Penis in the sky

Today: Talia Lavin, author of Wild Faith.

Issue No. 207

I Am Ready to Move to A Cave to Explore the Orphic Mysteries
Talia Lavin

I Am Ready to Move to A Cave to Explore the Orphic Mysteries

by Talia Lavin

The Derveni Papyrus, dating from ~340 BCE, is the oldest surviving text in European literature, and the first papyrus to be discovered in Greece. It was found in 1962 by a man at work with a bulldozer on the widening of a road who wound up accidentally uncovering a necropolis. The site was soon taken over by the Greek Archaeological Service, which recovered the papyrus—a black lump that had been tossed on the covering slabs of the tomb of a nobleman along with other charred remains of his funeral pyre, including a gilded wreath, spearheads, a horse’s harness and a pair of ivory eyes. The bronze crater in which this noble was entombed lay close to a shrine to Persephone, the doomed wife of Hades, god of the Underworld. The papyrus met with a better fate than the goddess did—it was rescued by archaeologist Petris Themelis, whereupon its fragments were unrolled and preserved between sheets of glass in the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki.

Over the years the text revealed tantalizing clues about a shadow religion far removed from familiar Greek mythology, with its legendary heroes and high ambrosial Olympus, full of horny, bickering gods. Scholars have pored over the Derveni Papyrus as (among other things) a possible key to the Orphic mystery cult, a group who worshiped the tragic figure of Orpheus, a bard torn apart by sex-mad Maenads, who left his head intact to float down the rivers of the world singing a sad song. The cult claimed to possess, and to worship, his poetry; their practices revolved around secret rites of ecstatic frenzy, and their beliefs involved metempsychosis and reincarnation.

In the Papyrus as interpreted by some contemporary Greek scholars, the Sun originated when the severed penis of the ur-god Uranus became a phallic celestial light, and Zeus then swallowed it, became pregnant with the universe, and gave birth to all things. (The fate of Uranus’s phallus here diverges from more mainstream Greek myth: in other versions, the god Kronos cast the severed member into the sea, from which splash and foam emerged Aphrodite.)

When an Orphic practitioner died—according to a gold funerary pendant of the type known as “totenpass,” or “death passport” to the underworld, found in the grave of a cult adherent—he or she was adjured to spurn the waters of Lethe, the pool of forgetfulness.

Instead, he is to say:

I am the child of Earth and starry Heaven;
But my race is heavenly; and this you know yourselves.
But I am parched with thirst and I perish; but give me quickly
refreshing water flowing forth from the lake of Memory.