the Orphics we are in a completely different situation. Since 1970, we have had the preliminary publication of a commentary on what may well be the oldest Orphic theogony (the famous Derveni papyrus),4 the discovery of Orphic bone tablets,5 a steady stream of Orphic ‘Gold Leaves’ (the small inscribed gold lamellae found in graves),6 and the appearance on the market of new Apulian vases with representations of Orpheus and the afterlife.7 These astonishing new discoveries enable us to place Orphic teachings about reincarnation in the framework of this intriguing movement in a more detailed way than was possible in earlier studies, which are now all to a larger or lesser extent out of date.8 As each publication in the continuing stream of new Gold Leaves obliges us to revise our ideas, this chapter is more in the nature of an interim report than a definitive statement. We will first look at the rise of the soul as exemplified by reincarnation in Pythagoreanism, Parmenides and Empedocles (section 1), then at Orphic practices, organisation and teachings (section 2), and conclude with an attempt at explaining the rise of the soul at the end of the Archaic period (section 3).
