What Orphicaeum Is

(Last Updated June 29, 2026)

My name is Tiberius Caelius Quadratus. To quote Kallímakhos of HellenicGods.org, “I am no-one special”. I, like many before me, went through a rough period in my life, during which I asked myself “Why am I here? What is this all for?”

While this was ongoing, I was rekindling my childhood love of Greek Mythology and my high-school infatuation with Philosophy. Now, as an adult, I am able to engage with the texts on a deeper level, and it is easier for me to more fully grasp the things being presented in them. (That’s not to say that I completely understand everything; no one ever can.)

Maybe this was the perfect storm. Whatever happened, I found purpose in it. I found myself constantly and consistently drawn to one specific thing: Orphism. Since then, I have been unable to step away and study anything else. One of the first things anyone will learn about Orphism is that scholarship is murky and nebulous; some scholars have very clear ideas of what it was, others have very clear ideas of what it never was, but no two scholars agree on the whole thing.

I do not come as a scholar per se, although at times I try to make my approach a scholarly one. I found Orphism only after seeking to learn about worshipping the Gods of ancient Greece. I don’t have anything to note of my education beyond a high-school diploma. I am self-taught on the scholarship of ancient Orphism. Scholarship, at any rate, seems to frequently neglect the believer’s perspective: for whatever reason, scholars are sometimes quick to raise and dismiss ‘unanswered questions’ or contradictions that, in the eyes of a believer, are easily reconciled or otherwise not unanswered. Thus, everything I write comes from my own perspective.

I have always been fascinated by a particular genre of internet-writing; the kind that begins like a normal personal essay but makes the synchronistic, broad-sweeping, As-Above-So-Below connections and assumptions that split the comments firmly into two camps of “this is utter gibberish” and “this absolutely changed my life”.

So I write from the position that it’s not strange to draw connections between what I believe and what happens around me. I write about how I see, find, and notice Orphism manifesting throughout the world in front of me, even (and maybe especially) in places where it’s obvious that this connection is unlikely or unprovable, because this is exactly how one experiences religion. I would argue that this isn’t a sign of a wandering mind’s reckless pattern matching, but simply one of the ways that the Divine interacts with the Human.

I have been blessed with, as Plato would say, “a babble of books”, and plenty of time to explore them. I know that not everyone has this luxury, and I am eternally grateful for it. I started Orphicaeum with a single goal in mind: to create a sort of Orphic Temple, a form of altar upon which I can place my devotion, and which can act as a beacon for others along a similar path.