For the magically minded ancient Greek, with his refined philosophical way of thinking, both the cold abyss of reason offered by Apollo and the hot abyss of madness, reflected in Dionysus, were equally unacceptable and the first who managed to balance these two abysses was the legendary Orpheus, who was married to Eurydice and, when she suddenly died from a snake bite, went after her to the kingdom of the dead. All the inhabitants of the Otherworld - the Dog of Hades Cerberus, the Erinyes, Persephone and Hades himself were conquered by the game of Orpheus. Hades promised Orpheus to return Eurydice to earth if he fulfilled his request - he would not look at his wife before entering his house. But Orpheus could not overcome the influx of feelings and turned around: Eurydice was drawn into the abyss, this time forever. Inconsolable, the singer wandered the earth, finding no peace. But soon death overtook him too. Orpheus did not respect Dionysus enough, considering Helios the greatest god, and the Angry Dionysus sent maenads to Orpheus. They tore Orpheus to pieces, scattering parts of his body everywhere

The followers of the religious teaching, the founder of which is considered Orpheus, became the Orphics, and the basis of Orphism is the secret, closed cult of Dionysus, which is significantly different and even opposed to the Olympic religion, including the traditional understanding of the role of the Olympian Dionysus. The cult of Dionysus in its original form was barbaric and in many ways repulsive. However, in the spiritualized form created by the Orphics, in their ascetic form, which replaced the physical with spiritual intoxication, it became one of the pillars of Greek philosophy. The intoxication sought by the Orphics is “enthusiasm,” union with god

According to the Orphics, man is also dual. There are two principles in it: the lower, bodily, titanic, and the higher, spiritual, Dionysian. In Orphism, Dionysism is Apollonized. If for Homer earthly life is preferable to the afterlife, then for the Orphics, on the contrary, life is suffering. The soul in the body is incomplete. The body is the tomb and prison of the soul. Therefore, the goal of life for an Orphic is the liberation of the soul from the body. This is not easy, since the soul is doomed to move from body to body. Such bodies, according to the Orphic hymns, can be the bodies of not only people, but animals and even insects and plants

It was precisely to get rid of the curse of endless rebirth that the numerous purificatory rites of the Orphics served, who sought to “purify”, partly through a purification ceremony, partly through the avoidance of defilement. The most devout of the Orphics abstained from animal food, the only exception being rituals (when food was taken sacramentally). Having freed itself from the wheel of rebirth, metempsychosis, the soul of a pious Orphic reaches the “islands of the blessed”, where it lives carefree and happily, without experiencing either physical or physical, no mental anguish