Religion and Philosophy from Plato's Phaedo to the Chaldaean Oracles

Abstract

A FEW YEARS AGO another of the so-called Orphic tablets was found? Like the previously known ones ~ it is an instruction for the deceased--it tells h im what he will find in the beyond and how he is to act to secure for himself a blessed afterlife. As a rule the tablets differ somewhat in their wording and the newly found is particularly remarkable in that the deceased, when asked by the guards of the Spring of Memory what his business here is, is instructed to answer, I am a child of the Earth and o~octvo~5 ~aveOo~v~og ~ and m y n a m e is A s t e r i o s . ''~ Now, it is generally recognized that the tablets are the product of some mystery religion? The new tablet suggests that part of its initiation ceremony might have been the experience of a mock death and a mock rebirth, the latter symbolized by the assuming of a new name?