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| Cosmogony of Orpheus.
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Chapter
XXX.—Cosmogony of Orpheus.
“All the literature among the Greeks which
is written on the subject of the origin of antiquity, is based upon
many authorities, but especially two, Orpheus and Hesiod.868
| 868 [Comp. chaps.
17–19 and Homily VI. 3–10, 12–19.—R.] | Now their writings are divided
into two parts, in respect of their meaning,—that is the literal
and the allegorical; and the vulgar crowd has flocked to the literal,
but all the eloquence of the philosophers and learned men is expended
in admiration of the allegorical. It is Orpheus, then, who says
that at first there was chaos, eternal, unbounded, unproduced, and that
from it all things were made. He says that this chaos was neither
darkness nor light, neither moist nor dry, neither hot nor cold, but
that it was all things mixed together, and was always one unformed
mass; yet that at length, as it were after the manner of a huge egg, it
brought forth and produced from itself a certain double form, which had
been wrought through immense periods of time, and which they call
masculo-feminine, a form concrete from the contrary admixture of such
diversity; and that this is the principle of all things, which came of
pure matter, and which, coming forth, effected a separation of the four
elements, and made heaven of the two elements which are first, fire
and air, and earth of the others, earth and water; and of
these he says that all things now are born and produced by a mutual
participation of them. So far Orpheus.
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