ABSTRACT
As we saw in the introductory History of Scholarship, during the twentieth century scholars were oscillating between an understanding of Orphism as an almost church-like religious system, a sect in the modern sense of the word (scholars such as Macchioro or even, less extremely, Guthrie),1 and the rejection of any importance that Orpheus and Orphism had on Greek religion (most prominently expressed by Wilamowitz). This constellation mirrored the way scholarship on mystery cults had been oscillating between understanding them as the most important feature of Greek religion (Creuzer 1812) and a much more modest reading that saw them as just one small part of it (Lobeck 1828). Like our ancestors in the early twentieth century, most contemporary scholars seem again to lean toward a moderate definition that ascribes some importance to Orphic texts and religious specialists connected with them, against the minimalist approach of Linforth and Zuntz, who rejected any religious phenomenon that could be called Orphic. But by now the textual foundation for any position has become much better: spectacular finds such as the Derveni Papyrus and the growing number of gold tablets have helped, as has the steady increase in texts and interpretations of Hellenistic poetry and mythography that show a presence and perception of Orphic texts already among the scholar-poets of the third century BCE; Plato’s interest in Orpheus no longer seems isolated and unusual. We have also learned from the mistakes of earlier scholars. Unlike them, even among contemporary maximalists, no one talks about “Orphic religion” or claims that early Christianity depended for its soteriology on Orphism or “Orphic mysteries.” To derive Christianity directly from pagan mystery cults has been revealed as an ideological stance; when religions are understood as systems, the Bacchic mysteries are a sub-system among many others, with Orpheus “the singer, magician, initiator and visitor to Hades” (above, p. 177) belonging to more than one of them.2
