Anthi Chrysanthou, Defining Orphism: the Beliefs, the Teletae and the Writings
In a pottery fragment from an Attic red-figure Kalpis in Malibu (c.480 B.C.) a sun-struck satyr is represented looking at the sky and hiding his face from the sunlight, while next to him there is the inscription ΔΥΕΛΙΟ (δυ΄ἥλιο), which means two suns. This also brings to mind the double vision of Pentheus in Euripides’ Bacchae when under frenzy he says: ‘I see two suns’ to which Dionysos replies ‘Now, you see what you should’. Typically, it would be Apollo who would be identified with the sun but we often see Dionysos and Apollo to be perceived as one, as was also discussed earlier in this chapter in relation to the Delphic rites. Aeschylus refers to Apollo as: ὁ κισσεὺς Ἀπόλλων, ὁ βακχεύς, ὁ μάντις (‘Apollo, the ivy-crowned, the reveller, the seer’) and Euripides says: δέσποτα φιλόδαφνε Βάκχε, παιὰν Ἄπολλον εὔλυρε (‘Lord Bacchus who loves the laurel, Paean Apollo skilled with the lyre…’) It might be, thus, that the two suns that were related to Dionysiac beliefs and mysteries were a nocturnal ‘sun’ and the actual sun. A deity such as Apollo represented through an Orphic heliadic deity such as Protogonos/Phanes could personify the actual sun (creative light/present life) and Dionysos/Zagreus could represent the eschatological nocturnal ‘sun’ (death/afterlife). […] If we were right earlier in our astronomical interpretation, this nocturnal sun represented by the mystic light could in reality be the Auriga star, the point of contact between the Charioteer constellation and the Taurus constellation. This would explain why the ‘good ones’ according to Pindar enjoy the sun during the night, too, in the afterlife. A katabatic mystery, then, where the initiates would follow the mystic light to ascend into the light and the meadows from the darkness might have represented the journey of the soul from the underworld on a ‘chariot’ – much like the one mentioned by Plato – to become a star in the sky and dwell with the gods at the blessed meadows, where the Taurus constellation is situated in the Milky Way.