The Orpheus Myth
Don't look back.
Of the old Greek stories, Orpheus and Eurydice are most on The Middlebrow’s mind these days, particularly after reading “The Frame Between Us,” a short story by Ethan Luk, published this month by the highly recommended One Story.
Orpheus was a poet and singer who could capitvate and subdue nature with his lyre. He was the son of Apollo and the Muse Calliope, so had divine skills. Eurydice, who either was a nymph or had nymphs around her, was Orpheus’ wife. Soon after their marriage (in Thomas Bullfinch’s retelling) while wandering the fields with her friends, she caught the lustful eye of the Centaur Aristaeus, who pursued her into the woods where she stepped on a snake while escaping him.
Aristaeus, by the way, is also a divine creature (aside from being half-man and half horse). He is the son of a prominent water nymph and a noted keeper of bees. But he is also a wild creature, driven by appetites and impulses and, it seems, as a creature partly of humanity and partly from the animal realm, isn’t supposed to be despised for his inability to control himself.
Eurydice dies, then, under assault by two forces of nature — the animalistic impulse of Aristaeus and the bite of a startled serpent. Aristaeus, losing sight of Eurydice in the woods, isn’t even aware that she struck. The whole event could be read as nature conspiring unfairly to take one life and to ruin another’s.
Orpheus, a child of deities with the power to put his sadness into a song so debilitating that it could cause crops to whither and fish to flee from land, decides to reclaim his love from death, to right ther unfair events taken against both Eurydice and him. He journeys to the underworld and in front of Hades and his captive bride Persephone, performs a song so moving that even the tortures reserved for the most punished souls of the underworld cease for a moment. Hades agrees to send Eurydice back to the world of life, but Orpheus must go back the way he came and not look back until he and his love are back in the sunlight.
It’s a long journey. And near its end, he looks back to see if Eurydice is following. He gets a last glimpse and she dissipates, swept back to Hades. He returns without her. Why does Orpheus look back? Bullfinch says it was “in a moment of forgetfulness.” Surely, not.
In 1956, poet W.D. Snodgrass suggests it was suspicion:
“Doubt she must track me close behind;
As the actual scent of flesh, she must
Trail my voice unquestioning where.
Yet where the dawn first edged my mind
In one white flashing of mistrust
I turned and she, she was not there.
My hands closed upon high, thin air.”
But this answer, more satsifying than Orpheus forgetting the rules, didn’t satisfy the poet H.D., who wrote from Eurydice’s point of view in 1925. Here, Eurydice can’t come up with a reason, other than defects on Orpheus’ personality:
“So for your arrogance
and your ruthlessness”
Eurydice’s anger stems from having been teased with a return to life. Had Orpheus left her to the land of shades, she says, she would have gradually forgetten her Earthly life. He decided to perform the impossible task of bringing her back to life and as she walked from the land of the dead she regained more memories and joys of life, only to have her growing hopes destroyed by his inability to move forward without looking back. He has condemned her to a death where she knows what she is missing in the world above.
That Orpheus looks back is one mystery to the tale. I discount forgetfulness as an explanation. Suspicion of Hades seems more reasonable, but Hades is a god and Orpheus is the son of a god and a nymph. Shouldn’t he have assumes some faithfulness among the Olympians? It seems an act of cowardice, which would give new venom to Eurydice’ accusations in H.D.’s poem.
Another mystery to the story is Orpheus’ end. He tries to go back to the underworld but is refused. So he stays on the banks, singing songs of lament and refusing the companionship of other women. A troupe of Dionysus’ woroshippers, The Thracian Women, taken offense to his refusals to participate in their rites and they try to kill him. But his song causes their spears and stones to fall dead from the air. So they work themselves into a frenzy so loud that they drown his singing and then tear his body apart.
All that connects the death of Orpheus to his failure in the underworld is his grief. Despair causes him to try to rescue Eurydice — a hopeless task. Despair then strands him on the banks of a river where his refusal to engage with the world offends the Thracian women.
So the Middlebrow settles, after a long time thinking about Orpheus and a story that doesn’t quite hang together is that the thread here is all-consuming grief. A coda to the story is about properly honoring the dead and lost. The Centaur Aristaeus was a beekeeper and after the tragedy of Orpheus, all of the bees die. Aristaeus journeys to see the prophet Proteus, who tells him that the myths who kept company with Eurydice have cursed his hives, but that they will lift the curse if he builds a proper memorial to Eurydice and Orpheus to atone for his sins.