740 RENAISSANCES

and ideas dwindles almost to the vanishing-point at which the supposed
evidence for the presence there of Minoan elements quite disappears
from view.

Scepticism can, of course, be carried to an extreme at which it
becomes more paradoxical than credulity; and, if there were incontro-
vertible evidence, as there seems in fact to be,1 that in a pre-Alexandrine
Hellenic World a belief in the transmigration of souls under stress of
Karma,2 and a prescription for winning release from a melancholy round
of successive reincarnations, were current in Pythagorean, Orphic, or
any other philosophical or religious circles, it would seem decidedly
more improbable that these practices and doctrines had been worked
out in the Hellenic World independently than that they had been
derived by the Hellenes from the Indie World through the culturally
conductive medium of the Achaemenian Empire.3 Moreover, whatever
the source or sources of the philosophy of Pythagoras and of the
'miscellaneous' and 'disparate'4 'arts of Orpheus'5 may have been, it
has still to be explained why a pre-Alexandrine Hellenic Society should
ever have welcomed and promoted movements that were certainly felt
to have in them at least a touch of something alien. An explanation
suggested in a previous passage of this Study6 was that 'Orphism'
proved attractive to Hellenic souls because it promised to fill a fearful
spiritual void; and, since the publication of Linforth's book, this idea,
at least, can be entertained with somewhat greater assurance, since it
has received the nihil obstat of a scholar who has placed so many other
once cherished notions on a scientific censor's index.

'If we look for a wider unity in the things that bore the name of Orpheus,
we may perhaps find that they are the expression of a particular aspect of
the religious instinct among die Greeks. The practice of the public cults
involved little or no religious speculation and was not developed to meet
the deeper religious needs of the individual. Greek poetry—epic, lyric, and
dramatic—full as it was of gods and myths and profound thought on the
relations between gods and men, was secular rather than hieratic. Philo-
sophy, though it touched Religion at many points and became more and
more a guide for the moral life, was primarily intellectual and divorced
from religious practice. Meantime, the common human need required a
religion in which practice and belief would be united, a religion which
would allay the concern which men individually felt for their spiritual
welfare, in this life and the next. This need was met by the things that
bore the name of Orpheus, the comfortable rites of the mysteries, with
the doctrines that were implicit in them, and the poems which gave expres-
sion to the doctrines and supplied authority for the rites."7

1 As, for example, in Pindar's Second Olympian Ode, 11. 6a~o* (according to the
numbering in Christ's edition), and in the myth at the end of the Tenth Book of Plato's
Republic. If the inspiration of these passages was not Orphic, it must have been Pythago-
rean.

a The Indie conception of Karma has been noticed in V. v. 433-3.

3 If the philosophy of the Buddha was indeed the original source of these pre-
Alexandrine Hellenic notions, it had suffered lamentable spiritual damage en route, pox
instance, the perfect freedom of an Indie Nirvdna, which was the etherial goal of the
would-be arhat, had been jettisoned in favour of the sensuous delights of an Bgyptiac

+ Linforth, op. cit., p. 391. 5 Ibid., p. 396.

fi In V. v. 86. 7 Linforth, op* cit., p. 305,