Themis, a study of the social origins of Greek ... - Warburg Institute

x] Orphism and the Ouranians 465
It is almost as though the initiate Orphic would say, By nature,
by birth, I spring from my mother Earth, but by adoption and
grace I am made the child of Heaven. Manifestly a distinction is
drawn between the two great cosmic powers, and preference given
to Ouranos.
But we have other definite evidence that the religion of
Orpheus emphasized just what the Olympian religion disallowed,
the worship of the heavenly bodies. Tradition accounted Orpheus
a Sun- worshipper. Eratosthenes 1 thus writes
He (Orpheus) did not honour Dionysos but accounted Helios the greatest
of the gods, whom also he called Apollo. And rising up early in the morning
he climbed the mountain called Pangaion and waited for the rising of the
sun, that he might first catch sight of it. Therefore Dionysos was enraged
and sent against him his Bassarids, as ^Eschylus the poet says.
In worshipping Helios, Orpheus only followed the custom of
his native Thrace. Sophocles in the Tereus- makes one of his
characters say
:
Helios, name
To Thracian horsemen dear, eldest Flame
Maximus of Tyre 3 said that the Paeonians reverenced Helios,
and the Paeonian image of Helios is a small disk on a long pole.
Orpheus, Eratosthenes tells us, called Helios also Apollo, and
the later Orphics who went by the name of Pythagoreans always
worshipped Apollo. It was revealed in the mysteries that Apollo
and Helios were the same. That is clear from a passage in the
lost Phaethon of Euripides 4 . The rash Phaethon has fallen, killed
by a lightning flash from the Sun, and his bride thus reproaches
the slayer
:
Thou hast destroyed me, bright Helios,
Me and this man. O rightly among mortals
Apollo, yea, Destroyer, art thou called
By such as know the Silent Names of sjiirits.
Side by side with the Olympian movement which tended
entirely to humanize the gods, we have then a movement of return
to Nature- Worship. This movement arose in the sixth century,
and was, broadly speaking, contemporary with the rise of Ionian
philosophy, itself, if our contention be just, based in part on
1 Catast. 24. p. 140. 2 Soph. Frg. 523.
3 8. 8 ...diaKos fipaxvs virtp fiaKpov i;v\ov, something like, no doubt, the jjole and
globe carried in the Daphnephoria. See supra, p. 438.
4 Nauck, Frg. 781 6