The Arrival of the Clients : Technologies of Fame and the Prehistory of Orphic Eschatology

• The present study makes an attempt to delineate the socio-economic foundations for a soteriological agenda seen to pre gure certain new modalities of religiosity in antiquity. Proceeding from focal doctrines of a so-called ‘Orphic’ eschatology, involving the promise of a happy afterlife incumbent on wealthy patrons-cum-initiates, it engages deeper layers of comparative evidence to demonstrate the means by which patron-client relationships in Archaic Greece, pre-Achaemenid Iran, and Vedic India contributed to the emergence of a religiosity distinct from that of public worship. Crucial attention is drawn to the names, gures, and mythological characterisation of Gr. Orpheus and the three Vedic Rbƒ hus (rb ̊ hú- [pl. rb ̊ hávaḥ]) as embodiments of the quintessentially itinerant sage in his etymological sense of being both ‘skil- ful’ and ‘changing allegiance’ (reflecting a late Proto-Indo-European noun or adjective*h3rbhéu£s [formed from a verb*h3érbh-, ‘change sides, change allegiance’]).

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Filosofi, etik och religion -- Religionshistoria (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Philosophy, Ethics and Religion -- History of Religions (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

History of Religion

religionshistoria

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

art (ämneskategori)