Orpheus and Eurydice
Hymen, in raven-form, circled above the wedding. Although it was Orpheus’ honeyed song that hailed him, it was a different strumming than his fabled lyre that reverberated to the god’s ears. The immortal could hear the caress of scissors against the bride’s thread by the dread Fates. While he, now transformed, blessed their union and garlanded them with priceless gifts, all he could hear was the cackling of the Morai filtering through the earth. His trepidation was infectious, there was a nervousness and fidgeting in the god’s mannerisms. However hard he tried to ignore the black music from below, his words brought neither smile nor laughter, and were delivered tainted with foreboding.
Amid the flickering torches and the solemn deity, Orpheus held Eurydice close. It was not an ordinary love that bound him to her. No mere infatuation or familiarity, the nymph was his very navel point. His one still element in the spiralling tumult of life. No matter what fluctuated, her presence, her love was eternal. Amongst the world of spiteful divinities, monsters and grinding poverty, an aureate sensation of belonging and warmth gripped him. It was the melody of this that sounded from his lyre. A tune sweeter than Siren song constantly ran through his being. He was in short, the happiest man on earth.
As was customary, after vows were exchanged, Eurydice convened with her bridesmaids. The troop of nymphs, resplendent with joy, walked across a meadow. In their distracted state, they failed to notice a coiled snake, and the sniping of Eurydice’s thread by the Fates. As the agonal echo of the cut thread sounded throughout the cosmos, Eurydice stepped on the snake. The beast lashed round and sank its fangs into her heel.
Seeing the serpent disappear into the grasses, Eurydice began to run. She ran back to Orpheus. With him, and his melodies dripping with nectar and ambrosia she would be safe. As she ran, she felt more and more faint. The emerald of the meadow dulled to grey, the shrieks of her sisters to the cawing of distant birds. Her lifeforce ebbed into the earth, and she expired before Orpheus could reach her.
The Thracian stood speechless and motionless before her body. Unable to move, unable to speak and unable to die, he lingered in this state of numbness for weeks. It was as if he was a ship unanchored, tossed upon the heaving deep, without hope or heading. He prayed for death, anything to be reunited with his love. He was too numb to slay himself by his own hand. The world was drowned in syrup, sounds and feelings were merely leaden knocks and the world devoid of sensation.
He cast his mind back to the days before Eurydice. When he journeyed East with the Argonauts. The Sirens, the Dragon and the heroes appeared as merely flashes, vestiges of a vanished age, but what permeated his living death was the sense of destination. A telos, a higher purpose that drove that company relentlessly on, through hunger, deprivation and terror. In that moment, a spark flickered within his breast. In his lyre, he possessed the means to bind heaven and earth to his will, somewhere beyond a black and tormented river, Eurydice lay. As he resolved to journey to the ends of the earth and beyond for her, the spark became a roaring bonfire, his consciousness was again animated by direction.
In a ragged cloak, he journeyed through forest, over cruel mountains and nameless desert. He never deigned to learn the names or customs of the people he passed through, he had but one thought. Finally, on the Western edge of the earth, he gazed at a roiling sea lashed by heartless wind. Invoking Apollo, he aimed the prow of his tiny craft at the savage horizon and pushed out.
When he awoke, his boat was beached on the black shore of a desolate land. There was no movement, nor sound. Overhead, spires of jagged rock slashed at the gloomy heavens. Along the lifeless, coast he could make out an immense structure. Instinctively knowing that this was the seat of Terrible Hades, he set out for it.
As it came into focus, a monstrous form came leering out of the fog. A dog taller than a horse with three snarling heads. These shrieked spittle and venom at Orpheus, their yellow eyes gleamed with the same malice their fangs betrayed. Unfazed, he strummed his lyre, and sung a slow rhythm of pure melancholy. The beast stood dumb founded, its heads still, until one, by one, their eyelids dropped, and the colossus sunk to the floor.
He passed into the starless air of an immense cave. In the distance he could hear the warbling of a river, the final obstacle between him and Eurydice. Around the serpentine thread of the Styx, a huddling mass of unfortunates crowded. They were people in every state of misery, their form reflected the treatment of their body on earth. There were ragged men, their flesh torn by fish or dogs, forgotten slave women crawling with insects and the skeletons of infants littered the cavern. Orpheus pushed through this wretched mass, his burning love deafened him to their pleas.
At last, he came upon Charon, the ferryman to Hades. When pressed for payment, Orpheus unwound the single obol he wore on his necklace and placed it in the skeletal hand. safely on the dead’s side of the Styx, he set out for Hades’ palace, strumming his lyre and singing of the gods. He did not sing of their murderous scheming or the misery they inflicted on the most of humanity. It was of all that the gods gave us all. The glow of a sunset, the melodic breaking of waves on a shore and the golden light of the family home. As his notes filtered across the Field of Asphodel, Tantalus reached for his fruit, believing his starving grasp would finally find purchase. Sisyphus heaved his boulder with renewed purpose, just one more heave and he would possess immortality, and thus all these earthly goods forever.
Unmoved by this however, were the king and queen of the Underworld. Seated on thrones of basalt, their posture betrayed a disdain for the glories of earth. The underworld was the shadow of the light cast above, and its king was armoured in that darkness. When asked by Hades why he should return his wife, who would anyway end up here again shortly, Orpheus turned again to his lyre. Within his music, the primal agony of the grieving man echoed – the numbness, confusion and despair of those weeks where he sat motionless in torn clothes disseminated in those dread chambers. The notes were accusatory, why he, born doomed to die should know perfect happiness, have it snatched away and descend to these black halls within the space of a divine heartbeat? Together, the rhythm stopped time itself. The beaks of the terrible furies were wet with emotion, the fates looked at their threads without their former glee and even Hades blinked back tears.
Eurydice was hence returned to him, but with a single request, he was not to turn to look at her until they stood basked in light. He walked the way he came, but a nagging thought flickered in his mind as he beheld Ixion being broken on the wheel. The god eternally punishing him was whose word he was taking that Eurydice was behind him. The pain of the unfortunate on the wheel would be just a fraction of his if the gates of hell closed behind him as he left alone. He could hear the haunting laughter of Hades and Persephone as they celebrated the success of their latest scheme. With this ringing in his ears, every fibre in his body screamed for him to look around, to check if his love was truly with him. He heard no footfall, nor did Charon’s boat bob with any extra weight.
As the gate guarded by Cerberus came into sight, the pressure was intolerable. If he walked beyond that, he would never have the chance to rescue Eurydice, or himself every again. Confronted by this, his head spun around. He beheld Eurydice’s pale form just a pace behind him. Her lips uttered something soundless, and as he tried to hold her in his arms, her phantom flickered, and then vanished. Orpheus was left bent double, sobbing and clutching nothing but air.
Denied by the ferryman, he sat for a week ragged and unkept on the banks of the Styx. He merged with the unhappy masses futilely badgering Charon. Before he could join their ranks and enjoy the kiss of resignation that permeated their pleading, he would seek penance. He would thus wander the wild places of the earth meditating on what word Eurydice was forming before she was snatched away. Was it a gesture of love, that he was her sun and stars, the hinge of her earth, or was it accusatory? That his stupidity snuffed out their earthly happiness, a kind whose ethereality and mortality imbues it with a telos not present in airless Hades. Whichever one, Orpheus felt himself beyond redemption and unworthy of the fellowship of the polis.
And hence, the former favourite of Athena and Apollo trudged dejectedly through savage landscapes. He Absent mindedly crossed frozen tundra until he arrived back in the wilds of Thrace. He could hear shrieks and crashing ahead of him, but barely alive and unthinking he continued one foot in front of the other. As the crazed band of entranced Maenads came into focus, he neither ran nor panicked, but lumbered towards the screaming horde. His song of sorrow held the trees and animals of the wild spellbound, but the Maenads were deaf to it. They ruthlessly set upon him, tearing at his skin with their teeth and nails. He expired under a hundred blows as they tore him to ribbons, amid the fury he breathed the name of his love just once more.
His clawed head rolled into a stream, and the river god conveyed it to the shores of Lesbos, where Apollo entombed it. It is said that thereafter, the Isle’s nightingales have the sweetest song in Greece, as the bard’s spirit lives within them. As the wild places and creatures mourned the death of their favourite, his shade passed into Hades. After again tramping through the Fields of Asphodel, he came upon the ghost of Eurydice he took her into his arms with leaping heart, and finally came to his journey’s end.
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