THE DOCTRINES OF THE ORPHIC MYSTERIES I5!t 
Titans, their ‘‘deeds unrighteous,” and are doomed to ‘suffer the suffer- 
ing” and do penance for their “ancient sin.’’* 
What, then, is the nature of the punishment? The answer is the 
Orphic-Pythagorean doctrine of metempsychosis. By the law of the 
Orphic Fate the soul is condemned to an indefinite series of incarnations.? 
It must again and again take on a perishable body. “Clothed in a 
strange garment of flesh,” it must wander in this “meadow of woe,” 
“this roofed-in cave,’ “this cheerless realm of wrath and death and 
throngs of dooms and loathsome disease and decay.’ Each existence 
on earth is a punishment, each body a tomblike prison‘ in which the 
soul is exiled from its rightful home and deprived of its fellowship with 
the gods. 
This wandering of the soul from one existence to another, from a 
higher to a lower, from a lower to a higher, is conceived as a cycle or 
wheel of life, ev«Aos, Tpdyos.° In this cycle it is theoretically possible 
that the soul may fall indefinitely until it is born into the lowest form 
of earthly existence, or rise indefinitely until it becomes a god; but the 
chances are that it will not rise to any height, because the ancient guilt 
tends to beget an endless brood, and so the series of earthly punishments 
and imprisonments goes on and on. The cycle of rebirths is then for 
the majority of indefinite duration; or, when any limit is set to it, it is 
a minimum of ten thousand years.” 
So far the doctrine is simple enough, but the idea of reward or punish- 
ment by progress or retrogression in the earthly life is complicated with 
the notion of reward or punishment in the lower world between incarna- 
tions, and with that of eternal bliss or eternal pain. 
If the life on earth has been one of signal wickedness and the soul 
is beyond cure, it is sent to the torments of the damned in the lowest 
t See Compagno tablet 6, Timpone Grande tablet; Pindar, fr. 106, and Weil’s commentary, p. 36. 
2 Abel Orphica 222, 223; Empedocles (Stein) 383, 384. 
3 Empedocles 402, 381, 301, 385-87. 
4 Plato Crat. 400 C. Cf. Phaedo 62 B and Verg. Aen. vi. 733. 
5s Empedocles 381. 
6 Abel Orphica 225, 226. This is the xvxAov BapumevOeos apyadéovo of the gold tablets. Cf. perfecto 
temporis orbe of Aen. vi. 745 and rota in Aen. vi. 748. 
7 Plato Phaedr. 249 A; in Empedocles, 30,000 seasons. See Dieterich Nekyia, p. 119, and Rohde Psyche 
Is p21370) Te 3: 
