The Orphic Gold Tablets: "The Longed-For Crown"

I return now to my overview/commentary on Instructions for the Netherworld: The Orphic Gold Tablets by Alberto Bernabé and Ana Isabel Jiménez San Cristóbal (Brill: 2008). If you missed my first few posts on this topic, you can see them here: First, Second, Third, and Fourth.

One of the key features of the inscriptions found on these gold plates is the expression of the desire of the deceased to obtain a crown at the end of their long journey in the Netherworld.  On one tablet we find this phrase, a form of which is common to many of the inscriptions:

I launched myself with agile feet after the longed-for crown. ((From L 9, 6 as cited in Bernabé and San Cristóbal, p. 121))

The Greek term used here is στεφανος (stéphanos), which is commonly translated as “crown”.  Interestingly, although I would have thought the answer would be quite straightforward, scholars have debated what kind of crown we are dealing with here, and what its meaning is in the religious context of these texts (p. 122). A number of theories have been offered:

• That the “crown” was a given place in the Netherworld that the deceased was trying to reach. Because stéphanos can mean “a crown of fortifications”, the theory was that the term was used to refer to some sort of fence that encircled the kingdom of Persephone, or the dwelling of the blessed. This theory is improbable due to the lack of any description of such a fence in any Orphic or Greek myths.
• Another similar theory is that crown refers to a cycle or “orbit” that the deceased enters into after death — an astral cycle as opposed to the earthly cycle of life that one must endure until freed from it by following the correct path in the afterlife.  This theory, however, is also unacceptable because there is no mention anywhere in the tablets of an astral or heavenly part of the afterlife experience–it all takes place in the Underworld of the Earth itself.
• The third theory mentioned is perhaps the simplest, but most logical: that the term crown should be taken literally to mean a physical crown that is placed on the head.  There is much precedence in Greek culture and religion for the use of crowns, both for the living and for the dead.

It is this third theory that the authors argue for and which we will discuss here.  In Greek culture, literal/physical crowns were used in banquets, funerary rites, triumph in athletic competitions, certain rituals, and in many mystical symbols (p. 123).