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Orpheus was regarded in antiquity as the founder of mystery-religions; the first to reveal to men the meaning of rites of initiation (W.K.C. Guthrie). His father was Apollo (or Oeagrus, a Thracian river god) and his mother Calliope, the Muse of epic poetry. His magic power was his perfection of music – with his song and lyre, he “allured the trees, the savage animals, and even the insensate rocks, to follow him” (Ovid, Metamorphoses, 11). He is also one of the Greek heroes who visited and returned from the Underworld. He is chiefly regarded as a human figure – a prophet of Dionysus/Bacchus; however his story is so blended with mythology that is is impossible to say whether or not he ever truly existed....

Orpheus and Jesus Similarities

What distinguishes Orpheus from other pagan heroes is his meekness and humility:

The influence of Orpheus was always on the side of civilization and the arts of peace. In personal character he is never a hero in the modern sense. His outstanding quality is gentleness amounting at times to softness. (Guthrie, 40) (like Jesus)

Although Orpheus cannot be said to have resurrected or come back from the dead (at least not since the first time he did it, when rescuing Eurydice), we do of course have the curious prophecies of his disembodied talking head, which gave the bulk of his teachings after he’d been violently murdered.

Strikingly, Christianity has its own version of a miraculous talking head:

Herod’s stepdaughter, to whom the name Salome was later attributed, is said in Matthew 14:8 and Mark 6:25 to have asked him for John the Baptist’s head on a platter, and the presentation of his severed head often appears in art.

In medieval times it was rumored that The Knights Templar had possession of the talking head of St. John, and multiple records from their Inquisition in the early 1300s make reference to some form of head being worshiped by the Knights.

Most telling, of course, is the adoption of Orpheus by the Christians, which was only a continuation of a previous adoption by Jews.

It was easy to see in the characteristic picture of Orpheus not only a symbol of the Good Shepherd of the Christians (and we remember the Orphic bukoloi), but also parallels to the lore of the Old Testament. It too had, in the person of David, its magical musician playing among sheep and the wild beasts of the wilderness, and the resemblance did not pass unnoticed. (Guthrie, 264)

“As an allegory, the pagan story even found its way into early Christan iconography. In the catacombs of Jerusalem, for example, Jesus was depicted in the guise of Orpheus with the lyre. In some later Christian tombs, Orpheus is shown delivering the Sermon on the Mount or acting as “the Good Shepherd” (C. Scott Littleton, Gods, goddesses, and mythology, Volume 5, 1058)

The Christian apologists on the whole regard Orpheus with anger and contempt, as an imposter. They were certainly not willing pupils. He appears mostly as the champion of polytheism and superstition. Yet the passage of Justin, of which a part was quoted in the previous passage, shows that the similarity was noticed in his time between the myth of Dionysus and the story of the Christ sufficiently close to constitute a danger and necessitate a warnings against confusion between these two representations of a suffering son of God. (Apo.1;54 – Dionysus and Jesus) Guthrie266

Cyril against Julian “Of Orpheus son of Oiagros they say that he was the most superstitious of men, and that he anticipated the poetry of Homer, that is to say that he was older than him in time, and that he made up songs and hymns to the false gods and obtained no mean glory thereby; that then he condemned his own teaching, realizing that he had wellnigh left the highway and wandered from the true road, and turned to better things and chose truth instead of falsehood and spoke thus about God… (Shows what a serious threat Orpheus was…and how powerful to make him an ally)Guthrie 256

A final bit of interesting trivia is Orpheus’ personal antagonism towards women, and their resentment of it leading to his violent death, which was used to justify sexist cultural practices. Women were banned from Orphic mysteries (although apparently not from the rites of Dionysus…)

Similarly the practice of tattooing among Thracian women was said to be the punishment inflicted on them by their husbands for the murder of Orpheus. To Plutarch indeed it does occur to protract the punishment thus far shows a certain lack of proportion: ‘we can find no praise for the Thracians, that they brand their wives to this day to avenge Orpheus’. (Guthrie, 50)

Thus, we have women being blamed and punished for a mythological event; not unlike Christianity’s subordination of women – ‘the weaker sex’ – for Eve’s fall and the temptation of Adam. (To carry the theme further, we can argue a mythical parallel between Eve, falling into sin and Adam following after her – into Sin and Death – with Orpheus pursuit of Eurydice into the Underworld.

OΡΦEOC BAKKIKOC: A Brief Summary in English

Two years after the German archaeologist Eduard Gerhard died in 1867, this item was donated to the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum (now the Bode Museum). Originally it came from Italy. In 1904 the item became part of a permanent exhibition and was there up until World War II, when for some unknown reason it disappeared from the exhibition and has since then been missing. The story and the background are depicted in part 1.

I am not sure that the stone is genuine, but I have long suspected that it is genuine. Now that I have investigated the reasons for why it should be a forgery, I am even more inclined to think that it after all is genuine. It seems like the fundamental reason for the forgery proponents to discard it as a forgery is that they believe that it depicts Jesus; and then they say that Jesus was not depicted that way in ancient time (which is not entirely correct). But why should we believe that the crucified figure is Jesus, when the inscription says something else?...

The engraving shows the crucified Christ hanging on a cross, the astro-mystical interpretation of which is made evident by the superposition of the crescent and the seven stars; most probably the Pleiads or "Lyre of Orpheus," are meant. Then the cross itself is probably to be identified with the [cruciform stars], the main stars of Orion, whom the ancients...sometimes held to be the constellation of Dionysos. The inscription "Orpheus Bakkikos" is intended to identify the crucified Messiah with the "Orpheus" of the Bacchic mysteries. The ring-stone, which certainly belonged to an Orphic initiate, who had turned Christian without giving up completely his old religious beliefs, is attributed to the 3rd or 4th century A.D. It cannot be much earlier in any case considering the late introduction of the crucifixus type into Christian art.