221; (Rohde 342). To free the soul from the process of reincarnation and eternal misery, the soul must follow the ordinances of salvation with perfect obedience. In the Orphic mysteries, this salvation is granted directly from Dionysos himself.Pythagoreans adopted many similar if not identical beliefs on transmigration and reincarnation as the mystery cults. “The whole religious side of this movement, which included an elaborate cycle of rebirths, cannot be separated from that adopted by Pythagoras, and to make the attempt would probably be unhistorical. The Pythagoreans not only used the religious books promulgated under the ancient name of Orpheus: prominent members of the school were named in later antiquity as the authors of some of them, and the tradition ascribing some to Pythagoras himself goes back, as we have already noted, to the fifth century B.C.” (Guthrie 198). Pythagoras believed that “the present life is a sojourn, a temporary stage in a long pilgrimage; and the body (soma)was likened to a tomb (sema) in which they held that the soul has to live out a sort of shadow-life, a half-life, which is more nearly death than it is life” (Wheelwright 209). Pythagoreans were life-long abstainers from animal flesh just like the followers of the Orphic mysteries. The only time the Pythagoreans tasted meat was during ceremonial offerings to the gods. Pythagoreans strongly stressed the kinship of all life. “Since then all animals are our kin-if it is clear that, as Pythagoras said, they have the same soul-the man who does not keep his hand off his own relatives is rightly condemned as unholy” (Guthrie 195). Pythagoras recognized that (because of his belief in reincarnation) all learning in the present life is recollection from past lives, and so the Pythagoreans believed that truths are already in us waiting to be stirred up. Th...
