"Orpheus and the swan" is a Platonic-inspired title, which refers to the episode of the metempsychosis into a swan of the soul of Orpheus told in the Republic. A hidden red thread, which runs through (both in the positive sense of reaching the knowledge of the celestial origin, and in the negative sense of escaping the unhappy wheel of rebirth) the essays, published and unpublished, gathered in this book. The deepening of themes related to Orpheus (shamanism, Dionysism, Pythagoreanism) and the movement that takes its name from him, and the examination of the Orphic re-proposal of traditional notions and formulas reinforce the idea that Orphism is an articulated but organic system of thought, a mosaic in which eschatology and theogony support each other, marking the passage from a theology of the Earth to a theology of Heaven. The path extends to the tendentially monogenetic character of Derveni's theogony, on which today's criticism is concentrated, and to the correspondence between the evolution of the cosmos and the fate of mankind, opening new perspectives to the definition of Orphic "faith".
