Orpheus

Summary

Orpheus is a singer from Thrace in Greek myth, son of King Oeagrus and of Calliope, whom Hesiod calls the first of the Muses. The Library ascribed to Apollodorus says that his songs moved stones and trees, and that he went down to the house of the dead to fetch his wife.

His story is the story of his wife Eurydice. A snake bit her and she died. Virgil, in the Georgics, his poems on farming, says she was running along a riverbank away from Aristaeus, the beekeeper, and did not see the snake in the tall grass. Orpheus went down through the opening at Taenarum, the gate of the house of Hades, and sang to the shades and to the king and queen of the dead, Persephone. The shades came up from the depths of the dark to listen, the three-headed dog held its mouths still, Ixion's wheel stopped, Sisyphus sat down on his stone, and the Furies wept for the first time. In his song, as Ovid tells it in the Metamorphoses, Orpheus said that the love that brought him there was the same love that joined the king of the dead to his wife on the day he carried her off. The two rulers allowed Eurydice to return, on one condition, which the Georgics says Persephone laid down: she would walk behind him, and he would not look back at her until he was out of the valley. Near the light he turned to look at her, and she slipped back to the dead. Virgil has her say: who has ruined me, and you, Orpheus? Then she vanishes like smoke mixing with the air, and the ferryman will not let him cross a second time.

Orpheus wept for seven months by the river Strymon and kept away from women. The women of Thrace killed him on a night of Dionysus's rites and tore him apart, and the river Hebrus carried his head and his lyre to the sea, the head still calling Eurydice, until it reached the island of Lesbos. Ovid ends the story with his shade going down under the earth and finding Eurydice: now they walk together, and he can look back at her safely.

The idea his story turns on is that song opened for him what no living man may open, and looking closed it. The king of the dead let him take a dead woman from his house, and the whole condition lay in the eye: he had to trust that she was walking behind him without seeing her. When he wanted to see with his own eyes what he had been promised, he lost it. What he kept afterwards was knowledge of the road, and the Greeks credited him with the mysteries and rites that speak of what comes after death: the Library says he founded the mysteries of Dionysus, and Aristophanes, in the Frogs, says that Orpheus taught people the rites and to keep from killing.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. Ὀρφεύς, Orpheus, ends in -eus, the ending that closes the names of many heroes, and Doric puts a different ending in its place: Ὄρφης, Orphēs. What stays is Orph-: a vowel at the start, then r, then φ. Arabic ʿayn has no Greek counterpart; it drops and leaves its vowel at the head of the word, r is r, and f answers φ. So the name is ʿarf, from ʿarafa, "to know", which is the Greek essay's reading: Orpheus is "the one who knows". In Lane, ʿarafa is to know a thing and perceive it; al-Rāghib says maʿrifa is perceiving a thing by reflecting on its traces; and the ʿarrāf is the one who tells of what is past and what is to come. On this reading Orpheus is the knower, which is what the story makes him: the man who knew the road to the house of the dead and came back from it, and to whom the mysteries that teach people about the afterlife were credited.

Linguistic Root

Orpheus and "the one who knows"

The ending changes across these forms while Ὀρφ- stays, so that is where the comparison sits. Lane gives ʿarafahu, he knew it and perceived it, by one of the five senses or by considering its traces; the ʿarrāf is a diviner, or one who tells of what is past and what is to come; ʿurf is a limit; and from the same root comes al-aʿrāf, the wall between Paradise and Hell, or its upper parts. The root joins knowledge gained by reading traces, knowledge of what is hidden, and standing on a boundary between two abodes.

The sounds: Arabic ʿayn drops in Greek or becomes a vowel at the head of the word, as ʿanbar became ἄμβαρ; r is r; and Arabic f answers f and p in the European languages, here φ. So the three letters of ʿ-r-f stand in order in Ὀρφ-.

A Greek word with the same letters

Greek has ὄρφνη, the darkness of night, which Euripides uses in the Heracles for the darkness of the world below. It shares Ὀρφ- with the name, and the dictionary does not derive the name from it. The reading "the one who knows" does not exclude it: the man who knew the road knew it in that darkness.

Key Mythic Narratives

On the Argo

Apollonius of Rhodes names Orpheus first among the companions of Jason on the Argo, says Jason took him on at Chiron's bidding, and says the oaks he led down from the mountains of Pieria with his song still stand in ordered rows on the Thracian shore. Pindar, in his fourth Pythian ode, calls him "the father of songs" and says he came from Apollo. Argonautica 1.23–34; Pindar, Pythian 4.176–177.

When the men on the ship quarrelled, he took up his lyre and sang how earth, heaven and sea were once one mingled form and were then parted from each other after deadly strife; how the stars, the moon and the paths of the sun keep their places; how the mountains rose and the rivers began to run; and how Ophion and Eurynome ruled, then Kronos and Rhea, while Zeus was still a child in a cave. The men fell silent to listen. It is a witness of the separation of heaven and earth. Argonautica 1.492–511.

When the ship passed the island of the Sirens, Orpheus struck his lyre and sang fast until his voice drowned theirs, and only one man leapt overboard towards them.

Women who became trees

Ovid says Dionysus did not leave the killers of Orpheus, the singer of his rites, unpunished: he bound their feet with twisting roots and drove their toes into the ground, and they became oaks. He adds that a snake tried to bite the head when it reached Lesbos, and Apollo turned its jaws to stone.

Symbolic Reading

The essay "Rereading Greek Myths" sets Orpheus's descent in its last table and reads it as a journey into mines or deep caves: a man who goes down into the belly of the earth and comes up again.

In the Georgics the story sits inside another one. The sea god Proteus tells the tale of Orpheus to Aristaeus when his bees have died, and tells him their death is punishment for Eurydice's. His mother then teaches him to slaughter four bulls and four heifers, and on the ninth day to send an offering to Orpheus and honour Eurydice with a calf. When he goes back to the carcasses he finds bees swarming out of them. The poem sets a dead woman who did not return beside a life that returned through sacrifice.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

The story closest to his is that of Izanagi in the Japanese account: he goes down to Yomi to bring back his wife Izanami, is forbidden to look at her, looks, and loses her. The project's Japanese Semitic essay sets this comparison in its table, saying Izanagi "looked at her and lost her" as Orpheus lost his wife. They part at the end: Orpheus goes back alone and weeps, while Izanagi blocks the road with a boulder and the parting becomes a pact between death and birth.

In the North Hermóðr rides to the house of Hel to ask for his brother Baldr, and Hel sets a condition: everything in the world must weep for him. One giantess refuses, and Baldr stays below. Both stories grant the one who would return a leave on a condition, and the condition fails in a single moment: a glance from Orpheus, a tear that does not fall in the North. Both are witnesses of the descent to the underworld, which also holds Heracles's descent into the same house and Persephone's return from it.

Through the rites and mysteries credited to him Orpheus stands among the culture heroes who taught people a practice or a rite.