Bacchus & Orphics

(Originally Written July 1, 2006 in Book 2)

The History of Western Philosophy
Bertrand Russell
1974

Commerce initially arose as piracy.

Writing came to the Greeks via piracy and commerce. It came from the Phoenicians (whose alphabet was derivative of Egypt). Greeks added vowels to the Phoenician alphabet. Writing quickened the rise of Ancient Greece.

Homer was the first product of Greece of real merit. He became a staple of Greek learning in Athens and later, all of Greece.

Homer's writings showed the best of Greek religion (the gods of Olympus), but more savage religious cults lay in wait throughout Ancient Greece, coming out in times of weakness and terror.

Primitive religion was tribal, not personal.

Homer's gods were very human, his religion, not very religious. These gods were as or less moral than men.

Fate, necessity and destiny were the objects of utmost power in Homeric religion. Even Zeus was subject to them.

The Olympian gods were never said to create the world, only to subdue and conquer it.

Homer's heroes (men) were as unbehaving as the swashbuckling gods who ruled with indifference to humanity.

When the Homeric epics took their present form, in the late 6th century BC, science, philosophy and mathematics were being born in Greece. Confucius, Buddha and Zoroaster lived in this century (allegedly). Cyrus established Persia in the 6th century as well.

The Philosophers endured to escape Persian domination, spreading the enlightened Greek civilization to the Hellenic world.

While Greece eventually fought off the Persians only a few cities advanced all the independent Greek city-states:
1. Sparta - military
2. Corinth - commerce & wealth
3. Arcadia - agriculture

Arcadia was supposedly an idyllic paradise, but it was truly ghastly in their barbaric ways.
1. The bull was too expensive in fertility cults, so the goat replaced it.
2. A clan of self-proclaimed werewolves terrorized with human sacrifice and cannibalism
3. Even Zeus was portrayed as a werewolf: Zeus Lykaios.

Superstition reigned in Arcadia and flourished throughout ancient times.

Religion, as we now perceive it, was not connected to the Olympic gods but to Dionysus or Bacchus. Bacchus was the god of wine and drunkenness. Bacchus originated as a fertility god of Thrace. When the Thracians invented beer they perceived intoxication as divine and attributed it to Bacchus. When wine was invented later, the Thracians loved Bacchus even more.

The cult of Bacchus was not received well by the orthodox of Greece, but was nonetheless established.

Bacchus worship involved ecstasy, brought about by intoxication; partly due to alcohol, but mainly due to mystic frenzy. It was both beautiful and savage.

Greece gravitated to the primitive and instinctive nature of Bacchus that freed them from strict Greek morality.

"The civilized man is distinguished from the savage mainly by prudence, or, to use a slightly wider term, forethought" (Russell, 15).

Foresight is working for benefits later and not being controlled by impulses. Impulses are checked by civilization via foresight (self-check), religion, law and custom.

Private property brought about the subjection of women and the creation of a slave class.

Prudence involves sacrificing the present to the future without extremeness. Prudence can easily destroy some of the best things in life.

Bacchus worship is a complete rejection of prudence. Intoxication (physical or spiritual) recovers intensity destroyed by prudence. The world is beautiful and full of delight and the imagination is free from the prison of prudence.

Bacchic rituals produced enthusiasm, which etymologically means "having the god enter into the worshipper, who believed that he became one with the god" (Russell, 16).

Most achievements of men include some form of Bacchic practice of passions overrunning prudence. Bacchus worship is dangerous to life, yet it makes life interesting.

Sober civilization is akin to science. Science itself is dull and not satisfying. Man needs art, passion and religion. Science sets limit on knowledge, not on imagination.

Greek philosophy produced both scientific philosophers and religious philosophers. Plato and Christianity (via Neo-Platonism) fall into the latter category.

The ancient religion of Bacchus was barbaric and repulsive. The form that influenced philosophy was ascetic as it replaced physical intoxication with a mental form. It was spiritualized by Orpheus.

Orpheus is believed to have come from Crete. Egypt influenced Crete, Crete then Greece. Egyptian influence in Greece came indirectly via Crete. Orpheus was a priest/philosopher.

Orpheus is not well-known or certain to have existed, but the religion bearing his name certainly did: the Orphics.

The Orphics believed in:
1) The Transmigration of souls
2) that the soul may receive eternal bliss, temporary punishment or eternal punishment based on one's earthly life
3) purification rituals
4) man was partly of earth, partly of heaven
5) Through purification a man can become one with Bacchus

Orphic tablets gave instructions for the after-life to the dead.

Orphics were ascetic

They sought intoxication solely through enthusiasm.

The Cult of Bacchus was reformed by Orpheous, the Orphic religion by Pythagoras, Pythagoras by Plato and most religious philosophy has incorporated Plato.

Bacchic elements are everywhere in Greek culture:
1) Pythagoras & Plato - feminism
2) Greek Tragedies - pure emotional instictiveness
3) Euripides
4) Athens - The Eleusinian Mysteries

To the Orphic, life is pain and weariness. Their true life was in the stars, but they were bound to the earth. This cycle was ceaseless. The only hope of escape was through purification via asceticism.

A large portion of the Greeks were "passionate, unhappy, at war with themselves, driven along one road by the intellect and along another by the passions, with the imagination to conceive heaven and the willful self-assertion that creates hell" (Russell, 23).

Religious Greeks embraced Orphic religion; rational Greeks despised it.

Russell then goes on to condemn not only Ancient Greek religion, but religion itself: "It looked as if Greek religion were about to enter on the same stage as that already reached by the religions of the East; and, but for the rise of science, it is hard to see what could have checked this tendency. It is usual to say that the Greeks were saved from a religion of the Oriental type by their having no priesthood; but this is to mistake the effect for the cause. Priesthoods do not make dogmas, though they preserve them once they are made; an in the earlier stages of their development, the Oriental peoples had no priesthoods either in the sense intended. It was not so much the absence of a priesthood as the existence of the scientific schools that saved Greece" (Russell, 23).

The Orphics founded 'churches'. The Olympic cults did not. It was the founding of 'churches' that influenced the conception of philosophy as a way of life.