Orphism

Orphism was a current of Greek religious thought tracing itself to the mythical singer Orpheus, who had descended to the underworld and returned. It is known from a body of sacred poems — theogonies and hymns — and from gold tablets buried with initiates to guide their souls in the world beyond.

A different cosmogony

The Orphic poems told the birth of the gods in a form richer and stranger than Hesiod's, setting at the beginning primal Night and a cosmic egg from which the shining Phanes emerged, and giving the central place to Dionysus, the child torn apart by the Titans. From the Titans' ashes humankind arose, part divine and part Titanic — and so each soul bears a god imprisoned in it.

Purity and the soul

From this myth Orphism drew its way of life: the soul is fallen and reborn through many bodies in a cycle of transmigration, and must be purified — through ritual, abstinence, and a holy life — to escape the 'wheel of birth' and rejoin the divine. These doctrines, shared with Pythagoreanism, passed deep into Plato and the later Platonists, who treasured the Orphic poems as veiled theology and quoted them as scripture.