What is best understood about them is that they abstained rigorously from flesh except during the rare performance of some rite of purification, in which they tasted the blood of a bull which was supposed to procure mystic union with the divine. As happened with the performers of other cruel or horrid rites, the transcendent significance they ascribed to the act paralysed their power of recognising its revolting nature. A diseased spiritualism which ignores matter altogether is the real key to such phenomena. It is too soon to say whether any link can be established between the Orphic practices and the so-called “bull-fights” of which traces have been found in Crete. Despised and tabooed though they were in historical Greece, the Orphists are still held to have exercised some sure though undefined influence on the development of the greatest spiritual fact of Hellenic civilisation, the Eleusinian Mysteries.
(_Photo:_ _Sommer_) ORPHEUS. (_Fresco at Pompeii._)]
The popular description of Orpheus as founder of the Orphists must be taken for what it is worth. The sect may have either evolved or borrowed the legend. Christianity itself appropriated the myth of Orpheus, pictorially, at least, in those rude tracings in the Roman catacombs showing the Good Shepherd in that character, which inspired Carlyle to write one of the most impassioned passages in English prose. The sweet lute-player who held entranced lion and lamb till the one forgot his wrath and the other his fear, was the natural symbol of the prototype of a humane religion.
Out of the nebulous patches of Greek enthusiasts who cherished tender feelings towards animals, emerges the intellectual sun of the Samian sage. It is difficult not to connect Pythagoras in some way with the Orphists, nor would such a connexion make it the less probable that he journeyed to the sacred East in search of fuller knowledge. Little, indeed, do we know about this moulder of minds. He passed across the world’s stage dark “with excess of light”—an influence rather than a personality. Yet he was as far as possible from being only a dreamer of dreams; he was the Newton, the Galileo, perhaps the Edison and Marconi of his epoch. And it was this double character of moral teacher and man of science which caused the extraordinary reverence with which he was regarded. Science and religion were not divorced then; the Prophet could present no credentials so valid as an understanding of the laws which govern the universe. Mathematics and astronomy were revelations of divine truth. It was the scientific insight of Pythagoras, the wonderful range and depth of which is borne out more and more by modern discoveries, that lent supreme importance to whatever theories he was known to have held. The doctrine of transmigration had not been treated seriously while it was only preached by the Orphists, but after it was adopted by Pythagoras it commanded a wide attention, though it never won a large acceptance. One expounder it had, who was too remarkable an original thinker to be called a mere disciple—the greatly-gifted Empedocles, who denounced the eaters of flesh as no better than cannibals, which was going further than Pythagoras himself had ever gone.