Orpheus occupied one of four great seats of learning in ancient Egypt. He brought the Indian Mysteries of Initiation to Greece, nine millennia before Homer and Hesiod. Pythagoras was initiated to the Orphic Mysteries and Plato received a perfect knowledge of them.

H.P. Blavatsky explains:

1. How the Orphic Mysteries were disfigured by the exoteric rites of Bacchus. Dionysos is god Dis from Mount Nys in India. Bacchus, crowned with kissos or ivy, is Krishna. Orpheus is orphnos or a tawny-coloured Hindu.

2. And why Initiates were persecuted, tortured, exiled, executed, murdered.

Orpheus-Enoch is the possessor of the phorminx, the 7-stringed lyre. He is one of seven Primordial Creators, a branch of the Tree of Salvation grown out of One Seed. He called Nature “resourceful Mother,” and taught the “god-given” doctrine of the seven “Star-Regents” of the Unknown to Grecian philosophers. He also taught how to affect a whole audience by means of a lodestone. He even imparted the art of oömancy.