According to the Ionian philosopher Heraclitus (fr. 15 DK), Hades and Dionysos were the same. The concept of a chthonian, underworld Dionysos who had a role to play in the fate of the soul was widespread, though not fully manifested in state religion. Instead, it was disseminated through private Bakchic mysteries, which seem to have arisen in the late Archaic period. An inscription from a chamber tomb at Cumae in Southern Italy restricts use of the tomb to Bakchic initiates (c. 500). At the other end of the Greek world, Dionysiac mysteries were celebrated in the Black Sea colony of Olbia. Herodotus’ story (4.78-79) of the Skythian king who had himself initiated at Olbia finds support in the excavations there, which yielded a sixth-century mirror inscribed with the names of a couple and the Bakchic ritual cry euai. Here too were collected a scattering of bone tablets from the fifth century, one with the message “life, death, life, truth. . . Dio(nysoi), Orphik(oi).”35 Discoveries like these have made it clear that the movement scholars call Orphism, which consisted of teachings and rituals concerned with the secret knowledge and purifications necessary to achieve a blessed afterlife, overlapped with Dionysiac religion. An esoteric Orphic tradition held that Persephone was the mother of Zagreus, who as a child was torn apart and consumed by the Titans, yet came to life again as Dionysos in the womb of Semele.36 This unique experience meant that Dionysos, in conjunction with Persephone, was able to grant release from the miserable lot of the dead; thus his epithet Lysios (Releaser) had one meaning for the general public and another for the initiate. In the late Classical and Hellenistic periods, many initiates went to their graves with tiny folded leaves of gold, inscribed with the special instructions and passwords they would require. A small trapezoid of beaten gold from a grave at the south Italian city of Hipponion (c. 400) advises its owner to avoid the spring on the right when entering the house of Hades. Instead, she must look for the cold water flowing from the Lake of Memory, and speak the right words to the guardians. If she succeeds, she will “travel a road, a sacred road, which other famous initiates and bakchoi also tread.” Roughly a century later, a Thessalian woman was buried with two gold tablets shaped like ivy leaves positioned over her breasts, tablets which also provided the password to life after death: “Tell Persephone that the Bakchic one himself has set you free!” More than forty of these gold leaves have been uncovered in Thessaly, Krete, Italy, and other sites, witnesses to a form of religious experience that is rarely described in literary sources.37
Plato and other authors speak scornfully of the itinerant prophets who offered initiations and purifications to the ignorant, and it is clear that Orphic/Bakchic initiation did not have the same cultural prestige as the Eleusinian or other state-sponsored mysteries. Instead of journeying as pilgrims to a sanctuary and becoming a member of a public cohort of initiates, Bakchic devotees received initiation privately or as part of a small group from prophets who traveled about plying the family trade with their heirloom sacred books and spoken formulas. (Although written texts seem to have played an important role in the Orphic traditions, recent scholarship on certain hexameter texts from the gold leaves suggests that they can be traced to an oral archetype.)38 The Dionysiac prophets, who induced “telestic madness” as a remedy for physical and spiritual ills, had a long history reaching back to mythic figures like Melampous and Polyeidos. What is less clear is how such rites were related to those of Bakchic thiasoi, particularly those that engaged in mainadism. Euripides’ Bacchae (e. g. 22, 73, 238) is sprinkled with allusions to Dionysos’ teletai, initiatory rites, which were an integral part of the “Theban strand” of his worship.39 The Delphic Thyiads, for example, had a limited membership, generally restricted to females who had experienced teletai preparing them for the mystical aspects of the cult.
World History
