Orpheus and music

Excerpt - James Hillman - Mythic Figures

My second exhibition of the presence of Orpheus is music. Perhaps music belongs in first place: how many concert halls are named for him; how many images show him with his instrument; how many lyrical poems, operas, book titles bring him together with song and sound.

I want, however, to place this music within a wider category covered by a phrase that Guthrie uses for a chapter title, “Orphica and the New Age.” [3] The New Age to which Guthrie refers is not the contemporary popular movement referred to by that name. Guthrie’s book came out originally in 1935 long before hippies, pot, and peace. He is referring to the period of Greco-Roman syncretism when Orpheus was a major cult figure. Nonetheless, that syncretism bears comparison with the mood, interests, and beliefs of our “Age of Aquarius” as our contemporary New Age has been called, and which crystallized in the 1960s. Music was a communal force and message-bearer sounding through societal unrest, feminist liberation, politics of protest, idealistic reform, bodily freedom with banners flying for racial justice, community, love, youth, and imagination.

To sort out today’s New Age themes is as complicated as differentiating them in the early centuries of our era. Parallels are nevertheless striking: “Syncretism and the mingling of religious traditions,” says Guthrie (255), “were the order of the day.” “One mark of the new age was the spread and increased importance of private esoteric cult-societies” (254). Of the cults (Mithra, Osiris, Christ, Bacchus/Dionysus) many claimed descent from, incorporated aspects of, or showed similarities with the cult of Orpheus. The reference to Orpheus in the Christian context brings us again to music.