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Eurydice (yoo RID i see) is the author's real name, also her grandmother's name, and her grandmother's grandmother's name, as per the Greek family tradition of naming. It means "Universal Dike," "Universal Chance," "Universal Justice," "Expansive Fairness," "Mistress of Universal Justice," "Mother of Fate." EU at the beginning of any word means 'good, fair.'
The best-known Greek Eurydice stars in the prototypical story of Undying Love.
Eurydice was the beloved wife of Orpheus, a famous musician and poet demigod, who, fleeing the amorous advances of Aristaeus or Pan, stepped on a poisonous snake and died; Orpheus, struck by unbearable loss and grief, played his lyre with such sadness that the sun refused to come out and the rocks began to melt and humans and animals stopped what they were doing and stood still, heartbroken, and even the queen of the underworld, Persephone, wife of Hades (the Romans' Pluto), was so moved that she invited Orpheus to come to Hades and take Eurydice back. So Eurydice would be "the only mortal allowed a second chance, the first mortal who would come back from the world of the dead to tell us about it." The only condition was that he should not look at her until she was back in the world of the living because he was not allowed to behold her in her underworld aspect. On the journey back, he could hear her following close behind him. Orpheus failed in his task at the last minute, after he had crossed the river Styx that separates the world of the living from the world of the dead, just as she was about to cross over as well, when he could not control his longing and desire for her and turned back and looked at her a moment too soon. He only had the time to see her shadow wave goodbye to him before she disappeared. After that he became a mystic, and a semi-god. He died a gruesome death, martyred in the hands of maenads in Thrace who, in the frenzy of religious Bacchic ecstasy, attacked him and tore him from limb to limb and threw his body parts into the Aegean Sea. Some versions say he was torn apart by maenads avenging the second death of Eurydice, but most versions say he was dismembered by maenads on Dionysus' orders after Orpheus rejected the cult of Dionysus and established his own cult. His lyre and head were washed up at the shores of the island of Lesbos.
The Eurydice myth climaxes in the underworld, at the crossroads between desire, rhetoric, and death. In one version, Orpheus and Eurydice have a long conversation in Hades, in the dark, before she is persuaded to follow him back. He hears her but he cannot see her. Timeless, stateless, permanently abject, this new scene for the hero is the border of his magic. The same passion that has driven him underground-"love is not mortal"--now insures his mission's failure, and that failure insures the success of the myth, its requisite moral-that nobody comes back. The underworld is quiet and solemn, as befits the meeting of legendary lovers, informed only by mystery, which the hero identifies with death and violation. Eurydice feels differently. Her answer stuns him. She reminds him that no one who visited the Underworld ever returned happy. She's made peace with her fate. Surely she wouldn't undo the future they might yet have for the sake of an abstract timelessness? Where Orpheus sees this as sexual loss, she senses in this blissful moment of cross-world contact the possibility to perpetuate their passion. Her initial wise decision not to follow him--which his involuntary gaze eventually confirms--extends their sexual desire into eternity. So long as there is no conclusion, no Orgasm, there can be no end. Eurydice is convinced to change her mind and join him when he misreads her view as proof that she doesn't love him equally. Orpheus enters the underworld as a grieving property owner, and returns to the light as a legend, whose love story bears what the quotidian life could never offer: duration. He remains celibate for the rest of his short, full life and is worshipped even before his death. He finds that he can perform miracle cures, speak in prophecies, help and protect others.
Orpheus (OR fi us) was the son of Apollo--god of music, poetry, sunlight, and prophecy--and the Muse Calliope (the muse of epic poetry). He was the greatest of all musicians in Greek mythology, as well as a lyrist and poet. He was beloved of Apollo, who presented him with a wondrous lyre. He also became a devotee of Dionysus who taught him the mysteries. Orpheus became such a master of the lyre that his playing enchanted every living thing. His music not only soothed the savage breast, and tamed the wildest of beasts, but moved all of inanimate nature as well. Rivers silenced their flowing, trees bent, and mountains moved gently in his direction-so they could hear it better. Through the magical power of his music, rivers changed their courses, trees and beasts followed him enraptured, stones arranged themselves around him in a circle, and no mortal, divine, or natural force was immune to his art.
As a young man, before his marriage, Orpheus joined the crew of the Argo and, after Jason, was the most important of the Argonauts-the most impressive heroes of ancient Greece, including Heracles/Hercules--because his playing was often all that kept the fractious crew from attacking one another. His music gave new strength to the exhausted rowers, and even launched the ship itself when nothing else could badge it. On the way there, he convinced the Argonauts to stop at the island of Samothrace in the northern Aegean, where they became initiates in the Samothracian mysteries, religious rites that could offer them protection in their journey. Orpheus' music was instrumental in their mission's success-to capture the Golden Fleece in the barbaric land of Colchis and return it to the Greek city of Iolkos. Aeetes, king of Cochis and son of Helius the sun god, was so powerful that even the goddesses Athena and Hera could not trick him and ensure the Greeks escaped with the fleece and their lives. So Athena agreed to bribe her son Eros with a golden ball to wound the heart of Aeetes' daughter, Medea. Only if Medea, a powerful witch and priestess of the Underworld goddess Hecate, would betray her family and her people would the Greek heroes have a chance. Medea was smitten by Eros and fell in love with Jason at first sight. They first met at dawn in the shrine of Hecate, where Jason, drunk with gratitude, promised to take Medea back to Iolkus where her name would be honored forever. With her magic, Medea saved Jason's life repeatedly, and helped him pass the deadly tests her father set up for him. And after she heard Jason vow to Hera to marry Medea in Greece, she even led him to the grove of Ares, where the beautiful sorceress put the sleepless dragon to sleep sp Jason could make off with the fleece. Medea's ultimate betrayal in the name of romantic love occurred when the Argo was being chased down the Danube and blocked off in Bosporus by Aeetes' fleet of warships; Medea sent a message to Aeetes claiming she had been abducted and asking for her young brother, Apsyrtus, as messenger; when her brother arrived, she and Jason killed and dismembered the innocent boy and threw his body parts into the sea. This forced the Colchian ships to call off the chase in order to collect the body parts for a proper burial. Zeus, furious at Medea's betrayal of her family, brewed up a terrible storm and ordered Medea and Jason to seek purification for the murder from Medea's aunt, the sorceress Circe, who lived on the island of Aeaea off Western Italy. On the return voyage from Aeaea, Orpheus' lyre-playing saved the ship from the Sirens-bird-women who lured sailors to their destruction with their hauntingly sweet songs, enchanting them to come toward them and crash against the rocks, which they tried to do later to Odysseus and his crew. As the Argo passed the island of Anthemoessa, off the coast of Italy, Orpheus drowned out the fatal singing of the Sirens with his lyre. Near the end of their trip, when the Argo was stranded in Lake Tritonis, Orpheus decided to offer the gods the bronze tripod that his father Apollo had given him. In response to this gift, Triton-a son of Poseidon-appeared and guided them to the sea-and home.
Orpheus is most famous, however, for following his love to hell and back. When Orpheus returned to his homeland of Thrace in northern Western Greece, he fell in love with a young wood or island nymph named Eurydice. She agreed to marry him and he enjoyed a happiness that eclipsed all joy he'd known before. But his bliss didn't last. A beekeeper named Aristaeus, a son of Apollo like Orpheus, had also lusted after Eurydice. Soon after the wedding, on Orpheus' first absence, Aristaeus tried to ravish Eurydice. As she ran through a field, fleeing from his advances, Eurydice stepped on a poisonous viper, which bit her foot. Within minutes, Eurydice was dead. Heartbroken, Orpheus mourned with his lyre. He realized he could not live without his bride, and resolved to descend to the Underworld and bring her back from there. Even in the dark gloomy despair of the Netherworld, where people existed as immaterial souls, the music of Orpheus proved enchanting. The ferryman Charon who boated the newly dead across the river Styx to the Underworld, the ferocious guard-dog Cerberus who guarded the entrance to the Underworld, and the three Judges of the Dead who awaited the newly dead at the entry, all let him pass, charmed by his music into kindness. The spirits of the dead crowded around him to hear him play and sing and tried to distract him with their stories of horror; instead, even the damned received pleasure from their tortures while he played. Sisyphus, for example, took a break from pushing his rock up the same steep hill and Tantalus forgot his thirst and hunger. Orpheus' art melted the hearts of the Furies, spellbound all the frightful powers, and softened Hades and Persephone, too. They agreed to restore Eurydice to life, because such boundless love deserved to be immortal. But there was a catch: as he traveled back to the surface of the earth, Orpheus was forbidden to turn and look back upon her, until they were both safe under the light of the sun. The implication of this caveat was that no mortal eye could behold the unprecedented transmogrification of someone dead into a resurrected physical being in the same body she had occupied before. During his long ascent from the Underworld, Orpheus hoped Eurydice was silently following the enchanting sounds of his lyre for guidance. Several times he feared she was no longer behind him, but resisted the temptation to look back. But as he anxiously stepped from the cavern of the Underworld, and caught the first glints of sunlight on him, he could not contain his doubts any longer, and felt safe enough to give into his impulse and turn his head and steal a glimpse, a moment too soon, only to see his beloved fade away, becoming a shadow again. She faded from his sight, murmuring 'Farewell'. Orpheus had lost Eurydice forever. And he couldn't live with this loss, or his guilt.
Orpheus tried to return once more to Hades, but he could not pass that way again. Anguished, he returned to earth, determined not to live long himself. From that time forth, he avoided inhabited places, keeping to the wilds of Thrace. He threw himself into religion and spirituality, and established a rite of sacrifice to his father Apollo, hailing him the greatest of all Olympians. He set up an esoteric circle of mysteries, a method of initiation, a new priesthood. It was surprisingly monotheistic and love-oriented, but shrouded in secrecy. Orpheus had been a Dionysian initiate and still considered Dionysus his alter-ego and spiritual father, but now he held Dionysus-the Dionysian cult as it had evolved--responsible for inciting passions and unlawful lusts like the one that killed his wife. Dionysus, god of corporeal pleasure whereas Apollo was god of spiritual or artistic pleasure, angered by Orpheus' refusal to honor him properly, sent his female devotees, the Maenads, to punish Orpheus and set an example. Raving Maenads, hormonally challenged and magic-drug-ingesting nature-worshippers, tore the lone musician to pieces-and then murdered their own husbands out of excess mania. They threw his head into the Thracian river, where it floated out to sea. Later versions of the story claim that the maenads were not inflamed by Dionysus, but by lust for him; they each wanted him for herself and when they couldn't decide who would ravage him first they pulled him to pieces. Others suggest that his continuing fidelity to Eurydice--and his renunciation of romantic love, and his new devotion to young men who became his disciples--enraged the proud women of Thrace. There is also a less-known version of the myth, according to which Orpheus was killed not by the Maenads but by Zeus' lightning bolt as punishment for his revelation of the gods' secrets to mankind, after his descent to hell. As a teacher of the mysteries of the after-life, Orpheus became a god of oracles. He founded the oracles of Hecate in Aegina and of Demeter Chthonia in Sparta, both earlier oracles of the pre-historic Mother Goddess. It was all this initiative that threatened the autocratic Zeus.
After the ritual murder, his mother and the other Muses collected the scattered pieces of his body and buried them in Pieria-Orpheus' birthplace and the main haunt of the Muses. The head of Orpheus, still singing, and his lyre floated across the Aegean sea to the island of Lesbos. The people of Lesbos who built a temple around the head and laid it to rest, were rewarded forever with the gift of music and poetry. There it prophesied day and night, like the head of Osiris at Abydos, drawing worshippers from all over Greece and pulling them away from Apollo's oracles, until Apollo ordered the head to be silent forever more. Local legend has it that the Orphic Oracle will sing again when enough people will believe in it. As for his lyre, it was also kept as a holy relic in the Orphic temple, untouchable. Neanthus, son of the Tyrant of Lesbos, once tried to play the Orphic lyre and was torn to pieces by a pack of dogs, or dog-masked Maenads-Priestesses. When the Oracle was silenced, the lyre became the constellation Lyra, and we can still see it in the heavens.
According to Robert Graves (The Greek Myths) and other classicists, Eurydice was the pre-Hellenic, prehistoric goddess of the Underworld, known as the Snake Goddess. Hellenic writers converted her into Orpheus' wife, sent by a mystical serpent's bite back to the land of death, where, in his love for her, he followed her. This was an artificial myth of very late origin, which is why his story echoes the Roman martyrdom of Jesus. The icons from which writers built the apocryphal story of Eurydice's death and Orpheus' subsequent understanding of death all came from more ancient myths, in which Orpheus was greeted by Eurydice-as-Hecate in the Underworld and her divine serpents. Eurydice's 'snake in the grass' (the agent that pushes forward the story's action) is her sacred animal, the constant companion of the underworld Goddess. The serpent is also the symbol of healing, still used on the medical caduceus (the winged snakes on the staff of all doctors). Eurydice is the descendant of the tri-partite, Minoan and Cycladic, pre-historic Mother Goddess, whose simultaneous aspects were the Terrestrial, Celestial, and Infernal Goddess. In Greek mythology, she was broken up into Olympian goddesses, like Demeter, Artemis, and Persephone, all daughters of Zeus. Orpheus is the descendant of the primitive dying young god, the Goddess's consort, who marries her every spring, who follows her to the underworld every autumn to be taught by her the mysteries of life, which he can pass on to the priests in her temple, and who is sacrificed every winter, just before the thaw of spring, in order to ensure the fertility of the land.
Nevertheless, even though Eurydice had been reduced to a secondary, mute part by the patriarchal Hellenistic writers, the story of Orpheus marks the end of the Greek heroic tradition that they fabricated and represent. Orpheus is gentle, devoted, artistic, and fiercely monogamous. He performs no physical feats and passes no manly tests and takes part in no battle. The typical hero explores the same material as our own daily tabloids and soap-operas: sex, violence, death, and superhuman wonders. The hero is a man of no hesitation, blessed by the gods in some way in order to rid the world of some evil and teach us a moral lesson. The Greeks regarded promiscuity in their heroes as permissible if not admirable, whereas a headlong lifelong infatuation with the same one woman was dangerous and embarrassing, because it destroyed a man's prudence and pride and independence. Love was considered a form of intoxication that could ruin a hero. The Greek culture for that reason tried to relegate women to an inferior position. Women had too much seductive power that could distract and destroy any man. So the culture did its best to keep them sequestered at home, unschooled, and unable to vote or speak in public. To dedicate one's life to the memory of a woman was unmanly. With Orpheus we see the end of the Greek heroic tradition, also caused by the emergence of ruthless, mannish heroines like Medea and the maenads. Orpheus, a poet-musician-prophet whom the Alexandrians elevated to the status of Son of God, was the most unlikely Greek hero. He was the prototype of the modern Romantic hero.
In fact, Orphism developed as a merging of the cult of Dionysus and the worship of Apollo, whose earthly prophet and savior-son was Orpheus. Like Osiris before and Jesus later, Orpheus was martyred in the hands of ecstatic maenads who tore his body from limb to limb and scattered it in water. Orphism was one of the most popular monotheistic mystery-religions of the early Christian era. At that time, Christian communities had no priests or bishops and were ruled by agape. Orphism has been called 'the Western Buddhism', because it advocated escape from the karmic wheel through ascetic contemplation, spiritual journeys of the astral-projection kind, and revelation. It has also been called the precursor of Orthodox and Catholic Christian mysteries.
The Orphic Revelation was virtually indistinguishable from the Christian one. Orphic ascetics abstained from meat and sensual pleasures in order to gain eternal blessedness and after-life bliss. Orphism introduced to Greek faith the concept of Hell, a system of post-mortem punishment, whose resemblance to the later Christian one is striking. In The Republic, Plato quotes Adeimantos as saying that the Orphic Revelation was being misused by unscrupulous teachers "who hold out the bribe of eternal life and a happy immortality to the good and threaten eternal punishment to the bad, so that men turn to goodness not for its own sake, but out of fear."
Orphism introduced a theology of redemption for the first time. It was also first to teach a doctrine of original sin. Man's nature was dualistic, it said, composed of the Titanic elements, closely associated with the body, and the Dionysian-Apollonian elements, allied with the soul. By an ascetic morality, the former must be repressed and the latter cultivated, to the end that the soul may escape from the body as from a tomb, and may cease to be subject to the weary cycle of reincarnation, or kyklos genesios, "cycle of reincarnation." "I have flown out of the sorrowful wheel," says the Orphic initiate on the Compagno tablet. Orphism was one of the most serious rivals of Christianity in the first few centuries AD, so the Church devised ways to identify the Orphic savior, Orpheus, with Christ. Fourth-century Christian art shows Christ in the guise of Orpheus, wearing a Phrygian cap, playing the lyre, a sacrificial lamb by his feet. The Orphic Gospel was preached in the Mediterranean for at least twelve centuries.
Orphism reinvented the Dionysian rites that had been fraught with orgiastic elements, adopting its emotionalism--its doctrine of Enthousiasmos, Enthusiasm, and of possession by the deity--but rejecting its wild frenzy, and transforming its savage ritual into an ordered sacramental religion. Orphism was steeped in sacramentalism, which flooded the later Mysteries and flowed into Christianity. Orphism introduced the practice of achieving salvation by sacrament, by initiatory rites, and by esoteric doctrine. Orphism was the most potent solvent introduced into Greek and Western religious life. The Orphics sowed the seeds of the Greeks' distrust toward the nationalist, exclusivist principles in Greek religion, after the fall of Greece to Rome. The Orphics were revolutionary in making the salvation of the individual soul of first importance. In this way, Orphism had tremendous influence on the subsequent history of religion. [S. Angus, The Mystery Religions]
Orphism was the principal vehicle of Oriental mysticism in Greece, Rome, and the West. Its teachings were those of mystics everywhere: "Grasping in your mind that nothing is impossible for you, consider yourself immortal and capable of understanding everything. Ascend beyond all height, descend beyond all depth. Gather into yourself the sensations of creation, of fire and water of dryness and humidity, imagining that you are at one and the same moment everywhere, on earth, in the sea, in the heaven, that you have not been born, that you are beyond death." [Lindsay]
In the Orphic mysteries, which predated the Christian rites and were a model for early Christians and other Roman-era millennial cults, Eurydice represents the Holy Mystery. Eurydice is "Universal Dike or Tyche," the lady of the karmic wheel, Fate. Eurydice was also the Orphic name for the underworld Goddess who received the soul of Orpheus. The transparent knowledge that Orpheus carried back from the underworld is the immutability of the circle of Fate, a message of the inexorable cycle of life, which includes eternal repetition of death. Eurydice's death, and the repetition of her death, reflects her feminine attachment to the laws of nature--rather than to the ecstatic drive of Apollo-Dionysus to which her husband is bound. She represents the inscrutable, immutable, unnameable, and omnipotent power of nature, of woman. Orphic priests dressed in robes.
An Orphic funerary tablet discovered near Sybaris mentions a Buddhalike escape from the karmic wheel (kyklos genesion, cycles of becoming), essentially identical to Buddhist sangsara, achieved through Orpheus' underworld trip and later sacrifice at the hands of the maenads. An Orphic sacramental golden bowl from the 5th century, discovered in Romania in 1837, shows the Orphic initiate's death-and-rebirth life journey: the carved deities of the upper and nether worlds are arranged on the bowl in the same way as the deities of the Intermediate State, between death and rebirth, are arranged on mandalas of Tibetan holy books.
Orphism gave Western Europe more than bardic romances and holy rites. The Hellenic myth of Orpheus and Eurydice inspired countless writers and artists to reconceive it (like Virgil, Ovid, Shakespeare, Shelley), for Orpheus symbolizes the writer/ artist/ creator and Eurydice his Muse or Work. Most notable are the eponymous opera by Gluck, Milton's "L'Allegro", a play by Anouilh, a film by Cocteau, and a poem by Robert Browning, which ends with the following famous lines:
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