by Tamra Lucid and Ronnie Pontiac.
Life Death Life
Truth
As we have seen, those words were found inscribed on a bone tablet. While no gold leaf, it has been included for consideration among the few possible remnants of Orphic funeral practices. Many of the gold leaves were found in Crete, but this Orphic relic survived near the Black Sea, in what we now call Ukraine, in a grave not far from an ancient temple of Apollo. Gold leaves have been found in graves from southern Italy to Macedonia, most dat- ing from the fourth and fifth centuries BCE, around the time of Plato and Aristotle.
What are these gold leaf objects? Leaf in the sense of gold foil, but a few are cut to look like leaves. Historians usually call them gold tablets, though they are very small and thin. German scholars adopted the term totenpass, meaning a passport for the dead. One gold leaf’s message starts with the word password. The gold tablet, found in a woman’s otherwise undistinguished grave in a large necropolis near Hipponion in Southern Italy, provided a less cryptic message:
Here is the password of Memory.
When you die you go to the vast halls of Hades.
A spring is on your right
and by it stands a shining cypress tree
where the descending souls of the dead refresh themselves.
Stay away from that spring!
Further on you’ll find refreshing water
flowing from the lake of Memory.
Guardians stand by.
They will ask you sharply
what you seek in the dank shadows of Hades.
Say: “I am a child of earth and starry heaven
and I’m parched with thirst.|
Now give me refreshing water to drink
from the lake of Memory.”
They’ll speak to the king of the underworld,
then they’ll give you to drink from the lake of Memory,
and you, having drunk, will go along the holy road
initiates and mystics travel.
As we have seen Orphism remains stubbornly mysterious. A place where even skilled researchers end up chasing their own shadows, a fertile breeding ground for mystics and magicians.
For example, a phrase that appears on the gold tablets is “a kid, I have rushed to the milk and fallen in.” This has inspired much poetic reverie. Among scholars the assumption was that this was probably ancient slang for really finding yourself in your element, like a “donkey in hay.” Some, perhaps influenced by the Neoplatonists, imagined a deeper symbol in the idea of a young goat drowning in milk. Could this be a metaphor for the way the soul loses consciousness when imprisoned in a material body? What might have nourished us instead smothers us.
Professor Martin Nilsson in the mid-twentieth century thought the reference to milk an adaptation of a popular proverb of the time, meaning simply abundance and happiness. In the twenty-first century scholars Sarah Iles Johnson and Fritz Graf agreed that milk symbolized the beginning of a more abundant life.
Or perhaps the kid in milk is a symbol for the newly liberated soul rushing to the milk of spiritual sustenance. Recently Stian Torjussen has argued that the milk mentioned in the gold tablets is a symbol of immortality. He points out that in Greece since the seventh century BCE milk and stars have been connected. The queen of the gods, Hera, was said to have created the stars when she sprayed milk across the sky, and to this day we call our galaxy the Milky Way. The kid jumping into the milk must be of the race of starry heaven.
A kid in milk is covered in white, like the white shroud of the dead or the white robe of the Orphic, which may have been one and the same. A kid in milk could also be an image of a new-born encased in the amniotic sac. All are symbols of the spiritual rebirth of the initiate.
Then another gold tablet was found in which a bull rushes to milk and falls in. That’s an unnatural image. Bulls don’t drink milk. Bulls are symbols of Dionysus. Finally, the word milk itself came into question. The word could also be interpreted as referring to the froth of sea-foam. In some variations of the Dionysus myth, he is a bull that charges off a cliff into the frothing white sea-foam. Could the gold tablet actually be referring to that ancient myth?
To further complicate matters, in ancient Greek religion hymns commonly invite gods to leap into the milk, into the wine, into the youth maturing that year. The kid or bull leaping into milk might be nothing more than a springtime prayer.
Edmonds makes a strong argument that the golden tablets were inscribed with sentences from an oracle. The earliest records never mention Orpheus as having visited the underworld, and he’s not listed among those with special knowledge of the afterlife. His fame, according to them, is for his rites of purification and his oracles. Someone could have asked the oracle of Orpheus about crossing over to the afterlife and received the famous answer in hexameters about the glowing cypress tree and avoiding the waters of forgetfulness, including what to say to the guardians of the water of memory—that you are a child of earth and starry heaven but of the race of heaven.
Another gold leaf promises that though once mortal the initiate is now a god. But no other leaf says that. Edmonds suggests that the “child of earth and starry heaven” phrase is a reference to “the ancestral heroes, the founders of the race who lived in closer conjunction with the gods than the ordinary folk today” (2010, 111), races like the Tritopatores (Thrice Fathers) from the times when gods feasted among men. On the other hand, the phrase may simply be a reference to Memory’s parents, Gaia the earth and Ouranos the starry sky god.
Except for those golden leaves that share the same content, how do we know that any of the golden leaves were connected by a consistent belief system or community? Once thought to have been the symbols of exclusive membership in a mystical cult, they are now considered at best instructions for ritual dances or motions, at worst the relics of unscrupulous traveling oracle mongers. The small number of them makes them seem rare, and their influence therefore appears to have been relatively minor, but it’s easy to speculate that gold attracts grave robbers, and most of the tablets may have been stolen and melted down long ago
Excerpt from The Magic of the Orphic Hymns: A New Translation for Modern Mystics by Tamra Lucid and Ronnie Pontiac (Inner Traditions: Aug 2023).
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Magic-of-the-Orphic-Hymns/Tamra-Lucid/9781644117200