Philosophicoreligious Sects

Detienne’s term for the Orphic-Pythagorean initiatory circles at the margins of polis religion — the “philosophicoreligious sects” whose private salvific practice occupies the ground between archaic civic cult and the philosophical interiorization that will succeed them. “According to the dichotomatic view of the philosophicoreli­gious sects, earthly life was corrupted by time, which was syn­onymous with death and oblivion. Man was cast into the world of Lēthē, where he wandered in the meadow of ate” (Detienne 1996).

The sects elaborated “a technique of salvation that constituted a rule for living, a ‘recipe for sanctity’” — a psychophysiological practice aimed, through cataleptic experience, at transcending human time and purging the soul of oblivion (Detienne 1996). The gold tablets buried with initiates prescribe the otherworld path: past the spring of Lēthē on the left, to the spring of mnemosyne on the right, where the elect drink the waters of memory. The ritual geography replicates the Trophonios oracle, where the suppliant is washed by the “two Hermes” and led past both springs before descending — “the water from the first spring obliterated the memory of human life, while the water from the second allowed the individual to remember everything he saw and heard in the otherworld” (Detienne 1996).

For the Lineage, these sects are the classical substrate of the interior-turn: the moment at which salvation becomes a private, memorial, psychophysiological work rather than a civic ritual. They stand beside katabasis and nekyia as the ancient prototype of what Jungian depth work recovers — a descent into the underworld, a rescue from oblivion, a remembering of what the meadow of ate threatens to erase.

Relationships

• aletheia-archaic
• mnemosyne
• ate
• katabasis
• nekyia
• initiation
• interior-turn

Primary sources

• detienne-masters-truth-archaic (Detienne 1996)