Who Orpheus was, and when he lived, can never be known.  But the probabilities are that he brought from Egypt into Greece, what Moses took from Egypt into Palestine, the Egyptian ideas of culture, law, and civilization.  He reformed the Bacchic mysteries, giving them a more elevated and noble character, and for this he lost his life.  No better account of his work can be given than in the words of Lord Bacon.

“The merits of learning,” says he, “in repressing the inconveniences which grow from man to man, was lively set forth by the ancients in that feigned relation of Orpheus’ theatre, where all beasts and birds assembled; and, forgetting their several appetites, some of prey, some of game, some of quarrel, stood all sociably together, listening to the airs and accords of the harp; the sound thereof no sooner ceased or was drowned by some louder noise, but every beast returned to his own nature; wherein is aptly described the nature and condition of men, who are full of savage and unreclaimed desires of profit, of lust, of revenge, which, as long as they give ear to precepts, to laws, to religion, sweetly touched by eloquence and persuasion of books, of sermons, of harangues, so long is society and peace maintained; but if these instruments be silent, or that sedition and tumult make them not audible, all things dissolve into anarchy and confusion."[263]

Of the Orphic doctrines we are able to give a somewhat better account.  As far back as the sixth century before Christ, there were scattered through Greece hymns, lyrical poems, and prose treatises, treating of theological questions, and called Orphic writings.  These works continued to be produced through many centuries, and evidently met an appetite in the Greek mind.  They were not philosophy, they were not myths nor legends, but contained a mystic and pantheistic theology.[264] The views of the Pythagoreans entered largely into this system.  The Orphic writings develop, by degrees, a system of cosmogony, in which Time was the first principle of things, from which came chaos and ether.  Then came the primitive egg, from which was born Phanes, or Manifestation.  This being is the expression of intelligence, and creates the heavens and the earth.  The soul is but the breath which comes from the whole universe, thus organized, and is imprisoned in the body as in a tomb, for sins committed in a former existence.  Life is therefore not joy, but punishment and sorrow.  At death the soul escapes from this prison, to pass through many changes, by which it will be gradually purified.  All these notions are alien to the Greek mind, and are plainly a foreign importation.  The true Greek was neither pantheist nor introspective.  He did not torment himself about the origin of evil or the beginning of the universe, but took life as it came, cheerfully.

The pantheism of the Orphic theology is constantly apparent.  Thus, in a poem preserved by Proclus and Eusebius it is said:[265]—­