I’m suggesting this opening to the new edition of Sewell’s The Orphic Voice (1960) as a reading for all the participants in the current lecture series.
Hello Tom, great to hear your voice coming through the substacks since the Jung conference.
The book sounds like such a gem. I love the retrieval of Orpheus as a methodology and way of thinking.
I worked the Orpheus myth closely for a few years, influenced by Ted Hughes, and Lewis Hyde,and Gregory Orr's telling of it, but most of all by Ann Wroe's wonderful book "Orpheus: The Song of Life"
I used it as a mythopoetic guide to therapy with children and families affected by addiction (which is really of us in a western culture)
And focused in that on the role of the relationship between loss, soul, sorrow and creative expression.
I put the story down in the end, and partly to do with it's ending, so great to hear you bringing some light to it's ending. My key into Orpheus was Nietzsche and the idea that Orpheus is a priest of two gods, Dionysos and Apollo, and that the ending is a kind of reclamation and divinisation of him as Dionysian, as he is torn apart by Maenads in an enactment of the ritual in which the god is also the goat that is sacrificed, hunter and hunted. So i love this passage
"Take the Orphic severed head as marking a crisis for our species, maybe even our endgame, but—according to the myth—not the end of Orpheus. How can we imagine such a metamorphosis? No Orphic poet has gone that far—or maybe, more chillingly, they have, and the music is so inhuman (and inhumane) as to be as yet unheard.
"Maybe the next Orphic poet is the river itself. Or the wind. The clear truth, I would propose, is that Nature has always been the composer and Orpheus the musician. How does the song go on after the singer returns to the elements? Not hard to grasp, if Orpheus was simply their instrument from the beginning, elements singing through the human. And so the transformation— the emptying out—of Orpheus into the elements, and the return of the song to sky and cave, is actually the restoration of song to its origin point. Song, on loan to Orpheus, now back into the Cosmos: music of the spheres."
The return of Orpheus to Nature and Sky as a singing head fits with Dionysos as Zoe, the indestructible life force and the argument between Apollo and Pan as to who plays the best music.
There are other singing heads that feature in myth, I'm thinking of King Raven (Bran) in the Mabinogion, who sings in some ways to establish Albion and to undo the traumatic effect of a bloody war. I think Robert Graves mentions him.
Just throwing some associations out; thanks for the inspirations.
this is great - thanks so much for the references etc. I talked about Kaja Silverman’s analysis of the ending in class - she points out that Ovid has a 4th step in the story - which reunites Orpheus and Eurydice in Hades - she calls this the “redemptive coda” and says that Rilke and Salomé are exemplary of that finale. Her use of the myth is fabulous.
That's a lovely thought - that Rilke and Salome in some ways embodied a "redemptive coda" - it did look like Rilke lived out the dismemberment part. The Silverman looks like another great text.
I think Wroe says somewhere that the emphasis on the glance back arose in the Roman re-tellings of Ovid or Virgil, and that the Greek Orphics probably had more of a sense that Orpheus at that time returns successfully from his mission to the underworld, as they hint that Orpheus taught about the trans-migration of souls. I seem to remember there is no agreement on how organised the Orphic cult was or if there was one what it was.
Hillman has a chapter on Orpheus in "Mythic Figures" - he connects him to exactly your point about the need for Orpheus in ecology, as well as the music of listening, and the need to be in love with longing.
The other recent pop culture reference to Orpheus recently was that he has a cameo in Neil Gaimon's sandman, in the comic and netflix. He is the son of Dream and the Muse Calliope and his untimely death represents a major grief to them that underscores the action and gives Dream a kind of dignity and gravitas.
Thank you, Tom. I really needed to read something like this after last nights lecture. I was finding it so full of mercurial surprises, and Sewell is new to me: but I'm glad to have heard your thoughts and then read this, it's a marvellous memory theatre. One thing that popped up, forgive me, from my youthful explorations of Naples, landed me here: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-anatomical-machines-of-cappella-sansevero-naples-italy A very strange mercurial surprise, indeed. Yes, I will buy the book. By the way, isn't the creepy "Alone with the Alone" a variant on Plotinus "Life is the flight of the alone to the alone"?
Hello Tom, great to hear your voice coming through the substacks since the Jung conference.
The book sounds like such a gem. I love the retrieval of Orpheus as a methodology and way of thinking.
I worked the Orpheus myth closely for a few years, influenced by Ted Hughes, and Lewis Hyde,and Gregory Orr's telling of it, but most of all by Ann Wroe's wonderful book "Orpheus: The Song of Life"
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/410913/orpheus-by-ann-wroe/9781845951689
I used it as a mythopoetic guide to therapy with children and families affected by addiction (which is really of us in a western culture)
And focused in that on the role of the relationship between loss, soul, sorrow and creative expression.
I put the story down in the end, and partly to do with it's ending, so great to hear you bringing some light to it's ending. My key into Orpheus was Nietzsche and the idea that Orpheus is a priest of two gods, Dionysos and Apollo, and that the ending is a kind of reclamation and divinisation of him as Dionysian, as he is torn apart by Maenads in an enactment of the ritual in which the god is also the goat that is sacrificed, hunter and hunted. So i love this passage
"Take the Orphic severed head as marking a crisis for our species, maybe even our endgame, but—according to the myth—not the end of Orpheus. How can we imagine such a metamorphosis? No Orphic poet has gone that far—or maybe, more chillingly, they have, and the music is so inhuman (and inhumane) as to be as yet unheard.
"Maybe the next Orphic poet is the river itself. Or the wind. The clear truth, I would propose, is that Nature has always been the composer and Orpheus the musician. How does the song go on after the singer returns to the elements? Not hard to grasp, if Orpheus was simply their instrument from the beginning, elements singing through the human. And so the transformation— the emptying out—of Orpheus into the elements, and the return of the song to sky and cave, is actually the restoration of song to its origin point. Song, on loan to Orpheus, now back into the Cosmos: music of the spheres."
The return of Orpheus to Nature and Sky as a singing head fits with Dionysos as Zoe, the indestructible life force and the argument between Apollo and Pan as to who plays the best music.
There are other singing heads that feature in myth, I'm thinking of King Raven (Bran) in the Mabinogion, who sings in some ways to establish Albion and to undo the traumatic effect of a bloody war. I think Robert Graves mentions him.
Just throwing some associations out; thanks for the inspirations.
https://www.academia.edu/62714163/Dont_Look_Back_Orpheus_and_the_complicated_grief_of_children_and_young_people_affected_by_alcohol_or_drug_problems_in_their_families_a_reflection_on_the_orpheus_myth_in_relation_to_this_group
this is great - thanks so much for the references etc. I talked about Kaja Silverman’s analysis of the ending in class - she points out that Ovid has a 4th step in the story - which reunites Orpheus and Eurydice in Hades - she calls this the “redemptive coda” and says that Rilke and Salomé are exemplary of that finale. Her use of the myth is fabulous.
That's a lovely thought - that Rilke and Salome in some ways embodied a "redemptive coda" - it did look like Rilke lived out the dismemberment part. The Silverman looks like another great text.
I think Wroe says somewhere that the emphasis on the glance back arose in the Roman re-tellings of Ovid or Virgil, and that the Greek Orphics probably had more of a sense that Orpheus at that time returns successfully from his mission to the underworld, as they hint that Orpheus taught about the trans-migration of souls. I seem to remember there is no agreement on how organised the Orphic cult was or if there was one what it was.
Hillman has a chapter on Orpheus in "Mythic Figures" - he connects him to exactly your point about the need for Orpheus in ecology, as well as the music of listening, and the need to be in love with longing.
The other recent pop culture reference to Orpheus recently was that he has a cameo in Neil Gaimon's sandman, in the comic and netflix. He is the son of Dream and the Muse Calliope and his untimely death represents a major grief to them that underscores the action and gives Dream a kind of dignity and gravitas.
Oh nice. Thanks for this Toby.
This is cool! And I think you are right about Plotinus. See you soon.
Thank you, Tom. I really needed to read something like this after last nights lecture. I was finding it so full of mercurial surprises, and Sewell is new to me: but I'm glad to have heard your thoughts and then read this, it's a marvellous memory theatre. One thing that popped up, forgive me, from my youthful explorations of Naples, landed me here: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-anatomical-machines-of-cappella-sansevero-naples-italy A very strange mercurial surprise, indeed. Yes, I will buy the book. By the way, isn't the creepy "Alone with the Alone" a variant on Plotinus "Life is the flight of the alone to the alone"?