Mark F.

McClay
Rethinking Orphic ‘Bookishness’: Text and
Performance in Classical Mystery Religion
Abstract: The mythical singer Orpheus was credited as the proto-founder of private
Dionysiac initiations in Classical Greece, and written hexameter poems attributed
to his authorship played an important role in these cults. Since at least the nine-
teenth century, classical scholars have identified this “bookish” orientation as a de-
fining feature of Orphism. This article approaches Orphic texts using the analytical
tools of “material religion” and argues that Orphic textuality is best understood as
a medial extension of poetic performance. Like musical-poetic performers, ritual ex-
perts drew authority in part from mimêsis of legendary archetypes (Orpheus, Mu-
saeus, Melampus, etc.), and part of the physical text’s function was to make this
identification believable for performers in Orphic cults and other low-level genres.
In the Derveni Papyrus, however, the book enables a rejection of performance-
based expertise in favor of an authority based on textual exegesis.

Introduction: Books and Material Religion

The “material turn” in religious studies has in large part been a turn away from texts
—that is, away from a propositional model of religion based on scriptures and sacred
writings. This shift has also involved a new focus on the materiality of texts, with in-
creased attention to the agential impingement of writing technologies on users of
books in religious contexts. Two of the contributors to Ritual Matters address this
set of issues, though with different inflections: Jennifer Knust, in her study of Late
Antique Christian miscellany manuscripts, and Richard Gordon, as part of his survey
of non-institutional Graeco-Roman divination practice. For Gordon, the texts em-
ployed in “low-level” divination belong to a set of practices and technologies that
complicate the agency of their users: those operating outside of institutionalized div-
ination still work within a material habitus that shapes their ritual activities while
also giving impetus to new developments and affording new means for asserting re-
ligious authority.¹ In this respect, the new modes of analysis prompted by the mate-
rial turn dovetail not only with the “History of the Book,” but also with recent devel-
opments in the study of ancient and world religions, where “sacred texts” have been

 Knust 2017 and Gordon 2017.

https://doi.org/10.1515/arege-2020-0010
202 Mark F. McClay

shown to be more deeply emmeshed in their material and ritual settings than the
concept of “scripture” has allowed.²
This essay will consider these issues in connection with books that were used in
Orphic mystery cults of Classical Greece, with focus on evidence from Athens and the
Greek mainland. “Orphism” is a modern term used to describe a range of cults that
offered release from postmortem sufferings through ritual purity and initiation into
Dionysiac mysteries. Such cults were propagated by itinerant initiators who offered
services to paying clients, and the mythical Thracian singer Orpheus was recognized
as the proto-founder of such mysteries. Written hexameter poems attributed to his au-
thorship (hymns, theogonies, and eschatological poems) played some role in these
rituals. Greek religion generally had no “scriptures,” and the use of written texts
in Orphic cults has been taken as a distinguishing trait that set Orphism apart
from mainstream Greek religion. Indeed, since the nineteenth century, “Orphism”
has often been defined as a “bookish” form of cult, even as a religious movement
with myths and doctrines derived from quasi-scriptural writings.³
Beneath this label of “bookishness” lie several assumptions that are due for
reevaluation. The original Orphic “books”—both the papyrus rolls themselves and
their poetic contents—are mostly lost, and so we are dealing for the most part not
with actual artifacts but with “textual objects” reflected in literary testimonia. View-
ing these objects against the background of Greek performance culture, I propose
that they can be understood as media that bolstered the authority of ritual specialists
in “live” poetic performance. This is, in fact, precisely the function assigned to Orphic
books by the skeptical observers who provide our testimonial evidence. However, the
Derveni Papyrus—the closest thing we possess to an actual Orphic “book” from Clas-
sical Greece—represents an innovation over practices described in literary sources.
The Derveni text does not mediatize a poetic performance, but rather seeks to bypass
live performance entirely in favor of an authority based on textual interpretation. In
each case, focusing on Orphic texts as “objects”—with attention to their interactions
with poetic performance, the possibilities of agency that they open and foreclose,
and the modes of religious authority that they embody—can begin to give a clearer
picture of Orphic books and their roles in private cults of Classical Greece.⁴

 On the role of writing in oral religious traditions, see especially Gill 1985 and Frankfurter 2004. For
applications of similar analytical tools within classical scholarship, see Frankfurter 2002, Henrichs
2003, Bremmer 2010, and MacRae 2016.
 Itinerant initiators: see Burkert 1982, with development in Graf and Johnston (2013: 66 – 93) and
Edmonds 2013. The “gold leaves” are another important body of evidence for Orphic ritual expertise,
though they are somewhat separate from the question of “bookishness”: see notes 4 and 10 below.
Orphic Poems: see West 1983 and Meisner 2018.
 For a similar reassessment of the Orphic “gold leaves,” see McClay (2018: 89 – 130).
Rethinking Orphic ‘Bookishness’: Text and Performance in Classical Mystery Religion 203

“Cacophony of Books”
Two literary testimonia connect Orphic books with private mysteries. At an intense
moment of Euripides’ Hippolytus (952– 955), an enraged Theseus mistakenly accuses
his son of raping his stepmother and driving her to suicide. He accuses the holier-
than-thou Hippolytus of rank hypocrisy:

Well, go ahead—preen all you like, eat a meatless diet, make Orpheus your lord (Ὀρφέα τ’
ἄνακτ’ ἔχων), play a mystic (βάκχευε), and worship the smoke of a lot of books (πολλῶν γραμ-
μάτων τιμῶν καπνούς). You’re busted.

Mysticism, Orpheus, and vaporous ritual texts all belong to a fifth-century caricature
of Tartuffe-ish religious ostentation. Orphic ritual texts are mentioned again in Pla-
to’s Republic, where Socrates’ interlocutor Adeimantus describes mendicant priests
who offer clients means of escape from divine justice (2.364e):

They produce (παρέχονται) a cacophony of books by Musaeus and Orpheus (βίβλων δὲ ὅμαδον …
Μουσαίου καὶ Ὀρφέως), the offspring of Selene and the Muses (or so they say), by which they
conduct sacrifices (καθ’ ἃς θυηπολοῦσιν), persuading not only individuals but also cities that
there are means of release and purifications of unjust deeds for those who are still living, by
means of sacrifices and pleasant frivolities—and even rituals for those who are dead, which
they call “initiations,” that release us from troubles there, while terrors await those who have
not sacrificed…

Robert Parker joins other scholars in noting the disdainful tone of both testimonia:
as he remarks, these passages in Plato and Euripides, with “their talk of a ‘hubbub’
and a ‘smoke’ of books,” show that “the bookishness of Orphics was itself a part of
their offensive unorthodoxy.”⁵
Written texts appear in connection with Orphic-Bacchic cults outside of Attica as
well. A red-figure Apulian amphora by the Ganymede Painter (ca. 340 BCE), now in
the Antikenmuseum Basel, shows Orpheus standing before an elderly seated figure
who holds a papyrus in his hand. The scene strongly implies an Orphic text, perhaps
of an eschatological nature.⁶ Two papyri of a slightly later date testify to the use of

 Parker 1995: 484.

 Antikenmuseum Basel, inv. S40 (= LIMC s.v. “Orpheus” #88). On the evidence of this and other
South Italian vase paintings, see Schmidt (1975), Bernabé and Jiménez San Cristóbal (2008: 179 –
205, especially 201– 203), and Graf and Johnston (2013: 65). That the scroll in the Basel vase repre-
sents a mystic Totenpass is an attractive supposition, made plausible by proximity with Orphic-Bac-
chic gold leaves from Magna Graecia and Sicily. Apulian vases in general were produced for native
Italians rather than for Greek inhabitants, as Carpenter 2009 and Carpenter, Lynch, and Robinson
2014 have shown; but this does not obviate their evidentiary value, given the extensive contact be-
tween the Greek and native populations. The remark of Aristoxenus that Pythagoras counted Lucani-
ans, Messapians, Peucetians, and Romans (!) among his followers (fr. 17 Wehrli), while not necessarily
reliable for events of the sixth century, suggests that by Aristoxenus’ own time (early fourth century)
204 Mark F. McClay

texts by Orphic-Bacchic ritual experts in Egypt. A third-century BCE edict of Ptolemy

IV Philopator requires initiators in Egypt to deposit their sacred texts with authorities
in Alexandria, and a near-contemporary papyrus from Gurôb in the Fayum contains
what seems to be a Dionysiac liturgical text (including portions that are roughly hex-
ametrical). While the differences in textual practice between Egypt and the Greek
world should not be ignored, the fourth- and third-century evidence points toward
a basic continuity of structure: Orphic-Bacchic cults were propagated by itinerant ex-
perts, and the authority of these experts was based in part on the books in their pos-
session.⁷
A few testimonia from Classical Athens also link Orpheus to mystery ritual with-
out reference to books. Aristophanes (Ran. 1030 – 1036) includes Orpheus in a list of
“canonical” poetic authorities (alongside Homer, Hesiod, and Musaeus): here he is
credited with instituting initiations and teaching mortals to abstain from bloodshed
(Ὀρφεὺς μὲν γὰρ τελετάς θ’ ἡμῖν κατέδειξε φόνων τ’ ἀπέχεσθαι). Theophrastus (Char.
16.11) says that the “Superstitious Man” is the sort of person who regularly visits “Or-
pheus-initiators” (πρὸς τοὺς Ὀρφεοτελεστάς), though this vignette says nothing
about whether such initiators might have relied (or been imagined as relying) on
written texts.
For many scholars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Orphism
in Archaic and Classical Greece was imagined as a coherent religious movement, a
“reformed” and enlightened type of Dionysiac cult. As Radcliffe Edmonds has
shown, Orphism in turn-of-the-century scholarship came to be assigned the distin-
guishing traits of Protestant Christianity: an emphasis on interior faith over outward
ritual observance, concepts of “original sin” and personal salvation, and a doctrinal
system based on the exegesis of sacred writings.⁸ The study of Orphism thus followed
an oft-repeated pattern whereby ancient and non-Western religions were interpreted
within the characteristic thought patterns of Protestant Christianity.⁹ Within this
framework, “Orphism” came to designate a kind of proto-Protestant bibliolatry: Or-
phic books were proto-scriptures, with Orphism’s doctrinal emphasis and its interest
in books going hand in hand. The trope of “bookishness” has also influenced inter-
pretation of other bodies of evidence, such as the Orphic funerary gold leaves from
the Late Classical period that have been found in the graves of Dionysiac mystery in-
itiates in various corners of the Greek world. On the assumption that Orphic cults re-

aspects of Orphic-Pythagorean tradition had attracted an observable following among the non-Greek
Italian population.
 P.Berlin 11774 (= OF 44) and P.Gurôb 1 (= OF 578); see Henrichs (2003: 227– 235) and Graf and John-
ston (2013: 150 – 155), with references to earlier bibliography.
 Edmonds (2013: 95 – 159); for review of scholarship on Orphism more generally, see Graf and John-
ston (2013: 50 – 65).
 See Smith 1990 and Asad 1993, with developments in Nongbri 2013 and Barton and Boyarin 2016.
On the influence of Protestant-Catholic religious polemics in Anglo-European scholarship on Greek
religion, see also Konaris 2016.
Rethinking Orphic ‘Bookishness’: Text and Performance in Classical Mystery Religion 205

lied heavily on written texts, the brief inscriptions on these tablets have been inter-
preted by many scholars as extracts from a pre-existing Orphic katabasis that circu-
lated in written form.¹⁰ The model of a pseudo-Protestant “Orphism,” at least in its
most extreme forms, was significantly undermined in the mid-twentieth century both
by skeptical critiques and by the appearance of new evidence (several new gold tab-
lets, the Derveni Papyrus, and Orphic bone plates from Olbia). In recent decades, the
pendulum has swung away from skepticism toward a more cautious positive descrip-
tion of Orphism as a heterogeneous but still circumscribable entity within Greek re-
ligion.¹¹
Nevertheless, while no scholar today would describe “Orphism” in an explicitly
Christian vocabulary, the older Protestantizing model casts a long shadow over the
question of “bookishness.” For scholars seeking a stable identifier for “Orphism,”
the use of written Orphic texts has seemed an attractive definitional starting point,
since it avoids the aprioristic assumptions about Orphic “doctrines” and “commun-
ities” that have troubled earlier scholarship: this is the methodology favored, for in-
stance, by both Parker and Martin West.¹² But taking books as Orphism’s defining
characteristic introduces new problems. Only two Classical literary sources refer to
Orphic books in connection with cult: when other sources (such as Theophrastus
and Aristophanes) describe Orphic phenomena without mentioning books, is the
use of books nevertheless implied? If so, the “bookishness” of Orphism is amplified
by circular argument: if Orphism is defined in terms of books, then Orphic phenom-
ena in turn become evidence for the use of books, and so on.
Then there is the question of how Orphic texts were actually used. Many scholars
still tend to assume that Orphic books must have served as fodder for exegesis, on
implicit analogy with the familiar uses of sacred scriptures in the Abrahamic reli-
gions. The widely accepted hypothesis that Orphic religion is built around a standard
hieros logos assumes that such a poem was fixed and circulated in written form. Al-
berto Bernabé, editor of the Teubner collection of Orphic fragments, has gone as far
as to characterize Orphism as a “religion of the book.”¹³ Yet the presence of a text in
ritual indicates little about the text’s role or function. Two of the most significant re-
cent studies of Orphic literature, Dwayne Meisner’s Orphic Tradition and the Birth of
the Gods and Edmonds’ Redefining Ancient Orphism, both draw attention to the prob-

 On the tablets (OF 474– 496), see Bernabé and Jiménez San Cristóbal 2008 and Graf and Johnston
2013; also McClay 2018.
 Scholarship: see note 8 above. Derveni Papyrus: see notes 37– 40 and the final section of this
paper. Olbia bone plates: see SEG XXVIII 659 – 661 with discussion in West (1983: 17– 19) and Ferrari
(2016). The “positive” description of Orphism has been developed variously by Burkert (1985: 290 –
304), Parker (1995), Bernabé and Jiménez San Cristóbal (2008), and Graf and Johnston (2013); Ed-
monds (2013) proposes an alternative definition of Orphism according to Wittgensteinian “family re-
semblance” criteria rather than a body of central texts, myths, or doctrines.
 West 1983 and Parker 1995.
 E. g., Bernabé and Jiménez San Cristóbal (2008: 189 – 190). See also review and critique in Ed-
monds (2013: 95 – 138).
206 Mark F. McClay

lematic assumptions that continue to hamper discussions of Orphic textuality.¹⁴

Dwayne Meisner’s study focuses on the literary tradition of Orphic theogonic poetry
and refrains from speculating as to the importance that might have been assigned to
such texts in early Greek cults. Edmonds, for his part, argues that the disparaging
references to Orphic books by Euripides and Plato reflect fifth- and fourth-century
intellectual competition, in which written texts served as conduits of subversive phil-
osophical and sophistical ideas. While Edmonds has done a great service in challeng-
ing long-standing assumptions about Orphic “textuality,” there is little reason to be-
lieve that the production of books in itself constituted grounds for suspicion in
Classical Athens, where the literary papyrus was hardly an exotic or novel technology
by the fourth century BCE. I also caution against categorizing the Derveni Papyrus
alongside the “books” of Orpheus used by Plato’s initiators (as Edmonds’ argument
implicitly does), absent significant qualifications.¹⁵ Even the term “book”—which to
modern ears inevitably suggests the canonical closure of the codex rather than the
more open-ended format of papyrus rolls and sheets—is bound to be somewhat
anachronistic and misleading as a label for the hodge-podge of Orphic writings
that circulated in Classical Greece. The issue of Orphic “bookishness,” then, can
still benefit from reframing.

Orphic “Books” and Poetic Performance

To this end, I offer two broad suggestions. First, Orphic textuality can be better con-
textualized within the oral practices of Greek religion than as an alternative to them.
Greek religion was primarily oral. Albert Henrichs, Jan Bremmer, and Robert Parker
have all observed that such textual practices as were developed in Greek religion
tended to mediatize or extend existing oral customs rather than replace them.¹⁶
Even in the Classical period, literacy and writing had been incorporated into various
cultural and social practices that remained fundamentally oral.¹⁷
This basic fact carries several unrealized implications for our approach to Orphic
and other ritual texts in Greek antiquity. Sam Gill, a historian of Native American re-
ligions, in an essay provocatively titled “Nonliterate Traditions and Holy Books,” has
stressed the crucial role of performance for the interpretation of sacred writings. As
Gill observes, norms of performance not only govern interpretation of the written
word, but also reveal to the scholar the modes and possibilities of authority that
are instantiated in the text—for instance, the decision to write (or not to write),
and the possibility of “translation” between written text and oral performance.¹⁸

 Edmonds 2013 and Meisner 2018.

 Edmonds (2013: 111– 135); see also below “‘Hearing’ and ‘Understanding’ in the Derveni Papyrus.”
 Henrichs (2003), Bremmer (2010: 329 – 333), and Parker (2011: 16 – 20).
 E. g., Thomas 1992.
 Gill 1985.
Rethinking Orphic ‘Bookishness’: Text and Performance in Classical Mystery Religion 207

David Frankfurter has shown in applying Gill’s framework to the typology of the an-
cient “magician” that the authority of “literate” ritual specialists often involves their
ability to activate texts in performance—as, for instance, the literacy of Late Antique
magicians enabled them to produce magical objects and utterances for their clients
out of esoteric writings.¹⁹ Textual studies of the Orphic gold lamellae and the Late
Classical inscribed “Ephesia Grammata” from Crete and Western Greece (including
the so-called “Getty Hexameters” from fifth-century Selinus) have begun to reveal
a complex interaction between oral and literate practices in lower-level ritual genres
as well.²⁰
Since Orphic cults most likely involved recitation of hexameter poems attributed
to Orpheus—a point that is underscored by the Derveni Papyrus (see below)—we may
take poetic performance, rather than poetic texts, as a starting point for reexamining
Orphic textuality. The link in Orphic cult between poetic and ritual performance is
often overlooked: but Orpheus was recognized in the Archaic and Classical periods
as a proto-founder of several real-life performance genres, including poetry and
music (especially lyre-based song) as well as mystery ritual. Poetic performance, es-
pecially of hexameter poetry, was also a key feature of several lower-level ritual gen-
res. Plato’s itinerant initiators recite verses from a number of poets, including Homer
and Hesiod as well as Orpheus and Musaeus, and the Derveni commentator engages
in a polemic against the poetic performances of contemporary initiators.²¹ In the
Greek world, where nearly all poetry was composed for “live” performance, the
poet’s author-persona was also a device of self-presentation for real-life performers
(rhapsodes, kitharodes, etc.). In Gregory Nagy’s formulation, the “poet” is an ideal
archetype who is reembodied or “recomposed” in each performer’s song.²² In
other words, poetic performance was mimetic: the singer was Orpheus (or Homer,
or Hesiod, or whoever) in a quasi-theatrical way. This phenomenon is nicely illustrat-
ed on an Attic black-figure oenochoe from the late sixth century (now in the Villa
Giulia in Rome). The vase shows a kitharode in a musical contest. Mounting the
bêma, he is greeted with the acclamation, “ΧΑΙΡΕ ΟΡΦΕΥΣ” (“Hey there, Orpheus!”)
(Figure 1).²³ The kitharode is a kind of “Elvis impersonator,”²⁴ embodying the author-
ity of his archetype in performance.
Some evidence shows that poetic performers in lower-level genres related to their
legendary archetypes in similar ways. A remarkable but little-discussed fourth-cen-
tury fragment from the New Comic playwright Diphilus (preserved by Clement of

 Frankfurter (2002: 169 – 170) and (2004).

 Ferrari 2011 and Faraone and Obbink 2013.
 Betegh 2004 and see also below “‘Hearing’ and ‘Understanding’ in the Derveni Papyrus.”
 Nagy 1994 and 1996; see also developments and applications in Martin 2001 and Power 2010.
 Villa Giulia, Rome; Collezione Castellani, inv. 50627 (= Minigazzini 534 = LIMC s.v. “Orpheus”
#174). On the musical context of the image, see Power (2010: 361, and more generally 350 – 367).
 I thank Rebekah Spearman (University of Chicago) for this apt comparison.
208 Mark F. McClay

Fig. 1. Black-figure Attic oenochoe (ca. 530 BCE); a kitharode is greeted with the exclamation “ΧΑΙΡΕ
ΟΡΦΕΥΣ.” (Photo by Mauro Benedetti; reproduced by permission of the Museo Nazionale Etrusco di
Villa Giulia.)
Rethinking Orphic ‘Bookishness’: Text and Performance in Classical Mystery Religion 209

Alexandria) has a kathartês onstage chanting hexameters and impersonating the leg-
endary purifier Melampus while performing a kathartic ritual:

Προιτίδαϲ ἁγνίζων κούραϲ καὶ τὸν πατέρ’ αὐτῶν

Προῖτον ᾿Aβαντιάδην καὶ γραῦν πέμπτην ἐπὶ τοῖϲδε
δαιδὶ μιᾶι ϲκίλληι τε μιᾶι, τόϲα ϲώματα φωτῶν,
θείωι τε ἀϲφάλτωι τε πολυφλοίϲβωι τε θαλάϲϲηι
ἐξ ἀκαλαρρείταο βαθυρρόου Ὠκεανοῖο. 5
ἀλλὰ μάκαρ ᾿Aὴρ διὰ τῶν νεφέων διάπεμψον
᾿Aντικύραν, ἵνα τόνδε κόριν κηφῆνα ποιήϲω.

…cleansing the Proetids and their father Proetus, the son of Abas, and the old woman to make
five in all, with one torch and one squill for all those people, and with sulphur and pitch and
much resounding sea, drawn from the deep and gentle-flowing Ocean. But you, O blessed
Aêr, send Antikyra through the clouds in order that I may turn this bug into a drone(?).²⁵

The play and the dramatic context of the fragment are unknown. Clement says only
that Diphilus is mocking goêtes, i. e. ritual conjurers (χαριέντωϲ γοῦν καὶ ὁ κωμικὸϲ
Δίφιλοϲ κωμῳδεῖ τοὺϲ γόηταϲ διὰ τῶνδε). In myth, Melampus was known both as a
seer and for purifying the daughters of Proetus from madness inflicted upon them by
Dionysus, and the specific ritual staged here is obviously one of purification.²⁶ Parker
remarks that the effect here is one of “burlesque,” in which the poet “seems to have
transferred to the legendary Melampus the healing methods of the lowest contempo-
rary charlatans.”²⁷ This is true enough: but even if the scene plays up the incongruity
between the purifier’s mythologizing self-image and the modest apparatus of his on-
stage performance, such imaginative “transference” between archetype and perform-
er is exactly what is found in higher-level poetic performance genres. Rhapsodes, for
instance, maintained what Boris Maslov calls an “aedic ideology,” a conventional
self-representation as “singers” (including identification with mythical bards such
as Phemius, Demodocus, and Orpheus), even long after their own performance
style had lost the more “musical” traits (instrumental accompaniment, melodic vo-
calization, etc.) that had characterized earlier epic performance.²⁸ The purifier’s rec-
itation of hexameters, which are often used to portray ritual performers in Greek

 Diphilus fr. 125 K.-A. (= Clem. Alex. Strom. 7.4.26.4.2: trans. Parker, slightly adapted); Meineke con-
jectures that the fragment might belong to the play Helleborizomenoi (see fr. 30 K.-A.). On the ritual
apparatus, see Parker (1983: 207).
 Proetids: Hdt. 9.34, Apollod. 2.2.2, etc.: Loeffler (1968: 37– 39) discusses the myth and its variants.
On Melampus’ exemplary role for purificatory ritual, see Parker (1983: 207– 234). Several families of
manteis claimed genealogical connection with Melampus, and his descendants formed the subject of
the Hesiodic Melampodia (Hes. frr. 270 – 279 M.-W. = frr. 206 – 215 Most); for more general discussion,
see Flower 2008.
 Parker 1983: 207.
 Maslov 2009; see also Nagy 1994 and 1996. The more “musical” aspects of early bardic perfor-
mance were carried forward mainly in the kitharodic tradition: see especially Burkert 1987 and
Power 2010.
210 Mark F. McClay

drama, is a device of onstage characterization, along with the physical “props” of

purification (torch, sulphur, squill, sea-water). Thus, while Diphilus may be exploit-
ing a comic potential in this kind of mimêsis, he also shows the kathartês as someone
self-consciously “playing a part.” Diphilus’ chanting purifier, in other words, is try-
ing to impersonate Melampus in way that resembles the practice of more prestigious
poetic performers who impersonated Homer or Orpheus.
The implications of this parallel between high- and low-level poetic genres are
substantial. If, as Edmonds and others have suggested, certain rites came to be called
“Orphic” because poems of Orpheus were often performed in them,²⁹ we might pro-
ductively think of these rites as a performance genre sharing elements from “high”
poetic genres—especially if hexameter poems performed by rhapsodes were also fea-
tured in less prestigious settings. Divination offers an instructive parallel. Gordon de-
scribes “low-level” divination as a “dominated practice,” i. e. one which looked to in-
stitutionalized divination as a model and frequently adapted its practices at a
smaller scale.³⁰ The rubric of “dominated practice” is a useful description for the in-
itiations offered by fourth-century “Orpheus-Initiators” as well, although the “dom-
ination” of private mysteries would have come from several sources (of which poetic
performance was only one, along with institutional sanctuary-based mysteries). As
Gordon observes in the case of divination, literacy and writing technologies afford
individual specialists in “low-level” genres wide scope for adaptation. This is espe-
cially visible in the case of written verse oracles that were collected and recited by
chrêsmologoi (see further below).³¹ For private initiators performing Orphic poetry
and claiming the authority of Orpheus, the book was an especially useful (perhaps
even necessary) device of performance. Rhapsodes and kitharodes performed known
poetic repertoire in prestigious competitions with familiar performance conventions:
they did not need the medial support of a papyrus roll to claim the poet’s authority.
For performers in less prestigious ritual genres, where different texts proliferated
among competing experts, the book bolstered credibility by mediatizing the identifi-
cation between the live performer and his legendary archetype, much as modern ex-
periences of “liveness” are thoroughly dependent on various forms of mediation.³²
My second reframing observation is that the testimonia regarding Orphic and
other ritual books refer consistently to the dynamics of performer-client interaction.
In some ancient testimonia, the possession of books in itself seems to shore up the
authority of an individual practitioner in the eyes of potential customers. Isocrates
(19.5 – 7) tells of one Thrasyllus of Siphnus who inherited a personal library of divi-
natory books (τάς τε βίβλους τὰς περὶ τῆς μαντικῆς) from his guest-friend Polymae-

 Edmonds 2013: 139. This idea is confirmed as well by the evidence of the Derveni Papyrus (see
below).
 Gordon 2017. The concept of “dominated practice” is developed from Bourdieu 1991.
 On the interaction between orality and literacy in the circulation of oracles, and the resulting
problem of confirming oracular authenticity, see Dillery 2005.
 See Auslander 2005.
Rethinking Orphic ‘Bookishness’: Text and Performance in Classical Mystery Religion 211

netus. Using these books as his “start-up capital” (ἀφορμάς), Thrasyllus began prac-
ticing the same craft (ἐχρῆτο τῇ τέχνῃ), travelling from city to city and growing weal-
thy enough to retire on the profits. Nothing is said about the alleged authorship or
contents of the books he inherited from Polymaenetus; yet the ownership of written
texts is treated as metonymic for the transmission of the technê, and Thraysllus is
able to present himself credibly to paying clients largely because he has these
texts in his possession.³³ In the passage from Plato’s Republic quoted above, physical
texts of Orpheus and Musaeus are imagined primarily as devices of persuasion for
potential clients: the performers are said to “produce” or “show” their texts
(παρέχονται), stressing the alleged divine parentage of their authors more than myth-
ical or doctrinal content. The texts lend credibility to rituals conducted “according to
the books” (καθ’ ἃς θυηπολοῦσιν). This unusual phrase indicates not only the author-
ization that the text confers on the performance, but also the book’s entanglement in
a larger assortment of ritual actions and paraphernalia. In short, Adeimantus views
books as devices “for show” that enhance the credibility of “bad” ritual actors who
claim the authority of Orpheus.
We find the handling of books to similar effect in two other near-contemporary
sources. In a scene from Aristophanes’ Birds (959 – 976), an opportunistic chresmo-
logue (a performer of hexameter verse oracles) brandishes a papyrus to bolster his
authority: “Take the book” (λαβὲ τὸ βυβλίον) is his fixed refrain every time his skep-
tical client expresses doubt about the authenticity of the recited verse. Orphic books
used in telestic rituals are not to be conflated with the scrolls used by chrêsmologoi in
the context of divination, but we should also be wary of imposing too firm a boun-
dary between these ritual genres. Ever since Walter Burkert’s influential categoriza-
tion of Orphism as a form of ritual technê (rather than a community, institution, or
belief system), the continuities between Orphic cult and other forms of individual rit-
ual expertise have been increasingly recognized.³⁴ In a ritual context still closer to
that of Orphic-Bacchic mysteries, Demosthenes mocks his rival Aeschines for partic-
ipating as a young man in his mother’s Sabazius cult (18.259): his duties supposedly
included reading from books for his mother while she performed initiations (τῇ μητρὶ
τελούσῃ τὰς βίβλους ἀνεγίγνωσκες). Demosthenes does not indicate exactly what
sort of text he or his audience might have envisioned in a scene of this kind, but
its imagined function is not to provide information but to place a seal of authenticity

 See Burkert (1982: 7) and Henrichs (2003: 221– 222, especially note 46).
 Burkert 1982. Parker (2011: 17– 18) notes the typological continuity between private initiators and
chresmologues. The appearance of Musaeus in the poetic “repertoire” of both chresmologues and in-
itiators (see esp. the case of Onomacritus in Hdt. 7.6.2) is worth note: not only is Musaeus linked close-
ly with Orpheus and Orphic poetry used in ritual, but Athenian testimonia frequently group him with
Homer, Hesiod, and Orpheus as one of the “canonical” hexameter poets: Hippias 86 B 6 DK (= FGrHist
6 F 4), Ar. Ran.1030 – 1036 (see above), and Pl. Ap. 41a; cf. Cic. ND 1.15.41, and Phld. Piet. B 9970 –
9980 Obbink. This also implies “stylistic” overlap in performance practice between itinerant “Orphic”
practitioners, oracle-collectors, and even rhapsodes.
212 Mark F. McClay

on a non-standard form of ritual performance.³⁵ That Demosthenes lists books along-

side the “additional paraphernalia” (καὶ τἄλλα συνεσκευωροῦ) in this caricature of
his rival’s ritual activities—along with the clothes worn by initiates and purificatory
loam and bran, not to mention the items carried by initiates in procession (fennel,
poplar, and snakes!)—indicates that the papyrus scroll served a medial role that is
not reducible to its denotative function.
Each of these sources testifies to an expectation of response to the book as a
book. Poetic performance involves mimêsis of or identification with an authorizing
archetype: the implication in lower-level genres is that the written text will link
the performer more securely with a supposedly ancient authority and thereby
shore up his or her credibility in the eyes of clients. At the same time, the possession
of books is a credential upon which low-level performers are reliant. It is not the
book per se that makes the ritual disreputable: rather, it is the practitioners of “dis-
reputable” rites who benefit most from the medial reinforcement of a physical text.

“Hearing” and “Understanding” in the Derveni

Papyrus
In turning from the testimonia of Plato and Euripides to the Derveni Papyrus, we
move from Orphic books that are known to us only as “textual objects” to an ancient
text that survives in physical form.³⁶ This remarkable document is the nearest thing
we possess to an actual Orphic “book” from Classical Greece, but it is quite different
in content and function from the physical texts described in literary sources. The
papyrus was discovered not far from Thessaloniki among the remains of an ancient
funeral pyre, where it had been partially burned; the physical scroll is datable to the
fourth century BCE, the prose commentary to the fifth, and the hexameter poem (the
subject of the commentary) to the sixth. The surviving text comprises portions of
twenty-six columns. The first six feature explanations of various ritual practices, in-
cluding rites connected with the mystic sphere (e. g., apotropaic incantations of
magoi, libations and cake-offerings for Erinyes/Eumenides, etc.). It is likely that
this part of the papyrus text, which comprised the outer part of the scroll and suf-
fered the worst damage from the fire, was significantly longer than what has sur-
vived.³⁷ The remainder of the surviving text, which extends to the end of the scroll,
contains an allegorizing commentary on an Orphic poem. This second part of the

 Cf. Parker 2011: 17.

 Betegh 2004 remains the best introduction to the papyrus, the commentary, and the hexameter
poem. The editions of Laks and Most 2016 (to which I refer in this section) and Kotwick 2017 reflect
more recent work on the text. On further issues of interpretation, see the following three notes.
 On the reconstruction and interpretation of the early columns, see especially Betegh (2004:
74– 91), Janko (2008; 2016: 15 – 22), and Piano (2016), with references to earlier discussions.
Rethinking Orphic ‘Bookishness’: Text and Performance in Classical Mystery Religion 213

text, since it showcases the commentator’s attitudes toward poetry and poetic perfor-
mance, is of particular interest for the present argument.
The Orphic poem itself, insofar as it can be reconstructed from the lemmata pre-
served in the commentary, can be described as a hexameter “hymn to Zeus.” It re-
lates Zeus’ accession to power, his swallowing of the Orphic god Protogonos/Phanes
(or perhaps the phallus of Uranus), and his re-creation of the cosmos, as well as al-
luding to his incestuous union with his mother.³⁸ The commentator, drawing on
Anaxagoras and other Presocratics, interprets the poem as an allegory for the phys-
ical development of the cosmos: separation of hot and cold, congealing of elements,
recombination of matter under different names, and the cosmic influence of Mind
(Νοῦς). The commentator asserts that his idiosyncratic interpretation gives the
poet’s true meaning, and that Orpheus expressed this teaching in riddling fashion
using mythical tropes and poetic diction.³⁹ The commentator’s identity is unknown,
but it is now widely accepted that he was a ritual specialist of a rather unusual
stripe.⁴⁰ He views other specialists as rivals, and he is concerned with asserting
the superiority of his interpretive project over the services offered by his competitors.
The papyrus was discovered after the trope of Orphic “bookishness” had been
well-established in scholarship, and its implications for our understanding of Orphic
textuality have yet to be fully recognized. A key theme of the commentator’s polemic
that has, to date, received little attention is his denigration of “live” poetic perfor-
mance. In a programmatic passage at the beginning of the commentary (vii 2– 8),
he claims that it is “impossible to say the meaning of [Orpheus’] words after they
have just been uttered” ([κ]αὶ εἰπεῖν οὐχ οἷόν τ[ε τὴν τῶν ὀ]νομάτων [θέ]σιν καίτ[οι]
ῥηθέντα). To understand the poem, the reader must instead recognize that Orpheus
speaks “great things in the form of riddles” ([ἐν αἰν]ίγμασ[ι]ν … [μεγ]άλα, vii 6 – 7).
This is the commentator’s justification for a line-by-line, even word-by-word re-inter-
pretation of the poem (ἀ[πὸ το]ῦ πρώτου [ἀεὶ] μέχρι οὗ [τελε]υταίου ῥήματος, vii
7– 8; cf. ὅτι … αἰνίζεται κ̣ [α]θ’ ἔπος ἕκαστον ἀνάγκη λέγειν, xiii 5 – 6). In another pro-
grammatic passage, he adds that “it is impossible” for those undergoing initiation

 On the reconstruction of the poem and its contents, see Betegh (2004: 92– 182), Bernabé (2007),
Santamaría Álvarez (2016) and (2018b), and Meisner (2018: 51– 86).
 Apart from the Derveni Papyrus, Plato also attests to allegorical interpretation of myths in Orphic-
Pythagorean contexts (Grg. 493a-b = OF 434 II). On both the ritual and allegorical portions of the
papyrus, see Laks and Most 1997, Papadopoulou and Muellner 2014, and Santamaría Álvarez
2018a. On the commentator and Greek allegoresis, see Struck (2004: 29 – 39).
 I am persuaded by Obbink (1997) and Betegh (2004: 373 – 380) that the author’s critique of mys-
tery initiations in column xx is best understood not as a skeptical dismissal of all ritual expertise, but
as one expert’s assertion of superiority over his competitors. Plato describes Orphic priests and priest-
esses who offer interpretations of their own rituals (Men. 81a = OF 424). Edmonds (2013: 135 – 138)
makes a persuasive case for describing the Derveni commentator as an “Orphic” and examining
his project in continuity with other evidence for Orphic cult—but see also my argument below on
the differences between the Derveni text and the “hubbub of books” produced by other Orphic ini-
tiators.
214 Mark F. McClay

“to hear and at the same time understand what is being spoken” (οὐ γὰρ οἷόν τε
ἀκοῦσαι ὁμοῦ καὶ μαθεῖν τὰ λεγόμενα xx 2 – 3).⁴¹ The commentator constructs a po-
lemical opposition between voice and hearing on the one hand and anacoustic un-
derstanding on the other.
The Derveni author also redirects the “hearing” of his readers within the com-
mentary itself. Near the beginning of the poem, Orpheus says that Zeus heard certain
oracles and then “took from his father the rule as prophesied, and strength in his
hands, and a glorious divinity” (Ζεὺς μὲν ἐπεὶ δὴ̣ π̣α̣[τρὸς ἑο]ῦ πάρα θέ[σ]φατον
ἀρχὴν / [ἀ]λκήν τ’ ἐν χείρεσσι ἔ[λ]α̣β[εν κ]α̣[ὶ] δαίμον̣ [α] κυδρόν, viii 4– 5 = OF 5).
Here is an allusion to the familiar Uranus-Cronus-Zeus succession, and specifically
to the transfer of kingship from Cronus to Zeus: the “glorious divinity” is uncertain,
but may refer to the god Protogonos/Phanes, whom Zeus will swallow to regenerate
the cosmos.⁴² The fragments quoted by the commentator do not indicate how Zeus
came to power, nor do they suggest that he overthrew Cronus by force or guile, as
in Hesiod and the later Orphic Rhapsodies. The commentator actually warns against
this interpretation: the reader “must not hear” (χρὴ … οὐκ ἀκούειν) these lines as re-
ferring to Zeus’ overpowering of his father, but rather to his inheritance of his father’s
might (viii 9 – 10). The use of ἀκούω meaning “to interpret [something] as [something
else]” is unusual in Classical Greek, but typical of later scholiastic commentary (see
LSJ s.v. ἀκούω IV). The possibility of Zeus’ violence against Cronus would have been
audible in these lines to any listener familiar with the theogonic tradition, and the
commentator’s warning here, as elsewhere, has the effect of disconnecting the
poem from the nexus of allusion that is typical of the performance-based hexameter
genre. The instruction to “un-hear” this possible echo is consistent with the commen-
tator’s distrust of “heard” and “spoken/vocalized” meanings.⁴³
The commentator insists that the words of Orpheus should be taken not only in
terms different from their apparent meaning, but also in deliberate abstraction from
any possible performance context. The written prose allegory (and by implication the
book containing it) represents an alternative to live poetic performance and depends
on reading (and re-reading) a written text rather than relying on the sense of the
poet’s words as “spoken” or “heard.” Here again the material of the book represents

 On the opposition between “hearing” and “understanding” in this column of the commentary, see
also Jiménez San Cristóbal 2018.
 Santamaría Álvarez (2016: 153 – 156); other possibilities are succinctly reviewed by Betegh (2004:
163) and Meisner (2018: 68).
 That the poem alluded to the Uranus-Cronus-Zeus succession is made clear by further allusions in
columns xiv 5 – 6 and xv 5 – 6 (= OF 10); on the poem’s correspondences and differences with Hesiod,
see Betegh (2004: 172) and Santamaría Álvarez (2018b: 51– 52). The last of these, along with Santa-
maría Álvarez (2016: 150 – 153), discusses stylistic and thematic relations between the Derveni theog-
ony and early Greek epic. In the Orphic Rhapsodies, Zeus drugs and castrates Cronus (OF 219 – 225):
see Meisner (2018: 169, 210 – 217).
Rethinking Orphic ‘Bookishness’: Text and Performance in Classical Mystery Religion 215

Orpheus’ authority, but with a different import from the ritual texts produced by Pla-
to’s initiators or the “smoke of many books” in Euripides.

Conclusion
Applying the analytical tools of “material religion” to Orphic textuality, we can begin
to discern several ways in which Orphic “books” complicate, shape, and direct the
activities of cult participants and observers. Physical texts are media of performance.
For Orphic initiators, books are a credential that enhances their connection to the po-
etic “archetype” of Orpheus himself; for clients, they are a token of credibility,
though not all observers find Orphic texts compelling as instruments of authoriza-
tion. The testimonia present Orphic books as objects that confer authority on ques-
tionable or undeserving ritual performances. In the Derveni Papyrus, by contrast,
the written text has replaced out-loud song or poetic recitation altogether in favor
of a claim of authority through exegesis. Each form of authority is in a way “embod-
ied” in the physical text, as the book’s “agency” guides practitioners to new possi-
bilities of religious expertise.

Abbreviation
OF Bernabé, Alberto, ed. 2004 – 2007. Orphicorum et Orphicis similium testimonia et fragmenta.
Poetae Epici Graeci. Pars II, Fasc. 1 – 3. Munich and Leipzig.

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