Orpheus
(This is an excerpt from a University Of Metaphysical Sciences course at www.umsonline.org, please feel free to visit the school website)
The
Orphic Mysteries were the other immensely popular religion of Greece and
Rome, which communed with higher powers using the magickal power of the
word, music, and yogic living to attain self-divinity. Orpheus was responsible
for bringing myth and allegory to Greece from Thrace, his birthplace. His
was the dominant religious view in Greece while Bacchus worship and Mars
(Weapon) worship were more prevalent in Rome. Orpheus, Dionysos and Christ
were equated with one another until as late as 600 A.D., well after the
firm establishment of Christianity. Orpheus, the Thracian bard, was celebrated
as a divinity several centuries before the Christian era. In the Mystical
Hymns of Orpheus, Taylor writes, “Scarcely a vestige of Orpheus’
life is to be found amongst the immense ruins of time. Only a few of his
immortal songs remain. All we know of him is that his birth place was Thrace,
he was probably black, being named after orphasias, the dark one, and that
he brought theology to the Greeks. He was the instructor of the morals of
non-violence. He was the first of Western Prophets and the prince of poets,
himself the offspring of a Muse, who taught the Greeks their sacred rites
and mysteries and upon whose shoulders Homer, Pythagoras, and Plato stood.
All mystery traditions of the Greeks flowed from the odes of Orpheus.
Musaos, in his Orphic Hymns and Hymns of Ethiopia, claims his father Orpheus
brought the knowledge of the gods themselves to the Greeks. Orpheus was
the founder of the Grecian mythological system that he used to promulgate
his philosophical doctrines. The origin of his philosophy is universal in
that he was an early wandering yogi-sage and has elements of all the places
he had traveled. This includes an Eastern Indian influence, as many Thracians
at the time were of a mixed Indian and African descent.
Orpheus was initiated into the Egyptian mysteries, from which he learned
extensive knowledge of magic, astrology, sorcery, and medicine. The Mysteries
of the Kabiri at Samothrace were also conferred on him and these undoubtedly
contributed to his knowledge of medicine and music. Very similarly to Eastern
Indian metaphysics, Orpheus and his religion Orphism taught what was called
the metempsychosis of souls, when the state of pristine purity is attained
and one is freed from cyclic existence. Orpheus was a pacifist and a healer,
his music was the only “weapon” he used to teach, transform,
and entertain the people. He was so wise and his music so beautiful that
often the gods would seek him out to listen to him play. Both Apollo, the
Sun god, and Morpheus, god of dreams, were said to be his father.
Orpheus was the shamanic link between super-consciousness and sub-consciousness.
Orpheus taught moderation, vegetarianism, and herbalism as part of his presentation
of truth. The tragedy of Orpheus and Eurydice was the initiatory parable
for the follower of Orpheus. Eurydice, in an attempt to escape from a rapist
while Orpheus played music at their wedding night, was bitten on the heel
by an asp and died. Orpheus, journeying into the depths of the underworld,
so enchanted Pluto and Persephone with his music and poetry they agreed
to permit Eurydice to return to life if Orpheus could lead her back to the
sphere of the living without once looking round to see if she were following.
So great was his fear, however, that she would stray from him that he turned
his head and Eurydice was swept back into the land of the dead.
Orpheus wandered the Earth for a while in deep depression and there are
several versions of his death. Some declare that he was slain by a bolt
of lightning, some that he was successful in bringing back Eurydice and
they ascended to heavenly paradise while still alive, and in one version
he tried to commit suicide, but couldn't. Having already walked among the
dead and returned, he had become immortal. The most popular version of his
death was that he was torn to pieces by orgiastic Ciconian women in a Dionysian
frenzy when he resisted their advances. The head of Orpheus, after being
torn from his body was cast into the river Hebrus with his lyre that floated
to the sea near Lesbos. Resting at an altar there, the head gave oracles
and prophecies for many years, as Orpheus couldn't perish. The lyre, after
being stolen from its shrine and resulting in the quick destruction of the
thieves, was found by the gods and fashioned into a constellation in heaven.
Orpheus has long been sung as the patron of music. On his seven stringed
lyre he played such perfect harmonies that the gods themselves were moved
to acclaim his power. When he touched the strings of his instrument the
birds and beasts gathered around him as he wandered through the forests.
His enchanting melodies caused even the ancient trees with mighty effort
to draw their gnarled roots from out the earth and follow him. Orpheus is
one of the many Immortals who have sacrificed themselves that mankind might
have the wisdom of the gods. By the symbolism and blessing of his music
he communicated the divine secrets to humanity and several authors hint
that the gods were jealous of the shaman because he had surpassed them.
As time passed, the man Orpheus became one with the mythic symbol of the
Adept of the Orphic School. He was a living symbol of ancient wisdom, the
wandering necromancer priest-poet. He was declared the son of Apollo, the
divine and perfect truth, and Calliope, the Muse of Music, harmony and rhythm.
In other words, Orpheus is the Logos of the secret doctrine God Apollo revealed
through Harmony and Music, Calliope. Eurydice is the human part that dies
in ignorance's underworld. In this allegory, Orpheus signifies the initiate
who must lose the fleshly part of himself out of doubt about the natural
understanding within one's own soul and faith in the higher powers. The
Bacchic women who tore Orpheus apart are the contending forces of disruption
and transformation that destroy the illusion of stasis in life. They are
unable to harm Orpheus at first because his music creates a psychic shield
around him, but when their wild howls drown out his voice they rend him
to pieces. The harmony of the magical celestial seven-stringed lyre are
the seven star chakras of the spiritual body in perfect harmony with the
cosmos; when that harmony is disrupted the forces of nature can come in
to devour.
The head of Orpheus represents complete enlightenment and the pure Logos
freed from limitation. This Logos and its doctrines continue to exist long
after the “body” has been integrated and spread across the universe.
Orpheus Lyre is the secret teaching of Orpheus, the seven strings are the
seven divine truths which are the keys to universal knowledge. This was
the primary allegory of the initiate. "The student was also taught
of the two fountains of the other world. There are two fountains in the
underworld, one of forgetting called Lethe, and one of remembering called
Menomoseni. While most beings drank from the first, forgot their previous
lives and were reborn among the ignorant once again, Orpheus taught to drink
of the fountain of remembering in which one discovered total memory of all
lives and our divine nature and super-consciousness," W.C. Guthrie
tells us in Orphism (1953). This path led to total recall of all
lives and to the Elysian Fields, an immortal paradise. This was a powerful
instruction for both death and dreaming. This went along with strict food
vows and anti-violence vows the poet mystic followers of Orpheus would take
to improve their meditation and wisdom. Unlike the other popular mystery
cult of Dionysos and Bacchus, which believed frenzied ecstatic states were
the way to the divine, Orpheus taught stoical meditation and refined homage
through song.
The conflict between the demi-urge of the body and the spiritual nature
of man is emblematized by the tearing apart of Orpheus' body as well as
a superior form of continual meditational ecstasis, the severed head being
a metaphor for samadhi and deep meditation. Orpheus' body or substance is
spread across the Universe; i.e. the divine principle is spread through
everything at the moment of supreme awakening. The other popular rites in
homage to Dionysos were celebrated as a banquet and party with hallucinogenic
wine and wild sexuality. In both Orphism and early Gnosticism there is a
direct movement against these forms of worship because they were seen as
tricks of the senses to elude the soul and mind into the imprisonment of
the flesh. Sabazius or Saboath, the birthplace of Dionysos, became one of
the negative names of the false god in Gnosticism while the austere anti-drunkenness
tenets of Orphism were absorbed into early Christian thought.