Mystic Cults in Magna Graecia

Chapter 5. Who Are You? Mythic Narrative and Identity in the “Orphic” Gold Tablets

Chapter 5 Who Are You? Mythic Narrative and Identity in the “Orphic” Gold Tablets Radcliffe g. Edmonds I am parched with thirst and I perish. But give me to drink from the ever-flowing spring on the right, by the cypress. “Who are you? Where are you from?” I am the son of Earth and starry Heaven.1 “Who are you?” ask the unnamed guardians, as the deceased begs for the water of Memory. “Where are you from?” From the discovery of the first gold lamellae in the nineteenth century to the most recent discoveries, scholars have asked much the same questions about the tablets themselves: Who are the people who chose to have these enigmatic scraps of gold foil buried with them in their graves? Where do these texts come from? How can we reconstruct the religious context of these mysterious texts? Studies of the tablets have often sought to answer the “Who are you?” question by asking “Where are you from?”—trying to find the source of some of the elements that appear in the tablet texts in other recognizable contexts. Some scholars have concentrated on the deities involved—Mnemosyne , Persephone, or Dionysus—but all these deities appear in a variety of contexts. Since eschatology is one of the favored typologies for historians of religions, others have compared the eschatology revealed in the tablets to label them as Orphic and Bacchic, Egyptian and Pythagorean, or even Eleusinian. The texts, however, are frustratingly vague about the eschatological rewards imagined for the deceased. From Dietrich to West to the most recent study by Merkelbach,2 scholars have sought to construct a stemma of influence that limits the use of these mythic elements to certain contexts, like errors passed down in a manuscript tradition, rather than accepting them as options within a larger mythic tradition that a poet, 74 Radcliffe G. Edmonds religious specialist, philosopher, or any other bricoleur could employ in a wide variety of contexts within Greek culture. Whereas some editors of the tablets’ texts tended to seek the Urtext behind the variants, be it an “Orphic” katabasis poem or a Pythagorean Book of the Dead, other scholars have sought the origins of the texts in ritual, trying to reconstruct a lost ritual context. Graf has examined the tablets from a ritual perspective, concluding that an initiatory context is more likely than a funerary one, and recent studies by Riedweg and Calame have examined the texts of the tablets from a semiotic or narratological perspective, trying to identify the ritual contexts in which the words might have been uttered.3 All these approaches concentrate on discovering where the tablets’ texts are from, seeking the source of the text as the answer to its identity. Rather than trying to place the scene enunciated in the tablets within a hypothetical ritual or to trace the verses back to a lost canonical text, I think it better to focus instead upon the narrative created by the verses, examining how this narrative structure can help us figure out who and what these tablets are. I argue that analyzing the gold tablets as narratives of a journey to the underworld brings out significant contrasts with other tellings of the journey , contrasts that show what social and religious ideas were most important to the creators of the tablets. A narrative, particularly a mythic narrative that draws on a rich tradition of familiar elements and patterns, can convey more information in compact form about where a text came from and who produced it than a non-narrative text. Not only are the traditional elements evocative of associations beyond their simple meaning, but their deployment and elaboration within the structure of the narrative can also convey meaning to the audience. In contrast to gold tablets that are simply blank or contain only the name of the deceased or a dedication “To Persephone and Plouton,” some of these tablets evoke a narrative; they present a piece of the story of the deceased’s journey to the underworld and her encounter with the powers there.4 The verses present a sequence of actions by a character (the deceased) who interacts with other characters in a determined temporal setting. To be sure, the story on the tablets is evocative rather than exhaustive; it presents a brief glimpse of the action rather than an elaborated whole. Nevertheless, the basic narrative sequence is clear and familiar: the deceased leaves the world of the living and journeys to the realm of the dead...