While the myth of Orpheus, the musician whose song could overcome death itself, is well-known, the details of the cult that bore his name remain a mystery. Two major relics remain from this esoteric religion: the Orphic Hymns, including paeans to more than eighty different gods; and a collection of small gold pendants, many of them leaf-shaped, found on the corpses of the cult’s initiates. The words Theo recites in the Underworld are based on actual translations of these “Orphic gold tablets,” which were inscribed with instructions for the afterlife and passwords that would allow initiates to proceed past the guardians at the Lake of Memory. For the best modern version of the poetry that both Theo and Selene recite in rough fragments throughout the book, see The Orphic Hymns, translated by Apostolos N. Athanassakis and Benjamin M. Wolkow.
In the Classical period, Orphism bore a close relation to the cult of Dionysus, the God of Wine. The god’s epithet “Releaser”—assumed by many to refer to drunken revelry—may have meant something different to Orphic initiates, who believed Dionysus could release them from the miseries of the afterlife. The exact connection between the two cults remains unclear; I’ve attempted to explain it through the oft-told myth of the rescue of Dionysus’s mother from the Underworld. The sacred eating of raw meat, a famously Dionysian practice, was disdained by early Christians, but some scholars believe it may have influenced their conception of the Eucharist nonetheless.
Orphism’s relationship to Mithraism also eludes easy description. Statues of a lion-headed god have been found in several mithraea, and many of his attributes mirror those of the Orphic Protogonos, sometimes known as Aion. Professor David Ulansey, whose work inspired the astronomical components of Winter of the Gods, has written extensively on the possible meanings of this Mithraic lion-headed figure. For more, see his website, mysterium.com.
Followers of the ancient mathematician Pythagoras, possibly influenced by Orphic concepts of the afterlife, believed mankind could transcend mortality by uncovering the mathematical patterns that underlie the universe. The discovery of the tetractys and the harmonic ratios, as Theo explains in Chapter Two, were essential to this Pythagorean philosophy, and still influence our vision of the world today.
We will never know the true extent of Christianity’s relationship to Mithraism. Scholars who believe that Christianity borrowed heavily from Mithraism point to the origins of Saint Paul, the man most often credited with first teaching that Jesus was no mere prophet, but rather the divine son of God. Paul—originally named Saul—hailed from Tarsus, a city widely considered a key conduit for Mithraism’s spread from Persia to Rome. Paul’s prior knowledge of Mithras, one of the earliest gods concerned with man’s individual salvation, may have influenced the apostle’s belief in a divine Jesus as the one true path to heaven.
The Magna Mater’s Phrygianum, the site of the bloody taurobolium rituals, once stood in what is today Vatican City. My description of its interior, however, is completely fictional—no remnants of the building remain beyond a few ancient inscriptions mentioning its existence. The meridian line and the necropolis beneath Saint Peter’s Basilica are real, but the secret passages and the underground mithraeum, sadly, are not. If you’re interested in seeing the excavated necropolis, however (including its Jesus-as-Sol-Invictus mosaic), check out the virtual tour on the Vatican’s website, vatican.va.
Statues of Ephesian Artemis, complete with her temple crown and necklace of bull’s testicles, exist in museums throughout the world, but my favorites reside in the museum at the Ephesus archeological site. To my eyes, they bear a striking resemblance to the statues of Jesus’s mother in the nearby House of the Virgin Mary. The ancient city of Ephesus, where the Church declared Mary divine in the fifth century, is remarkably well-preserved, although the great Temple of Artemis is now little more than a single column surrounded by marshland. Still, it is fully worth traveling all the way to Turkey to walk through the city that once worshiped Artemis above all other goddesses. For photos of Ephesus, Brauron, Rome, Delphi, Athens, the cave in Crete, an ancient hydraulis, and more, visit my website, jordannamaxbrodsky.com.
Minh Loi’s explanation of the music of the Big Bang is based on the work of several scientists, most notably Mark Whittle from the University of Virginia. His excellent and very readable website, Big Bang Acoustics: Sounds from the Newborn Universe, served as the inspiration for much of this book’s climax and includes audio files of the sounds themselves. It does not, however, recommend playing the music on the cables of the Brooklyn Bridge. But lest you think such a thing impossible, watch Di Mainstone’s astounding musical performance project at humanharp.org.
As for Mount Olympus, the hike to the summit takes most people two days. The journey up begins with gentle wildflowers and ends with a brutally steep climb across a barren scree field to a final near-vertical ascent. The clouds roll in nearly every afternoon, bringing thunderstorms and bitter chill even when the valley below remains swelteringly hot. It’s easy to see why the ancients imagined Olympus as the home of Zeus, lord of storms and sky. While sprinting down from the summit, thunder rolling off the mountaintop, hail pounding my skull, and fierce winds tearing at my emergency poncho, I fully believed it myself.
Jordanna Max Brodsky
April 2017
New York, New York