The mythology, thanks to the gifted race's imagination and to its literary genius, became at once the source and inspiration of all that was most characteristic in the national life, and, accepted in its main lines wherever the race spread, the basis of whatever unity it possessed. But the effect of imaginative and artistic development was to humanise the gods until they became indistinguishable from creatures, and presently, for the intellectuals, little more than the playthings of the race's brilliant fantasy. When to the early poets there succeeded the first philosophers, and the later critical dramatic poetry, the inevitable antagonism between Greek religion and the Greek intelligence began to show rapidly. These were the Mystery Religions and the Orphic cults. He prepared himself for the event by ritual purification in the sea or in the appointed river, by fasts and special abstinences.
Orphic religion is at once a mystery and a philosophy.
Man is a being in whom there works a dual principle. From the Titans, from whose ashes he partly derives, he inherits a principle of evil. Whence the necessity for man to free himself from the evil element of his nature, so that what is divine in him may triumph. This emancipation is the object of the Orphic rites. These teachings, and the ceremonial effect of the mysteries' setting, made of the new movement a formidable rival to the futile formalism which preceded it.