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Other members of society mentioned are Telestai ("service men") - used land granted by king, and for that they owed military service. Problem is that Linear B tablets in Pylos list Telestai as potter, etc, so maybe regular citizens. Other palaces, though, show Telestai in higher station. Palmer suggested that Telestai potter might have been master of royal pottery, etc, which would give them higher social station.

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During the Classical period the activity of the Orpheotelestai is confirmed. With the help of Dionysus these succeeded in releasing man from his past and in his rebirth. Part of the secret teaching must have been the worship of a dismembering, chthonic Dionysus, together with faith in life after death. It has been convincingly maitained that these notions came from the worship of Osiris in Egypt, with which the Greek world was specially acquainted after the middle of the 7th century B.C.

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Early Orphism tended to have few physical schools (perhaps only one) and to be represented by individual travelling initiators, Orpheotelestai, with no fixed ties to any place or community. They rejected animal sacrifices and were vegetarian, shunning any contact with flesh or blood. To 'lower people' they acted as healers, but tended to be aloof from them. Later Orphic religious communities began to emerge, with their ranks of Musaei, or teaching initiates. It's Mysteries were not overtly different from the orthodox Dionysian Mysteries. It retained it's method of initiation and tradition of orgiasm, but their practical purpose became one of transcendence, as in Buddhist Tantra.

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