It is the
finer, mystical sentiment of the few, detached from the coarser and
more material religion of the many, and accompanying it, through the
course of its history, as its ethereal, less palpable, life-giving
soul, and, as always happens, seeking the quiet, and not too anxious
to make itself felt by others. With some unfixed, though real, place
in the general scheme of Greek religion, this phase of the worship of
Dionysus had its special development in the Orphic literature and
mysteries. Obscure as are those followers of the mystical Orpheus,
we yet certainly see them, moving, and playing their part, in the
later ages of Greek religion. Old friends with new faces, though
they had, as Plato witnesses, their less worthy aspect, in certain
appeals to vulgar, superstitious fears, they seem to have been not
without the charm of a real and inward religious beauty, with their
neologies, their new readings of old legends, their sense of mystical
second meanings, as they refined upon themes grown too familiar, and
linked, in a sophisticated age, the new to the old. In this respect,
we may perhaps liken them to the mendicant orders in the Middle Ages,
with their florid, romantic theology, beyond the bounds of orthodox
tradition, giving so much new matter to art and poetry.
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