by E R Dodds
Be that as it may, the fragments of Empedocles are the one first-hand source from which we can still form some notion of what a Greek shaman was really like; he is the last belated example of a species which with his death became extinct in the Greek world, though it still flourishes elsewhere. Scholars have been astonished that a man capable of the acute observation and constructive thought which appear in Empedocles' poem On Nature should also have written the Purifications and represented himself as a divine magician. Some of them have tried to explain it by saying that the two poems must belong to different periods of Empedocles' life: either he started as a magician, lost his nerve, and took to natural science; or else, as others maintain, he started as a scientist, was converted later to "Orphism" or Pythagoreanism, and in the lonely exile of his declining years comforted himself with delusions of grandeur— he was a god, and would return one day not to Acragas but to Heaven.68 The trouble about these explanations is that they do not really work. The fragment in which Empedocles claims the power to stay the winds, cause or prevent rain, and revive the dead, appears to belong, not to the Purifications, but to the poem On Nature. So does fragment 23, in which the poet bids his pupil listen to "the word of a god" (I find it hard to believe that this refers merely to the conventional inspiration of the Muse).69 So does fragment 15, which seems to contrast "what people call life" with a more real existence before birth and after death.70 All this is discouraging for any attempt to explain Empedocles' inconsistencies on "genetic" lines. Nor is it easy to accept Jaeger's recent description of him as "a new synthesising type of philosophical personality,"71 since any attempt to synthesise his religious and his scientific opinions is precisely what we miss in him. If I am right, Empedocles represents not a new but a very old type of personality, the shaman who combines the still undifferentiated functions of magician and naturalist, poet and philosopher, preacher, healer, and public counsellor.72 After him these functions fell apart; philosophers henceforth were to be neither poets nor magicians; indeed, such a man was already an anachronism in the fifth century. But men like Epimenides and Pythagoras73 may well have exercised all the functions I have named. It was not a question of "synthesising" these wide domains of practical and theoretical knowledge; in their quality as Men of God they practised with confidence in all of them; the "synthesis" was personal, not logical.
What I have thus far suggested is a tentative line of spiritual descent which starts in Scythia, crosses the Hellespont into Asiatic Greece, is perhaps combined with some remnants of Minoan tradition surviving in Crete, emigrates to the Far West with Pythagoras, and has its last outstanding representative in the Sicilian Empedocles. These men diffused the belief in a detachable soul or self, which by suitable techniques can be withdrawn from the body even during life, a self which is older than the body and will outlast it. But at this point an inevitable question presents itself: how is this development related to the mythological person named Orpheus and to the theology known as Orphic? And I must attempt a short answer.
About Orpheus himself I can make a guess, at the risk of being called a panshamanist. Orpheus' home is in Thrace, and in Thrace he is the worshipper or companion of a god whom the Greeks identified with Apollo.74 He combines the professions of poet, magician, religious teacher, and oraclegiver. Like certain legendary shamans in Siberia,75 he can by his music summon birds and beasts to listen to him. Like shamans everywhere, he pays a visit to the underworld, and his motive is one very common among shamans76—to recover a stolen soul. Finally, his magical self lives on as a singing head, which continues to give oracles for many years after his death.77 That too suggests the North: such mantic heads appear in Norse mythology and in Irish tradition.78 I conclude that Orpheus is a Thracian figure of much the same kind as Zalmoxis—a mythical shaman or prototype of shamans.
Orpheus, however, is one thing, Orphism quite another. But I must confess that I know very little about early Orphism, and the more I read about it the more my knowledge diminishes. Twenty years ago, I could have said quite a lot about it (we all could at that time). Since then, I have lost a great deal of knowledge; for this loss I am indebted to Wilamowitz, Festugière, Thomas, and not least to a distinguished member of the University of California, Professor Linforth.79 Let me illustrate my present ignorance by listing a few of the things I once knew.
There was a time when I knew:
That there was an Orphic sect or community in the Classical Age;80
That an Orphic "Theogony" was read by Empedocles81 and Euripides,82 and parodied by Aristophanes in the Birds;83 That the poem of which fragments are inscribed on the gold plates found at Thurii and elsewhere is an Orphic apocalypse;84
That Plato took the details of his myths about the Other World from such an Orphic apocalypse;85
That the Hippolytus of Euripides is an Orphic figure;86
That ("Body equals tomb") is an Orphic doctrine.87
When I say that I no longer possess these items of information, I do not intend to assert that all of them are false. The last two I feel pretty sure are false: we really must not turn a bloodstained huntsman into an Orphic figure, or call "Orphic" a doctrine that Plato plainly denies to be Orphic. But some of the others may very well happen to be true. All I mean is that I cannot at present convince myself of their truth; and that until I can, the edifice reared by an ingenious scholarship upon these foundations remains for me a house of dreams—I am tempted to call it the unconscious projection upon the screen of antiquity of certain unsatisfied religious longings characteristic of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.88
If, then, I decide provisionally to dispense with these cornerstones, and to follow instead the cautious rules of architecture enunciated by Festugière and Linforth,89 how much of the fabric still stands? Not, I fear, very much, unless I am prepared to patch it with material derived from the fantastic theogonies that Proclus and Damascius read at a time when Pythagoras had been in his grave for nearly a millennium. And that I dare not do, save in the very rare instances where both the antiquity of the material and its Orphic origin are independently guaranteed.90 I shall quote later what I believe to be such an instance, though the question is a controversial one. But let me first muster such uncontroverted knowledge about Orphism as I still possess, and see what it includes that is germane to the subject of this chapter. I still know that in the fifth and fourth centuries there were in circulation a number of pseudonymous religious poems, which were conventionally ascribed to the mythical Orpheus, but which the critically minded knew or guessed to be of much more recent origin.91 Their authorship may have been very diverse, and I have no reason to suppose that they preached any uniform or systematic doctrine; Plato's word for them, "a hubbub of books,"92 rather suggests the contrary. Of their contents I know very little. But I do know on good authority that three things were taught in some at least of them, namely, that the body is the prisonhouse of the soul; that vegetarianism is an essential rule of life; and that the unpleasant consequences of sin, both in this world and in the next, can be washed away by ritual means.93 That they taught the most famous of so-called "Orphic" doctrines, the transmigration of souls, is not, as it happens, directly attested by anyone in the Classical Age; but it may, I think, be inferred without undue rashness from the conception of the body as a prison where the soul is punished for its past sins.94 Even with this addition, the sum total is not extensive. And it gives me no sure basis for distinguishing an "Orphic" from a "Pythagorean" psychology; for Pythagoreans too are said to have avoided meat, practised catharsis, and viewed the body as a prison,95 and Pythagoras himself, as we have seen, had experienced transmigration. There cannot in fact have been any very clear-cut distinction between the Orphic teaching, at any rate in some of its forms, and Pythagoreanism; for Ion of Chios, a good fifth-century authority, thought that Pythagoras had composed poems under the name of Orpheus, and Epigenes, who was a specialist on the subject, attributed four "Orphic" poems to individual Pythagoreans.96 Whether th
ere were any Orphic poems in existence before the time of Pythagoras, and if there were, whether they taught transmigration, remains entirely uncertain. I shall accordingly use the term "Puritan psychology" to cover both early Orphic and early Pythagorean beliefs about the soul.
We have seen—or I hope we have seen—how contact with shamanistic beliefs and practices might suggest to a thoughtful people like the Greeks the rudiments of such a psychology: how the notion of psychic excursion in sleep or trance might sharpen the soul-body antithesis; how the shamanistic "retreat" might provide the model for a deliberate askēsis, a conscious training of the psychic powers through abstinence and spiritual exercises; how tales of vanishing and reappearing shamans might encourage the belief in an indestructible magical or daemonic self; and how the migration of the magical power or spirit from dead shamans to living ones might be generalised as a doctrine of reincarnation.97 But I must emphasise that these are only "mights," logical or psychological possibilities. If they were actualised by certain Greeks, that must be because they were felt, in Rohde's phrase, "to meet Greek spiritual needs."98 And if we consider the situation at the end of the Archaic Age, as I described it in my second chapter, I think we shall see that they did meet certain needs, logical, moral, and psychological.
Professor Nilsson thinks that the doctrine of rebirth is a product of "pure logic," and that the Greeks invented it because they were "born logicians."99 And we may agree with him that once people accepted the notion that man has a "soul" distinct from his body, it was natural to ask where this "soul" came from, and natural to answer that it came from the great reservoir of souls in Hades. There are in fact indications of such a line of argument in Heraclitus as well as in the Phaedo.100 I doubt, however, if religious beliefs are often adopted, even by philosophers, on grounds of pure logic—logic is at best ancilla fidei. And this particular belief has found favour with many peoples who are by no means born logicians.101 I am inclined to attach more importance to considerations of a different type.
Morally, reincarnation offered a more satisfactory solution to the Late Archaic problem of divine justice than did inherited guilt or post-mortem punishment in another world. With the growing emancipation of the individual from the old family solidarity, his increasing rights as a judicial "person," the notion of a vicarious payment for another's fault began to be unacceptable. When once human law had recognised that a man is responsible for his own acts only, divine law must sooner or later do likewise. As for post-mortem punishment, that explained well enough why the gods appeared to tolerate the worldly success of the wicked, and the new teaching in fact exploited it to the full, using the device of the "underworld journey" to make the horrors of Hell real and vivid to the imagination.102 But the post-mortem punishment did not explain why the gods tolerated so much human suffering, and in particular the unmerited suffering of the innocent. Reincarnation did. On that view, no human soul was innocent:103 all were paying, in various degrees, for crimes of varying atrocity committed in former lives. And all that squalid mass of suffering, whether in this world or in another, was but a part of the soul's long education—an education that would culminate at last in its release from the cycle of birth and return to its divine origin. Only in this way, and on this cosmic time-scale, could justice in its full archaic sense—the justice of the law that "the Doer shall suffer"—be completely realised for every soul.
Plato knows this moral interpretation of rebirth as "a myth or doctrine or what you will" which was taught by "old-time priests."104 It is certainly an old interpretation, but not, I think, the oldest. To the Siberian shaman, the experience of past lives is not a source of guilt, but an enhancement of power, and that I take to be the original Greek point of view; it was such an enhancement of power that Empedocles perceived in Pythagoras, and that Epimenides, it would seem, had claimed earlier. It was only when rebirth was attributed to all human souls that it became a burden instead of a privilege, and was used to explain the inequalities of our earthly portion and to show that, in the words of a Pythagorean poet, man's sufferings are self-incurred .105
Beneath this demand for a solution to what we call "the problem of evil" we may believe that there lay a deeper psychological need—the need to rationalise those unexplained feelings of guilt which, as we saw earlier, were prevalent in the Archaic Age.106 Men were, I suppose, dimly conscious—and on Freud's view, rightly conscious—that such feelings had their roots in a submerged and long-forgotten past experience. What more natural than to interpret that intuition (which is in fact, according to Freud, a faint awareness of infantile traumata) as a faint awareness of sin committed in a former life? Here we have perhaps stumbled on the psychological source of the peculiar importance attached in the Pythagorean school to "recollection"—not in the Platonic sense of recalling a world of disembodied Forms once seen by the disembodied soul, but in the more primitive sense of training the memory to recall the deeds and sufferings of a previous life on earth.107
That, however, is speculation. What is certain is that these beliefs promoted in their adherents a horror of the body and a revulsion against the life of the senses which were quite new in Greece. Any guilt-culture will, I suppose, provide a soil favourable to the growth of puritanism, since it creates an unconscious need for self-punishment which puritanism gratifies. But in Greece it was, apparently, the impact of shamanistic beliefs which set the process going. By Greek minds these beliefs were reinterpreted in a moral sense; and when that was done, the world of bodily experience inevitably appeared as a place of darkness and penance, the flesh became an "alien tunic." "Pleasure," says the old Pythagorean catechism, "is in all circumstances bad; for we came here to be punished and we ought to be punished."108 In that form of the doctrine which Plato attributes to the Orphic school, the body was pictured as the soul's prison, in which the gods keep it locked up until it has purged its guilt. In the other form mentioned by Plato, puritanism found an even more violent expression: the body was conceived as a tomb wherein the psyche lies dead, awaiting its resurrection into true life, which is life without the body. This form seems to be traceable as far back as Heraclitus, who perhaps used it to illustrate his eternal roundabout of opposites, the "Way Up and Down."109
To people who equated the psyche with the empirical personality, as the fifth century mostly did, such an assertion made no sense at all; it was a fantastic paradox, whose comic possibilities did not escape the eye of Aristophanes.110 Nor does it make much better sense if we equate "soul" with reason. I should suppose that for people who took it seriously what lay "dead" within the body was neither the reason nor the empirical man, but an "occult" self, Pindar's "image of life," which is indestructible but can function only in the exceptional conditions of sleep or trance. That man has two "souls," one of divine, the other of earthly origin, was already taught (if our late authority can be trusted) by Pherecydes of Syros. And it is significant that Empedocles, on whom our knowledge of early Greek puritanism chiefly depends, avoids applying the term psyche to the indestructible self.111 He appears to have thought of the psyche as being the vital warmth which at death is reabsorbed in the fiery element from which it came (that was a fairly common fifth-century view).112 The occult self which persisted through successive incarnations he called, not "psyche," but "daemon." This daemon has, apparently, nothing to do with perception or thought, which Empedocles held to be mechanically determined; the function of the daemon is to be the carrier of man's potential divinity113 and actual guilt. It is nearer in some ways to the indwelling spirit which the shaman inherits from other shamans than it is to the rational "soul" in which Socrates believed; but it has been moralised as a guilt-carrier, and the world of the senses has become the Hades in which it suffers torment.114 That torment Empedocles has described in some of the strangest and most moving religious poetry which has come down to us from antiquity.115
The complementary aspect of the doctrine was its teaching on the subject of catharsis—the means whereby the occult self might be
advanced on the ladder of being, and its eventual liberation hastened. To judge from its title, this was the central theme of Empedocles' poem, though the parts which dealt with it are mostly lost. The notion of catharsis was no novelty; as we saw earlier,116 it was a major preoccupation of religious minds throughout the Archaic Age. But in the new pattern of belief it acquired a new content and a new urgency: man must be cleansed not only from specific pollutions, but, so far as might be, from all taint of carnality—that was the condition of his redemption. "From the company of the pure I come, pure Queen of those below"—thus the soul speaks to Persephone in the poem of the gold plates.117 Purity, rather than justice, has become the cardinal means to salvation. And since it is a magical, not a rational self that has to be cleansed, the techniques of catharsis are not rational but magical. They might consist solely in ritual, as in the Orphic books that Plato denounced for their demoralising effect.118 Or they might use the incantatory power of music, as in the catharsis attributed to the Pythagoreans, which seems to have developed from primitive charms .119 Or they might also involve an "askesis," the practice of a special way of life.
