"The main purpose of the Orgia was to "purify" the believer’s soul, and so enable it to escape from the "wheel of birth," and it was for... this end that the Orphics were organised in communities. Religious associations must have been known to the Greeks from a fairly early date; but the oldest of these were based... in theory, on the tie of kindred blood. What was new was the institution of communities to which any one might be admitted by initiation. This was, in fact, the establishment of churches, though there is no evidence that these were connected... such... that we could rightly speak of them as a single church. The Pythagoreans came nearer to realising that."