Beyond the story of his descent to the underworld, Orpheus is also the named source of Orphism, a current of ancient Greek religious and philosophical thought concerned with the soul's fate after death, purification, and a distinctive cosmogony describing the world's birth from a cosmic egg. The difficulty is that the texts carrying this material, the Orphic Hymns, the theogonies referred to by later philosophers, and the gold funerary tablets found in graves across the Greek world giving instructions for the afterlife, all postdate any period in which a historical bard named Orpheus could plausibly have lived, some by many centuries.
Ancient authors themselves already treated Orpheus's authorship of these works as an attribution rather than a settled fact, and modern scholarship generally agrees that Orphic literature is a retrospective corpus, produced by later poets and religious specialists who wrote under his name to lend their teachings the authority of a legendary founder. Whether a historical singer named Orpheus existed at all, as a real predecessor to Homeric bardic tradition, or whether he was from the outset a purely legendary culture hero invented to give a body of poetic and mystical practice a face and a name, cannot be settled from the surviving evidence, and both readings remain current among classicists.