Opening the imagination - expressing the heart

Just how credible could it be to assert the identity of these 'Apollonian' writings with the preserved 'Golden Verses' attributed to Lysis? Perhaps the sage of Tyana wrote them from memory in the cave of Trophonius, and subsequent readers altered his words trying to wrest some sense from his mixture of obscurity and dialectical Greek.

The very title 'Golden Verses','Golden Leaves' etc. connects these utterances not just with magic, but with the cult of the dead in ancient Orphism with which so much pythagorean religion was suffused. Thin leaves of gold discovered at Thurii and dating from around the time of Plato bear inscriptions identifying them with Orphic-pythagorean cult. In them the soul of the departed begs Persephone and the company of infernal gods for entry, claiming "..1 too am of you blessed race.." and that "..1 have paid the penalty for deeds unrighteous..". The 'penalty' is the previous incarnated life, incurred by the soul in the otherworld. Another gold leaf proclaims; ".. I have flown out from the circle of heavy grief, and stepped swift-footed upon the circle of joy..". The earliest surviving references to the divine Orpheus in Attic literature contain allusions to spells and incantations "..written down in the Thracian inscriptions of golden voiced Orpheus.." (Euripides, , Alcestis' I. 967). The oracle delivered by Apollonius of Tyana to his doubting pupil regarding the souls escape from the bonds of matter, "..the spell of harsh and painful servitude..", has a distict echo in the verses of the 'Chaldaean Oracles', the pythagorean 'Golden Verses' as well as in these Orphic gold lamellae: "..Blessed and fortunate one! thou shalt be god instead of mortal..".Similar gold plates have been found in tombs from the second to the fourth centuries B.C. at sites ranging from Lipari in Crete, to Sybaris in southern Italy.

These gold plates are not, however the earliest surviving fragments of Orphic-pythagorean cult; a sixth century B.C. Greek colony established at Olbia, situated at the mouth of the river Bug on the Black sea, yielded up to the Soviet archaeologists a small group of rectangular bone plates about two and a half inches long, bearing crude inscriptions and designs variously interpreted as musical instruments or offering tables. A group of three such bone tablets discovered in 1951 bear inscriptions pointing to their Dionysiac-Orphic character:

A[ athanatos?].. "

The rudely scratched letters on these flat bone tokens to the Underworld speak volumes to one aquainted with Dionysiac- Orphic cult: born into life, passing through initiatory death, re-entering life as a devotee of the great god Dionysus, and finally the cryptic final letter ' A ' perhaps for the Greek 'athanatos': 'undying', 'immortal'.

The transformations of life into life, through mystic death and rebirth to everlasting divinity were enjoyed by many long before the days of Apollonius of Tyana. As the Orphics held their souls to be born again in Dionysus, as the theurgists and Neoplatonists claimed divine participation in the natures of particular powers, so Apollonius is credited with heavenly ancestry. Just prior to his birth, the god Proteus appeared to Apollonius' mother in the guise of an "Egyptian daemon", when his mother enquired what sort of child she would bear Proteus simply said "Myself'. No fitter parentage could have been found for the sage who valued foreknowledge above all abilities than the god

"..who knows what is now, what was before, and what will be in the future.."

(Orpheus' Hymn to Proteus)

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