Mark F McClay

This article argues that claims of divine kinship play a central role in the Bacchic gold tablets of the late classical period. While many scholars have interpreted these tablets in reference to the Orphic Zagreus myth, I contend that key details of their texts are better understood as asser- tions of a familial link with the gods that assured postmortem happiness. The tablets develop the Hesiodic idea of human-divine fellowship, expanding this theme to include claims of iden- tity or kinship with the gods through a variety of narrative strategies. This aspect of the tablets finds a parallel in Empedocles, who (under Orphic-Pythagorean influence) elaborates traditional human-divine fellowship into a claim that humans are exiled gods who can hope to rejoin divine society. Following this interpretive approach, I suggest that the puzzling expression “I/you fell into milk” in some tablets expresses a symbolic relation to the gods via divine breast milk. 

This article reconsiders the historical and typological relation between Greek maturation rituals and Greek mystery religion. Particular attention is given to the word κλεινός (‘illustrious’) and its ritual uses in two roughly contemporary Late Classical sources: an Orphic-Bacchic funerary gold leaf from Hipponion in Magna Graecia and Ephorus’ account of a Cretan pederastic age-transition rite. In both contexts, κλεινός marks an elevated status conferred by initiation. (This usage finds antecedents in Alcman's Partheneia.) Without positing direct development between puberty rites and mysteries, the article argues on the basis of shared vocabulary and other ritual elements that age-transitions influenced the ideology of mystery cults. It is further claimed that puberty rites and mysteries performed similar functions in their respective social contexts, despite obvious differences of prestige and visibility. Age-transition rites have been analysed in Bourdieu's terms as ‘rites of institution’, in which young elites were publicly affirmed in civic roles: private mysteries can be described in analogous but opposed terms as rites of ‘counter-institution’, in which familiar ritual language and symbols of elite status were used to construct an alternative ‘imagined community’ of mystery initiates.