Orpheus' Legend and Works

H.P. Blavatsky, G.R.S. Mead, Thos. Taylor · Hellenic and Hellenistic Papers Series · 21 pages

A twenty-one page compilation from H.P. Blavatsky, G.R.S. Mead and Thomas Taylor, opened by an abstract and train of thoughts with page references. The frontispiece is by Mike Deangelo. It is the third of the Orpheus files in this section, alongside the hymn to Apollo and the hymn to the Muses, and Taylor's separate essay on the hymns as a body sits beside it.

The claim announced on the title page is that Orpheus was the first and highest divine incarnation on this earth, and the compilation sets out the case for it in stages. Blavatsky is given first: that Orpheus occupied one of the four great seats of learning in ancient Egypt, and brought the Indian Mysteries of Initiation to Greece nine millennia before Homer and Hesiod; that Pythagoras was initiated into the Orphic Mysteries and Plato received a perfect knowledge of them; and that those Mysteries were afterwards disfigured by the exoteric rites of Bacchus. A group of etymological identifications follows, each tying a Greek name back to an Indian one — Dionysos as the god Dis from Mount Nys in India, Bacchus crowned with ivy as Krishna, and Orpheus himself as Orphnos, a tawny-coloured Hindu. The compilation then turns to what it calls the facts and clues underlying the lives of initiated adepts, and asks directly why initiates were persecuted, tortured, exiled and executed. The closing section gathers the attributes: Orpheus-Enoch as possessor of the phorminx, the seven-string lyre, and one of seven primordial creators, a branch of the Tree of Salvation grown from one seed; the teacher who called nature the resourceful Mother, who taught the doctrine of the seven Star-Regents to the Greek philosophers, who showed how to affect a whole audience by means of a lodestone, and who imparted the art of oömancy; and finally Orpheus as the Initiator, or the Great Sacrifice, on whom even initiated adepts rely.

Read the full text (PDF, 1.4 MB, 21 pages)