Free The Music of Pythagoras by Kitty Ferguson Page A

Homer’s epics and later in the official cults of the cities and in much of the great literature. A human soul, or
psyche
, survived after death, but this survival was not an attractive one. For the Homeric heroes, the true “self” was the body, and the good life was closely tied with it. What good was survival in a form that could not enjoy feasting, combat, human love, sex, comradeship? Death was separation from these, leaving the soul in a weak, witless state—a shadow, a dream, smoke, a twittering bat. Only the gods had a better sort of immortality, but not in the sense that they survived death, for they never died. Furthermore, they jealously guarded their immortality. Woe betide any human who tried to overstep the limits and attain the immortality of the gods.
    Alongside this mainstream, people who lived in the countryside, and some in the cities, too, clung to hundreds of small clusters of beliefs, so ancient that no one could trace their origins, that provided better answers to questions raised by an unfair world and suggested there wouldbe future compensation for its injustice and suffering. One “mystery cult” had been centered in the town of Eleusis, and when Eleusis became part of Athens a few years before Pythagoras was born, the cult outgrew its local origins and spread across the Hellenic world. It required initiation into the mysteries of the earth mother Demeter and her daughter Persephone, an adoption into the family of the gods that carried with it a happier life in the next world. After initiation, normal everyday affairs could continue with no onerous new requirements.
    The Orphic cult, by contrast, involved a complicated set of beliefs in which the soul was a mixture of the divine and the earthly. Developing the divine part and suppressing the earthly required a relentless pursuit of purity, including ceremonies of ritual cleansing and the avoidance of eating meat. This was the work of more than one lifetime. A soul was reborn again and again, with its conduct in one life determining its fate in the next. The ultimate goal was to become one with Bacchus, or “a Bacchus.”
    Orphism had roots before the historical era in the worship of Dionysus, another name for Bacchus, probably at first a fertility god and only much later connected with wine and drunkenness. He was a god of the Thracians, an agricultural people who lived north of mainland Greece in the area bounded by the Aegean Sea, the Black Sea, and the Danube River. The Greeks regarded them as primitive barbarians, and the fifth-century historian Herodotus described them as people who “led miserable lives and were rather stupid.” When Dionysus/Bacchus worship reached Greece at about the beginning of the historical era, it was greeted with hostility, but its unorthodoxy and savagery gave it an irresistible fascination that was portrayed in Euripides’ play
The Bacchae
. The cult exalted the status of women and, if the playwright is to be believed, married and unmarried women retreated into the mountains in large bands to dance in ecstasy and to tear apart wild animals and eat them raw. A tradition of strong, involved women may have come to the Pythagoreans through Orphism, but in a less bloodthirsty guise.
    By the time of Pythagoras, Orphic communities were all over the Greek world, including southern Italy and Sicily. The primitive worship of Dionysus/Bacchus had evolved into something more ascetic, stimulating the mind instead of (or as well as) the body and psyche. Cult members attributed its reformation to Orpheus, whom frenzied Bacchic women had reputedly torn to pieces for his efforts. Orpheus was probablya real person clothed in legend. He seems to have been regarded first as a priestly figure, while his lyre and connection with music, and the status of a semi-mythical hero, came later. Some called him a god. 1
    If the stories about Pythagoras’ youthful travels were genuine, he was familiar with religious traditions in Egypt and