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On Orphic Funerary & Burial Practices

or,

On the Gold Tablet Graves & Other Sites

Although Orphism centers on the fate of the Soul after death, its actual funerary practices are rarely discussed beyond the contexts in which the Gold Tablets or Derveni Papyrus were found. This essay examines what the conditions of those discoveries can tell us about Orphic practices regarding death itself.

The earliest-dated Orphica are the Bone Tablets of Olbia, from the 5th century BCE^[1]. Although these were not found in graves, they will set the stage for our investigation. The Bone Tablets contain Orphic symbolism, and they are often considered precursors to the Gold Tablets, which were more elaborate, more widespread geographically, and came later. The Bone Tablets also contain the earliest written proof of Orphics, with one tablet reading:

Life. Death. Life. Truth. Dio[nysus]. Orphics.^[2]

The city where those tablets were found, Olbia (on the north coast of the Black Sea), is one of the largest and best-known Greek colonies, founded in the 7th century BCE by settlers from Miletus^[3]. The Bone Tablets were all found within the central temenos or sacred precinct, which was approximately forty square meters, with a small building and altar dedicated to Zeus or Athena in the center, and a path leading away to a temple built in the 5th century BCE to Apollo Delphinios (although where specifically the tablets were found within all this is unclear)^[4]. There was also a Western temenos area, which had sanctuaries to Zeus, Hermes, the Dioscuri, Aphrodite, Apollo Iatros, and the Mother of the Gods^[5].

M.L. West says that the Orphic cult at Olbia was

not an open state cult in which all citizens took part at times fixed by the calendar. Nor was it merely a minor fringe cult. It was a prominent but circumscribed part of the town’s religious life, requiring an act of initiation from would-be participants, but accessible to all who wished to come, even non-Greeks. It attracted a significant following, and the public part of its ceremonies provided a spectacle. Its status is not really unlike that of the Eleusinian cult in Attica.^[6]

This tells us that Orphism was a recognized part of religious life in Olbia, but treated with a special reverence which implies a (negligible) level of exclusivity. West compares the cult to the Eleusinian Mysteries, which were similarly secret in content and open in participation around the same period of time. Continuing about the Bone Tablets, he says:

The little bone tablets scattered about the town seem to be connected with this cult. We may guess that they were membership tokens - bone chips symbolizing participation in common sacrifices. The graffiti are consistent with this. They tell us that the initiates rejoiced in specially revealed knowledge, ἀλήθεια, connected with the soul and with a life after death, and that they honored the name of the prophet Orpheus.^[7]

The Bone Tablets, then, are tokens to signify membership in the Orphic cult between citizens of Olbia. This cult was open to anyone who wanted to join, Greek or otherwise, although the cult was initiatory. Initiates enjoyed secret truths, and ceremonies not tied to the state festival calendar, although there were public elements. Deities important to the Olbians included Zeus, Athena, Apollo Delphinios, Apollo Iatros, Hermes, the Dioscuri, Aphrodite, and the Mother of the Gods. Although the Orphic Dionysus is often equated or related to many of these Gods, He is also included explicitly by mention on the Bone Tablets. The Bone Tablets are usually seen as being precursors to the Gold Tablets, which have some overlap in function.

The Gold Tablets are a group of roughly 40 small gold sheets, all found within graves or cemeteries. Each of them is inscribed with a message, though some are more elaborate than others. An unspecified number of tablets was found across fifteen graves at Pella/Dion, dated to the 4th century BCE. Each Tablet was inscribed with the deceased’s name and placed inside their mouth^[8]. Dion is notable as being where the Tomb of Orpheus was located, after it had been moved there from Libethra due to natural disaster, as told by Pausanias.

We can see already that the Gold Tablets are an evolution of the Olbian Bone Tablets. Although this particular group of tablets only bears the name of the deceased, we can infer from the Bone Tablets and from other Gold Tablets, some at the same site near Dion (which itself by that time was a major site for worship of Orpheus), that these were “membership tokens” to borrow a phrase from West. The Bone Tablets signified certain eschatological beliefs, such as that the true life is after death, seen in the Bone Tablet quoted above (Tablet A). Tablet B shows evidence of belief in a system of opposites, its inscription reading:

Peace. War. Truth. Lie. Dion[ysus].^[9]

Tablet C, the third and final Olbian Bone Tablet, is inscribed with only a few words, which suggest body/soul dualism (and by extension, further belief in a system of opposites at work):

Dio[nysus]. Truth. Body. Soul.^[10]

On the reverse of Bone Tablets B and C, we find a few symbolic drawings. The reverse of B has a long rectangle, divided into smaller compartments, each with a circle inside. Near that is, depending on how the tablet is oriented, either a strange inverse and crossed-out sigma^[11], Σ, or possibly iota-alpha-chi, ΙΑΧ, short for Iacchus, who was celebrated at the Eleusinian Mysteries and equated with Dionysus Zagreus. Anthi Chrysanthou argues that the 7 circles inside the 7-compartmented rectangle represent the 7 classical planets, or perhaps the Pleiades star cluster^[12].

If one orients the Tablet so that the inverse sigma can be read as shorthand for Iacchus, the rectangle becomes oriented so that the segments are on top of each other, like floors of a skyscraper. If they do represent the 7 classical planets, then in this orientation, they already resemble the concept of celestial spheres through which the Soul must ascend, and the Chain or Ladder of Being, all of which were further developed later.

Tablet C, if held in the same orientation, contains a drawing on the reverse that resembles a fleece draped over a folding chair^[13], which West says was likely an important part of initiation:

The simple stool was of great significance to the initiate in mystery cults. It was a typical feature of the initiation ceremony that he sat on a stool with his head veiled while purification took place. The parody scene in Aristophanes, Nub. 254, implies that the stool itself might have been called ἱερός [holy, sacred]. At Eleusis the seat was covered by a ram’s fleece, the Διὸς κώδιον [fleece of Zeus]. If the fleece also played a part in Bacchic initiation at Olbia, it would be appropriate to recall the ‘Orphic-Bacchic’ taboo on burial in woollen garments mentioned by Hdt. 2.81; Wool had sacral associations and was not to be taken to the grave.

We have examined Herodotus in previous essays, so we will gloss over him to instead find evidence of this taboo among the Gold Tablet gravesites. The excavation of the main tomb at Timpone Grande, where the Thurii tablets were found, contained a “very white shroud” which covered cremated remains. The shroud turned to dust when they touched it, but they assume that it was linen^[14], in-line with the taboo on wool.

That is not the only grave which gives an idea of clothing, though. There is one at Pella/Dion in which cremated bones are wrapped in a gold and purple cloth. These colors are usually associated with nobility, and by extension the Gods. It may seem at first glance like hubris to assume this status, but the Gold Tablets themselves show that the goal of an Orphic Soul’s ascent is to transcend being: “You have become a God now instead of a mortal”^[15]. In support of this idea, Gold Tablet graves at Lesbos, Elis, Pelinna, Methone, Europos, and Pydna all contain either diadems or wreaths, and at the site in Timpone Grande, the grave was at the bottom of eight strata of ashes, carbon, and burnt potsherds, suggesting that the deceased received continued worship there.

While it does not contain Gold Tablets or evidence of continued worship, one of the most elaborate gravesites is the one at Derveni. At that site were 3 simple cist graves, each of them were painted on the inside:

Tomb A had a garland of blue leaves and berries on a red ground, bordered by yellow and a blue band. The most colorful is Tomb B, where the lower half of the walls are painted red and decorated with a guilloche of branches with blue-red leaves and black berries (perhaps olive). The white plaster of Tomb Δ was decorated only with a blue band.^[16]

Derveni Tomb A belonged to a high-status individual, likely a solder, cremated on a pyre and then buried. On the remains of the funeral pyre in Tomb A is where the Derveni Papyrus was originally found. Tomb B was more carefully created than Tomb A^[17], and it contained an elaborate gilt bronze krater which held the remains of a man and a woman, likely relatives of the individual in Tomb A. Both Tombs A & B contained wreaths, jewelry, and various other grave goods. The krater in Tomb B is covered with Bacchic symbolism.

Although the Gold Tablet graves are mostly inhumation, the cremation of the Derveni graves echoes cremation of heroes in myth, and perhaps especially the apotheosis of Herakles on his funeral pyre. This, plus the elaborate grave goods at Derveni, including the papyrus and the krater, are evidence of the elevated status of the deceased, and even though there is not direct evidence of their worship, the Gold Tablets themselves suggests that the ultimate goal of Orphism is to realize one’s immortality, explicitly worded as becoming a God and evinced by the remains of continued worship at the Timpone Grande site.

The Bone Tablets and other inscriptions at Olbia suggest that these are not necessarily ‘new developments’, but they are evolutions of cosmological and eschatological beliefs explicitly linked to Orphism in the 5th century BCE but which can be traced further back to Milesian philosophy, such as the interaction of opposites.

In summary, Orphics are free to be inhumed or cremated, although the taboos present in an Orphic life should continue to be respected, for example initiates are not buried in or with wool. Membership tokens eventually evolved into instructions for navigating the afterlife, and as such, they came to be buried with initiates. In cases of cremation, the initiate may have been burned with sacred texts, as in the case of the Derveni Papyrus. In the cases where Gold Tablets are buried with cremated remains, they are placed on top of the remains inside the urn/krater. Initiates are buried with crowns, wreaths, and various Bacchic and Orphic symbols, with which the tombs themselves may also be decorated. Orphic initiates, due to the secret knowledge they possessed and the pure lives they lived, were thought amongst each other as having become Gods upon their deaths, as their Soul was now equipped to escape reincarnation. As such, some initiates even received continued worship.

To the Orphic, death is not the ultimate end, but instead a means to the true end, which is ascent to the Gods in realization of one’s own divinity.

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Works Cited

Betegh, Gábor. The Derveni Papyrus: Cosmology, Theology and Interpretation. Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Chrysanthou, Anthi. Defining Orphism: The Beliefs, the Teletae and the Writings. De Gruyter, 2020.

Graf, Fritz, and Sarah Iles Johnston. Ritual Texts for the Afterlife: Orpheus and the Bacchic Gold Tablets. Routledge, 2013.

West, M. L. “The Orphics of Olbia.” Zeitschrift Für Papyrologie Und Epigraphik, vol. 45, 1982, pp. 17–29. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20186193. Accessed 27 October 2025.

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Footnotes