compare, and judge. The alteration from symbol to dogma is as fatal to beauty of expression as that from faith to dogma to truth and wholesomeness of thought. The first philosophy often reverted to the natural mode of teaching as well as to mythological imagery, and Socrates in particular is said to have eschewed dogmas, endeavouring, like the mysteries, rather to awaken and develop in the minds of his hearers the ideas with which they were already endowed or pregnant, than to fill them with ready-made adventitious opinions 1. This negative or reserved method was not devised for the purpose of concealing the truth, but as a mode of expression when other modes were defective or wanting. The earliest speculation endeavoured to express far more than it could distinctly comprehend, and the vague impressions of the mind found in the mysterious analogies of phenomena their most apt and energetic representatives. Nature may be studied either in its wide bearings and analogies, or to ascertain its immediate links of causation and succession. In regard to the former, or things transcendental, mankind can scarcely be said to have advanced beyond the religious symbolism of India, Egypt, or Eleusis, for even Christianity admits the invisible world to be inconceivable, and that men can know God only so far as they become acquainted with his laws, and act in conformity with his will. "Behold," exclaims Lobeck 10, "the vaunted results of the august mysteries of the Pelasgian philosophers; they knew the great truths that wine inebriates, that fruit and corn are the food of man, that the fields begin to yield their increase in spring, and that in autumn their produce dies away!" These are indeed but trifles, yet the lessons of Nature, however trite, and often unheeded from their very simplicity, contain a wisdom still unfathomed, and every discovery either in theology or science may exemplify the remark of the Roman, that it was only by attending to trifles that his country acquired a power which overcame the world. All nature is as nothing to those unable to comprehend it, the 12 Diog. Laert. i. 16. Cic. de Or. iii. 16. Brandis, Hist. Philos. ii. 19. 24. Aglaoph. p. 180.

13

firmament but a collection of vapours, the earth a lump of common dirt. "If," says Lobeck", "there was no distinction in the mysteries of exoteric and esoteric, all hope of maintaining their dignity is at an end." As well may it be said that because Nature is open to all, without being comprehended by all, her operations are but an insipid and undignified routine, the mechanism to which the unreflecting are harnessed in order to turn them to material account. The steps of initiation were inseparably bound up with the constitution of phenomena, and had their necessary existence in the minds of the novitiates. The poet or philosopher might be said by virtue of their office either to have been initiated or to be above the want of initiation, since they had already felt in nature those eloquent analogies of which the mysteries were but a false or feeble image, revealing no new secret to those unprepared or incapable of interpreting their significancy. The eventual separation of the office of philosopher from that of priests, that is, from a technical acquaintance with traditions about days and seasons and peculiarities of temples and deities, affords no proof that the latter were destitute of foundation in what may be called the philosophy of the times in which they originated. Pythagoras might have sought the initiation which Socrates from an obscure statement was thought to have neglected, since philosophy itself was in many respects the offspring of theology and of the lore commonly ascribed to Orpheus 1, a name not to be understood pragmatically of an historical being distinct from Eumolpus or Museus", but as a general personification of the old Thracian theology and theological poetry in the sense understood by Pindar 18, including, as presumed author of the

14 Aglaoph. p. 43.

16

15 Plato, Polit. 290.

16 Apollod. i. 3. 2. Eurip. Rhesus. 940. Lactant. i. 22.

17 Plato, Protag. 316, compared with Aristoph. Ranæ, 1032. Comp. Lobeck Agl. 187. 239.

18 Pyth. iv. 177. Andãr warng suRIVATOS Oppsus. Höeck, Kreta, iii. 195. Orpheus is chiefly described as a rλorns in relation to Dionysus, Musæus as Cresmologos in relation to Demeter; but the gods and offices were united. The oldest mention of Orpheus by Ibycus proves that the name was already celebrated.

That

heroic metre, the names of Homer and Hesiod among his descendants and disciples 19. From this common source of religion and poetry flowed in one direction the inspiration of the epic, in another the symbolism and ceremonial of the Hierophant 20. Both were connected with the same mythical personage, who, like Hermes or Zoroaster, unites human attributes with divine, and is himself the god whose worship he introduced", teaching rude men the commencements of civilization through the influence of song, and connecting with the symbol of his death, emblematic of that of nature, the most essential consolations of religion 22.

$ 19.

THE WORSHIP OF DIONYSUS.

To say that Orpheus founded the mysteries' is tantamount to the assertion that the first religionists were poets. Poetry arose long before Homer, whose silence in regard to the name of Orpheus no more disproves his existence, i. e., as an ideal personification, than the occurrence of his name with those of Phemius and Thamyris would have affirmatively established it. The lyric expression must have preceded the more staid and artificial epic, and through unrecorded ages the pæan had been sung and the incantation employed to heal bodily wounds and to assuage moral discords". When Hermes he is not mentioned by Homer as little proves his non-existence, and the mention of Phemius or Thamyris, Polyidus and Theoclymenus, proves affirmatively the historical existence of these personifications.

2

19 Göttling. Pref. Hes. p. 9. Plutarch de Music. 5.

20 Plato, Protag. 316.

21 Augustin de Civit. xviii. 14.

Athenæus, xiv. 632. Conon. in Photius, Narr.

45. Lucian, vol. iii. p. 110. Adv. Indoct. 11.

22 Comp. Eurip. Alcestis, 970 or 990. He might to the Greeks represent the great "dos" whom Socrates wished to be sought for throughout the world. Phædo, p. 78.

1

Aristoph. Ranæ, 1032.

3

Comp. Hes. Theog. 90. 98.

2 Odyss. xix. 457.

8

assumed the exclusive jurisdiction over the lower world, he resigned to Apollo the lyre whose use seemed inconsistent with calamity, and which seemed more suited to the heroic Hellene than to those whose proverbial impressions as to the divine poßos became part of their history, making them ever seem as outcasts after the destruction of Ilium, or as driven by force or famine from their homes. The course of the worship of Dionysus, originally scarcely distinguishable from that of Hermes, was probably one with that of Greek development from its source among the Clodones and Mimallones of Thrace', whence arrived within the sphere of the Pierian musicians the god formed a sort of coalition with Apollo, migrating together with his votaries before the Temenida to Parnassus and Boeotia, that "metropolis of Bacchanals," and thence uniting with the Ceres worship of Attica and Arcadia. In a later age admiration of Egyptian wisdom made it seem as if the Thracian sage had imbibed his precepts on the banks of the Nile1o, and Herodotus, who though rejecting as spurious the so-called Orphic compositions of his time, yet admits the venerable antiquity of the name by the very circumstance that he undervalues the pretensions of the poetry, regarded the Orphic or Bacchic institutions as virtually the same" with the Egyptian and Pythagorean. Nor does he deny the existence of theological teaching or tenets, whether Pelasgian or Orphic, or derived through Melampus from Phoenicia and Egypt, long antecedent to the artificial12 theology of Homer and Hesiod, which he calls a creation comparatively of yesterday13. The

10

Eurip. Alcestis, 315. Comp. Psalm cxxxvii.

$ Dionys. H. i. 17.

The divine ancestor of the Thracian kings. Herod. v. 7. Supr. vol. i. 211. 'Herod. ib., and vii. 111. Pomp. Mela. ii. 2. 2. Plutarch, Vit. Alex. 2. Hoeck's Kreta, iii. 172 sq.

8 Thuc. ii. 99.

10 Diod. i. 23. 96.

Soph. Antig. 1122.

11 Containing, among other things, the doctrine of the transmigration of the soul.

Comp. ii. 81. 123.

12 σε Ποιησαντες.”

13 Bk. ii. 53.

name of Orpheus accompanied the propagation of the religion of the Muses by those Pierian bards who afterwards spread towards the south, and carried the legend of the Aloide to the islands of the Ægean1. But it would appear as if more than one school or class of symbols had been included under the term "Orphic." There was, it seems, a son or pupil of Apollo-Helios, the same who "in the woody pavilions of Olympus charmed beasts and trees by his lyre," 15 yet perished by the hands of the Bassarides for neglecting the rites of Dionysus 16; and there was an Orpheus from whom the worship of Dionysus originated", nay, whose death is that of the Deity himself 18. The variation must be ascribed either to the preconceptions of theorists as to the distinct and antithetical nature of the gods, or it may be understood as indicating divergent forms of the worship of the same Deity, relieved by his Pierian votaries from the tumultuous character of his older rites; so that in this way the Orphean lyre of the Apollinic school for a time appeared antagonistic to the orgiastic or Bacchic worship more nearly resembling its Thracian or Berecynthian original. The stories of Scyles, Lycurgus, and Pentheus, may be even partly indicative of a real opposition between rival religions 19; and the mythical catastrophe of Orpheus is sometimes related in a way implying an actual feud between the patrons of the pæan and the dithyramb". But the antithesis is more properly a physical one, the hostile array of opposing elements represented in the Homeric challenge of Apollo and Poseidon, the dualism of Zethus and Amphion, the god who outwatched the night considered as an enemy of the rising luminary", or the superior god killing, i. e., absorbing

14 Diod. v. 50, 51. Steph. voc. Nysæ. Müller, Orchom. 387.

15 Eurip. Bacchæ, 560. Iphig. Aul. 1211.

16 Eratosthenis, Catast. 24. Göttling, Pref. to Hesiod, xi. Apollod. i. 3. 2. Hyg. Poet. A. 7. "Quòd Orpheus Apollinem maximè laudaret."

17 Herod. ii. 81. Paus. v. 26. 3.

18 Höeck, ib. iii. 186.

19 Comp. Herod. vii. 49. Iliad, vi. 130.

20 Comp. Plutarch, Ei Delph. ch. ix.

21 Eratosthenes, Catast. 24.