Our chief concern with the Orphics here is that they seem to have introduced among the Greeks the idea that the soul of man was divine, was a [Greek: daimôn] which had fallen, and for its punishment was imprisoned in the body as in a tomb. In its corporeal cell it was condemned to suffer defilement until released by death, when it passed to Hades. Its lot there depended on its life on earth. As an Orphic fragment says: “They who are righteous beneath the rays of the sun, when they die, have a gentler lot in a fair meadow by deep flowing Acheron.... But they who have worked wrong and insolence under the rays of the sun are led down beneath Cocytus’s watery plain into chill Tartarus.”[8] The soul’s sojourn in Hades therefore was a time of punishment and of purification, even as life itself was a penance for sin. According to a common belief, at least in Plato’s day, after a thousand years the soul entered a new incarnation, and so on through ten rounds of earth and Hades, until at last, freed from sin and earthly dross by faithful observance of a holy life on earth and by the purification which it underwent below, it returned to its divine abode; but those who persisted in sin were condemned to all the punishments which man’s imagination could devise; the wicked were doomed to lie in mud and filth, while evil demons rent their vitals. Indeed the horrors which the medieval Christian loved to depict in order to terrify the wicked and to rejoice the faithful, were first devised by the Orphics and their heirs, for exactly the same purpose. But what bases did the Orphics find for their belief in the divine nature of the soul? In their mythology they had said that man was created out of the ashes of the Titans in which a spark of Dionysus still remained. But in fact they seem to have rested on faith or intuition, without working out clearly a philosophic answer. They were indeed deeply conscious of man’s dual nature; they perceived that on the one hand he is pulled by his baser instincts and desires, which they naturally attributed to the body, and that on the other hand he is prompted by nobler aspirations, which they assigned to his soul. This higher part of man’s dual self was, for them, the Dionysiac element in him. And man’s moral obligation they held to be to free this divine element from the clogging weight of the body, to cease to “blind his soul with clay.” So far as we are aware, the Orphics were the first among the Greeks to make the divinity of the soul a motive for the religious life, and perhaps the first to see that, if the soul is divine, it may naturally be regarded as eternally so, and therefore as immortal. What more momentous thoughts as to the soul’s nature and its destiny could any sect have introduced than these? They were shared by their contemporaries, the Pythagoreans; in fact it is hard to say with certainty which sect developed these concepts first.[9]