To Descend into Oblivion: The Landscape of the Underworld, Identity, and Escape from Reincarnation in the Orphic Tablets

The inscribed golden leaves known as the Orphic tablets contain remarkably clear and concrete instructions for its owners, to be carried out after death in the Underworld. While the tablets have been studied extensively from a literary perspective and in the context of the experiences of the living, their role in describing a physical geography of the afterlife is woefully understudied. This paper shows that the tablets’ owners saw the Greek Underworld as a real place, in which certain physical actions were to be carried out in order to avoid the oblivion of death and rebirth. It connects Orphic views on life, death, memory, and identity to the geography of the Orphic conception of the Underworld, and shows that these themes were intricately linked after death. Careful narrative analysis of the texts contained in the tablets shows that physical manipulation of the mythical landscape of the Underworld allowed one to retain their identity instead of being lost to post-mortem oblivion. In line with the Orphic belief system, this was crucial to the escape of the cycle of death and rebirth caused by the events of Orphism’s core narrative, the Zagreus myth. This paper thus highlights the perceived reality and urgency of the Underworld for the ancient Greeks, instead of relegating it to the realm of myths which only hold relevance in the context of pre-mortem experiences.