Orphic, Orphism, and a Word That Has Been Made to Carry Too Much

"Orphic" in the title of this collection does not mean what it means in discussions of the gold leaves from south Italian graves, or of the Derveni papyrus, or of the theogonies in which Phanes is born from an egg. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholarship assembled all of that into a single reconstructed religion, "Orphism", complete with a doctrine of original sin and a church. That construction has been dismantled. What is left is a scatter of related texts and practices across a thousand years, sharing an appeal to Orpheus and an interest in the fate of the soul, and not amounting to an organised religion. These hymns belong to that scatter, and their theology is not the theology of the gold leaves.

Their afterlife has been disproportionate. The Byzantine manuscripts reached Italy in the fifteenth century, where Marsilio Ficino sang the hymns to his own lyre accompaniment and treated them as an ancient theology consonant with Platonism and with Christianity. Through Ficino and the Florentine Platonists they entered Renaissance magic, and from there the whole Western esoteric tradition; they are still in use in modern Hellenic polytheist practice. A reader meeting them today is more likely to be meeting Ficino's Orphic Hymns than the Asia Minor cult association's, and the distinction is worth keeping.