On his return he fell in love with Eurydice, but on the day of their wedding she was bitten on the ankle by a snake and died. Half-blinded by grief, Orpheus descended into the Underworld. He was determined not to accept the new order of life and death, determined to win her back.
Death was now a terrible thing, no longer a welcome rest when the spirit recuperated and refreshed itself in preparation for its next incarnation. It was a painful separation from those you love.
Descending deeper and deeper, Orpheus encountered the grim old ferryman Charon, who at first refused to row him across the River Styx to the land of the dead. But Charon was charmed by the lyre, as was Cerberus, the three-headed dog whose job was to guard the way to the Underworld. Orpheus charmed, too, the terrible demons whose task was to tear from the spirits of the dead the unregenerate animal lusts and savage desires that still clung to them.
Finally, he reached the place where the King of the Underworld held his love captive. The King was not unequivocally charmed by Orpheus, because the release he granted was not unconditional. There was just one, small condition. Eurydice could return to the world of the living if Orpheus could lead her up there without ever once turning round to make sure she was following.
But of course Orpheus, at the last moment, as the sunlight hit his face, perhaps worried he was being tricked by the King, did turn round. He saw the love of his life suddenly pulled back down away from him, down the stone passageways, out of sight, fading into the Underworld like a wisp of smoke. The other, more muscle-bound heroes had succeeded in their quests by fighting the good fight to the limits of their strength and endurance, by being brave and never giving up. But times were changing. The great initiates who preserved this story for us wanted us to understand that Orpheus failed because he tried to do what every good hero had done — he tried to make sure.
It may also be that his music lost some of its charm, because it did not stop a band of maenads, the female followers of Dionysus, throwing themselves upon him and tearing him limb from bloody limb. They threw his head into the river, and it floated downstream, still singing. As it floated by, the weeping willows crowded the banks. Finally the head of Orpheus was rescued and set on an altar in a cave, where crowds came to consult it as an oracle.
IF CADMUS/ENOCH NAMED THE PLANETS and the stars, it was Orpheus who measured them, and by measuring them, invented numbers. There are eight notes in an octave, but in a sense really only seven, as the eighth always represents elevation to the next octave. The octaves, then, refer to ascent through the seven spheres of the solar system, which in antiquity were central to all thought and experience. By giving a system of notation, Orpheus was originating mathematics. Concepts could be manipulated, paving the way for the scientific understanding of the physical universe.
Orpheus is a transitional figure because on the one hand he is a magician with the power to move stones with music, but on the other he is a forerunner of science. Later we will see a similar ambiguity in many great scientists, even in modern times, but the other representative of the transition taking place at the time of Orpheus was Daedalus. (We know he was a contemporary because he was the keeper of the Minotaur, killed by Theseus, who joined in the quest for the Golden Fleece.)
Daedalus is famous for making wings out of wax and feathers to help him and his son, Icarus, to escape from Crete. He also designed the labyrinth and is credited with inventing the saw and the sail. So he was an inventor, an engineer, an architect in ways we would recognize today. He did not use magic.
If science was an innovation of the age, so too was magic. Magic was the application of a scientific way of thinking to the supernatural. In this age we no longer see the seemingly effortless shape shiftings of earlier ages or the turning of those who have offended into spiders, stags or plants. Instead we see Jason’s wife Medea and Circe, to whom Medea went for help, advice and magical protection. Circe and Medea had to work in order to achieve their supernatural effects, using potions, spells, incantations. If the invention of words and numbers enabled humans to begin to manipulate the natural world, it also gave them the idea of being able to manipulate the spirit world. Medea offered Jason a blood-red potion, made from the juice of the crocus, to soothe the dragon that guarded the Fleece. She used chants and sprigs of juniper to spray the dragon’s eyelids. She dealt in magic elixirs and knew the secrets of the snake-charmer.
As the material world continued to become denser and as the beings of the spirit worlds were increasingly squeezed out, even the lowest level of spirits, the nature spirits, the sylphs, dryads, naiads and gnomes, became elusive. They seemed to disappear into the streams, trees and rocks, fleeing the first light of dawn. But they still seemed tantalizingly close, and it was these spirits — then as now — that magicians found easier to manipulate.
Some magicians tried to bend the great gods to their will, too, to draw them down from the moon. The myths of the original werewolf, Lycaon, who prompted the flood of Deucalion, of Poseidon’s flooding of the Thracian plain, causing Athena to move her city to the present site of Athens, and of the terrible storms that pursued Medea wherever she went are depictions of the environmental catastrophes that were resulting from the practice of black magic.
At the end of this period humanity is sick and so, too, is nature.
Magicians drawing down the moon. Greek drawing.
ORPHEUS MIGHT HAVE FAILED BY THE standards of the conventional hero, but his influence on history was greater and more long-lasting than that of Hercules, Theseus and Jason. The music Orpheus originated would be a balm for healing the sick and troubled spirit of humanity down the millennia.
If people were becoming isolated not only from the gods but from one another, if they were worn down by an always harsh and sometimes hostile environment, and if their imaginations were infected by the perverse and bestial impulses of magic, all of this would now be countered by the aesthetic influence on the imagination, not only through music but also literature, painting and sculpture. Inspiring images of beauty, truth and love worked on humanity at a level below that of the conscious mind. They were more powerful than any explicit, abstract moral teaching.
Orpheus was the mythical founder of the Greek mysteries that would light up and inspire ancient Greece.
PERHAPS THE MOST POWERFUL ARTISTIC expression of the spiritual crisis at the end of the age of the heroes comes in the Bible.
In the written form it has come down to us, the story of Job is one of the later texts of the Old Testament, but in its origins it is one of the oldest parts.
Job was a good man, yet he lost all his money. His sons and daughters died. Left all alone he was covered with a plague of boils. Meanwhile, the wicked prospered. The story of Job has come down to us, not because he was a great leader or doer of great deeds, but because he was the first human being ever to think a very important and deeply true thought: ‘life is unfair’. Hercules had been the sport of the gods, but it was Job who cried out to the heavens in defiance. Unlike Hercules, Job had the language to do this.
Today we take it for granted that we have enough mental manoeuvrability to choose what to think about. However, before the invention of language, which was the great achievement of this age, this manoeuvrability would not have been possible.
Language enables us to distance ourselves from the world. It helps us to withdraw from what is physically present, and can enable us to break down experience, whether present or not, into bits we can manipulate. To some degree we can put experience into order as we wish.