“Were Orphikoi ascetic vegetarians?”
I was asked this question tonight and it’s an important one because I know for me personally that was a pretty huge stumbling block to involvement with this tradition.
After I left Christianity I spent a couple of years wandering around and trying on different faiths. At one point I was pretty seriously into Chan (Zen) Buddhism and briefly even considered becoming a monk. Towards that end I swore an oath not to take life or consume meat. Despite the reputation this school often has in the West on account of its adoption by Beatniks and Hippies I found it to be extremely conservative, stifling, escapist, overly intellectual and sacrophobic and eventually decided it just wasn’t for me and parted ways with the dhamma path. For a number of years – through my time as a Wiccan and even a while after being (re)claimed by Dionysos – I faithfully maintained my oaths until I came to realize that they were empty structures in my life, devoid of meaning and holding me back by limiting my possible experiences. So I did what any decent Dionysian would do and transgressed those oaths in order to draw closer to his raw, embodied ecstasy. Indeed a large part of why I had initially found that branch of Buddhism so appealing is that it offered a flight from life and the pains and frustrations of this world. Dionysos helped me face that about myself and has ceaselessly encouraged me to be engaged and celebratory.
So of course when I read accounts of Orphism by the likes of Thomas Taylor, Jane Ellen Harrison and W. K. Guthrie which made it seem like a reformist Protestant sect that espoused pacifism, celibacy, teetotalism, vegetarianism and an escape from metempsychosis through spiritual enlightenment I avoided it like the plague and wondered how the hell this had anything to do with Dionysos.
Well, it didn’t – and it had precious little to do with the ancient Orphics either.
Pick up any decent study on Orpheus and you’ll find at least one chapter devoted to the shifting trends within Orphic studies. Jesus, have people come to some wild conclusions about these guys, most of which radically contradict each other. It’s quite amusing, really – at some point I may post a bunch of statements scholars have made about them over the years to show how absurd all of this is – plus we can all use periodic reminders that the mere fact that someone in academia has said something does not make it true.
The reason that there’s so much confusion, I believe, is because there was never an ancient Orphic church, a set of universal doctrines or myth or even really an Orphic movement for that matter. What we’ve got are a lot of individuals and sometimes small, isolated groups who attach authority to the name of Orpheus, many of whom attributed their own writings and rituals to him. This process began around the 6th century BCE and continued more or less until the closing of the Platonic Academy by Justinian. (There was also some Christian and Renaissance pseudoepigraphica though this is quite outside the bounds of any discernibly Orphic tradition. Little can be said with certainty about the historical Thracian arch-poet and founder of mysteries, but I think it’s a safe bet to say that Orpheus was not a crypto-monotheist who prophesied the coming of Jesus.)
Although we’ve come a long way in our understanding of the ancient Orphics you still find a lot of people holding on to these outdated notions, especially with regard to their supposed vegetarianism. There are some issues (interpretation of the “hard and grievous circle” and how much of the Zagreus myth was known, and when) where cases can be made in a variety of ways, but I simply do not believe that we can ascribe vegetarianism to them across the board.
To begin with, out of the wealth of material we have on Orpheus and the Orphics (over four hundred pages’ worth in the latest collection) there are only a handful of allusions to this, most of which can be explained away by more sensible and straightforward interpretations. (For instance “not to stain one’s hands with blood” most likely means “don’t commit homicide”, especially when you consider the frequent Orphic concern for the removal of pollution associated with murder.)
Furthermore, of the three passages which are commonly cited in support of this claim two of them are part of mythological plays and in those plays context is everything. One is a fragment likely contrasting the purity of the chorus with the savage bloodthirstiness of king Minos and his bull and notably comes after the chorus of initiates discuss their own participation in the Dionysian sacrament of sparagmos and omophagia (the tearing apart of a live animal and consumption of its raw and still bloody flesh) so clearly there were times when even these fictive initiates broke their taboo. And in the second play Theseus is trying to smear his son Hippolytos (whom he suspects of committing incest) by accusing him of being an overly sensitive, bookish prig who is merely feigning his Orphic piety. Of course what people seem to forget is that none of what Theseus says is accurate – that’s the whole point since he’s trying to goad Hippolytos into confessing the role he played in his mother’s suicide. Hipploytos, after all, was basically a big dumb jock who got into trouble by spurning the goddess Aphrodite so that he could spend all of his time out in the woods hunting with Artemis. And the final reference is a passage in Plato about how vegetarianism is characteristic of the Orphikos bios except in all probability he’s talking about Pythagoreans since the other things he mentions are more commonly associated with them.
And for the most part that’s it. (I say “most part” because I’m sure I’m forgetting a couple other quotes.) The paucity of information on this is rather telling in light of the fact that there are a bunch of sources written by people who identified themselves as Orphics but didn’t say anything at all about such a prohibition. In fact there are a couple lists of wild and domesticated animals, aquatic creatures and vegetables that were denied them on religious grounds which makes you wonder why they’d bother with such specificity if they were to avoid ensouled foods altogether. If this was such a widespread feature it’s equally curious why Orphics aren’t mentioned more often in the numerous treatises by philosophers against meat-eating. Likewise, why are some of the most notable Orphics – including the soldier who was cremated with the Derveni papyrus, Queen Olympias and her Makedonian court, a Roman senator, a slave and a gladiator all known to have consumed flesh? Plus a ton of sources mention Orphics performing sacrifice – including the slaughter of hekatombs and offerings to the ancestors and underworld powers. Old dead things ain’t gonna accept animal crackers in substitution!
That’s not to say that all Orphics did consume flesh. There was a lot of cross-over between the Orphic and Pythagorean communities in Magna Graecia and we know that a number of the latter wrote books under Orpheus’ name, especially when their political plans fell apart and the neighboring communities began a systematic purge – indeed they may have thought that such duplicity was the only means of preserving their master’s teachings. (Though, ironically, it is sometimes claimed that Pythagoras was the first author of Orphika.) By and large the Pythagoreans were adherents of metempsychosis and vegetarians (except in the case of soldiers, athletes and others who required a more robust diet; Pythagoras is said to have sacrificed an ox after making an important mathematical discovery) so when we do see a rare instance of this ascribed to Orpheus and his followers in all probability it’s coming from a Pythagorean source who’s trying to pass or at least an Orphic who was influenced by the Samian’s teachings.
As such vegetarianism is not a requirement of the thiasos of the Sacred Bull. It’s perfectly fine if you are (and I think everyone should be conscious of where their food comes from and deplore factory farming and slaughter conditions, regardless of your diet) and I’ve seen a number of priests and spirit-workers have this restriction placed on them. As I mentioned a while back I personally abstain when I need to access a state of greater clarity and purity, or when I’m performing an animal sacrifice or doing other death related work. But it’s certainly not a central tenet of our emergent Bacchic Orphic tradition.
Asceticism is another matter, which I’ll be saving for a separate post.
Tagged: christianity, dionysos, greece, italy, orpheus, philosophy, thiasos of the starry bull
