Sam Laeuchli
The tale is quite simple, despite variations in details. Orpheus and Eurydice are lovers, blissfully joined, when Eurydice is killed by a snake. Orpheus decides to descend to the underworld in order to bring her back. He enters in Thessaly, charms himself through the barriers of hell by playing his flute and makes a deal with the powers of death: that Eurydice can return with him, under the condition that he not look back. As he is about to resurface to daylight, he does look back and loses her. At the end, he hates women and is torn to shreds by enraged menads. He is worshipped in ancient Greece, and his flute has become a symbol of salvation.
There are many methods, literary, anthropological or theological, by which to approach and comprehend myth. Some people deny its usefulness: mythic times are gone, eclipse of symbolism, and meaningful models must come from elsewhere. Some see in it not more than a structure of language, an etiological or social fragment of ancient culture.
We can also confront myth directly, as if its dynamic, its archetypal coding were still immediate, available to us. I am standing in line at a food truck to buy a cup of coffee, a woman ahead of us is flirting with a man, with charm and wit and artistry. The student beside me laughs as we walk away: Eve is handling the apple superbly, the snake did a nice job! A spontaneous translation has taken place, outside all preconceived theological or psychological investigations, a mythic transmutation that has connected the ancient tale to a concrete scene in front of our eyes.
The following essay results from the work in a mimetic institute, with a psychodramatic method by which people enter experimentally a my(hic paradigm. We continue what was already at work in anti(1uity, in the Orphic underground basilica under the Termini Railway Station in Rome. Why would the ancient Christians have used this myth and its iconography to portray the symbol of salvation, in an early Christian sculpture at Ostia Antica, or the 4th century floor mosaic of Aquileia, where Christ is Orpheus and holds the Orphic (lute? Is there any chance that this mythic tradition has any contemporary meaning, as Rilke’s Sonnets assumed or Cocteau’s Orphée?
We stage a play to find out.
1: EURYDICE
A modern woman plays Eurydice. How does an American individual imagine the myth’s initial scene, the first bliss between two lovers? We ask her a few questions. What do we experience at the outset of the drama?
Sixty years ago, Hollywood had a clear answer, and when we stage the play, this model of love appears deeply ingrained in the American imagination. Eurydice is the paradigm of love, she is happy, often quite beautiful, perhaps she poses in a bathing suit, they certainly had a glorious wedding, and life together is all smiles. Niagara Falls, perhaps Yosemite National Park; if she is more so1histicated, the Riviera or the Parthenon.
At times, we encounter Eurydice living in Greenwich Village, a highly creative individual, Mozart, T. S. Eliot, Aurobindo, she has a large collection of records, Leonard Cohen and the Beatles, she enjoyed “Einstein on the Beach” by Philip Glass and works as an editor (or Simon and Schuster. Her lover comes through like a cherished piece of art, another beautiful accessory in her personal success. It is his role to enhance the richness of her life.
Transmutations of Eurydice: She is a concerned actress without much money, living in a loft with her boy friend, they are violently anti-nuclear, and when Ronald Reagan was elected they fasted for two days; they do not own a lot of things and once in a while, they do not have enough food on their table. Her bliss seems to lie in her commitment.
And recently, the Eurydice of North Philadelphia, the couple from the throw-away society, her husband unemployed like his brother, like his father, like a cousin, like a second cousin . . . she came to our university, took my classes, she brought him along sometimes but it did not get him a job, and twice they were robbed in their primitive apartment, and since they owned so little, it was bizarre that anyone would even bother to loot their place.
Eurydice has a number of options with which she can confront the tale:
“Of course it was a glorious time, that initial bond! We loved each other! Love goes through you from morning to night and through the sleep. . . . You are fulfilled!”
She can be played with total naiveté:
“When a woman loves, nothing else matters; we would have lived in total bliss, it would have been the solution to all our ills, a never-ending story of joy!”
She can be played with a first awareness of what may lie ahead:
“I am not sure if it could have worked. It was effervescent love, but in a way we were afraid, we might not remain all that happy all our life. Perhaps two people cannot be happy forever. She looks at Orpheus, waits for a moment, she seems taken aback, looks at him again:
“The people who are asking me what it was like, they don’t realize what went on, maybe they think we should have lived like love-bugs for the rest of our lives, little that they know. . .
Orpheus and Eurydice, the classical love couple of ancient myth, talk to each other. Eurydice looks at him:
“Did you really love me? Was I the only one you were thinking about, every minute of the day? Were you absolutely faithful?”
ORPHEUS:
“What a strange question to ask me! I loved you so much, and now, once the story has gone awry, you project your doubt into the beginning!”
EURYDICE:
“You know, Orpheus: I don’t quite believe you! You told me you loved me but . . . please tell me: did you sometimes think of someone else?”
ORPHEUS:
“I was deeply shaken when I lost you!”
EURYDICE:
“Orpheus, they don’t understand that our love could not work. That two people cannot stay together. The moment comes when that snake bites us, when the movie ends, the illusions of the church, the phony film maker has pocketed the millions and goes on vacation, and we were left on the stage, the two of us, and suddenly we had to carry the tale, and the snake. . .
When Orpheus begins to question the dynamic of their fate, a passionate cognitive scope can be brought to the dialogue:
“Why did the gods put that story on us? What was the purpose of loss?”
Eurydice can get terrified:
“Stop asking such stuff! People have asked it forever and it never amounted to very much, what they came up with. We did not make it. That’s all. We were thrown out of the garden.”
Eurydice and Orpheus. The projection of love. The possibility of a happy past, however we imagine it in our scenario of sexual puberty, the fantasy of sexual puberty projected back into our early history. What is played out is actually a pre-sexual state, the childlike couple in the garden of Eden before the fall.
Each of us carries his own, her own, version of Orpheus and Eurydice, of love and expectation and a lost past. The opening scene recaptures an adolescent dream, of beauty and perfection, of hope arid illusion. We may play it with the ring of the Song of Songs or of Plotinus, through Sigmund Freud or Erica Jong, angrily or cynically, full of naiveté or full of despair; the imagined bliss in early human loving lies at the root of that initial scene.
Eurydice is dead. The myth tells us, as we all know and all too well, that the adolescent dream did not work out, not because the third chapter of Genesis, Dante, or Erich Fromm told us so, nor because the research team is especially depressive today. We see the resuit in front of us and are shocked by it. The couple is being torn out of their bliss.
Eurydice is dead and we ask her: why did you die? Why is it your love life did not work out?
She responds spontaneously:
“What stupid questions you people always raise! To ask a human being, after her death: why did you die!! I think it’s an accusation! You want to get at me!”
She thinks it over for a moment:
“It’s a clever mechanism of the mortals, to accuse the dead. Then you don’t have to come to terms with death! If I have been attracted to the God, if I have been unfaithful, even only in my head, with just one adulterous thought, then your puritan minds can go to sleep comfort. ably: I’m guilty! The gods are absolved! I got what I deserved!”
“What a mean twist: she wanted to die! Oh, if you just can use the word Thanatos you feel better! That’s why you took Psych I back as a sophomore. You spend a lifetime trying to feel better! If I wanted o die, by some trick of your troubled brains you don’t have to be afraid. I only died because I wanted to die! Things aren’t all that bad, are they?”
She can respond differently:
“You people aren’t as stupid as I thought. You are not totally off the track, asking me about my death.”
“No: it wasn’t all right, the two car garage in Bryn Mawr, the wedding list at Bloomingdale’s. Does not fill a life. We had all the cash we needed, and after we made love we did not speak to each other. Yes: he always went to pour himself a Scotch, afterwards . . Why did he pour himself a Scotch? . .
She can be very angry:
“Yea: that’s what the parents expected from us! Mom called, is it true that my period still had not come? That’s all she wanted from us, she did not care about my work, she did not ask me why Jerry lost his job, just that insinuation: did we think of renting a larger apartment.
We have listened to a very sensitive Eurydice:
“You want to know why the snake bit me, don’t you? You want to know if I could not tolerate my happiness! I hear you: that I had to destroy my joy, that love was too much for me and we could not bear closeness, neither of us, and I chose the way out, to free both of us from ourselves. Maybe you’re wrong, maybe you’ve got something there.
And we faced a powerful Eurydice, contemporary, alert, bleeding:
“You would like me to recreate Tinseltown for you, don’t you! And what would I get for it? Twenty years of futility. The kids turn to crack or they become successful on Wall Street. At the end I am here, in that damned jail of mine, the man long gone, divorced, or no: he may still be living with me, in bed next to rue, the stranger, long somewhere else, and I have lived a life without a life.”
“No thank you, I shall not tolerate P.T.A. The snake is my savior. Four weeks of honeymoon Instead of twenty years of civilization. Freud could not give me a reason why I should choose the second either. Nor did Jesus. Nor (lie guru across the street.”
Why did Eurydice die? The mythic play has brushed the gamut of questions long raised in theology, literature and society, in ethics and psychology. We have begun to trace its code: what is the meaning of loss, why were they, in that other story, chased from the garden? Eurydice died and the myth captured her experience, however she phrases it, and however we shall respond to it.
Why did Orpheus decide to risk this reckless venture? No one has ever come back from the land of the dead. We are not created to return from the underworld. What drove him to his journey? Love for Eurydice, or something else?
As we turn to Orpheus with these questions, we connect to something which operates from the first to the last scene of this mythic play: a synchronic experience of time which normal thought processes are not capable of carrying out and which may lie at the root of the healing quality of symbol. Mythic experience is not merely diachronic, it does not wait for the end to connect to the end.
For even as we ask this question, before Orpheus responds, we already know the end. We know that he will not succeed. He will go anyhow. And even though he will not succeed and finally will be killed, his flute will be worshipped, his tale will become meaningful, a code for salvation.
Did he know in advance that he would fail? But if he knew, why would he go ahead? Why does he choose what is doomed before he begins? Is the path into hell his own choice? And why do we look for salvation, ours or someone else’s, in such a bizarre sequence of events?
Theologians have raised the question of salvation, passionately and without ever coming to a consensus, from the rabbis and Saint Paul to Luther and Karl Barth: why are the borders between chaff and wheat so elusive, why are grace and freedom such paradoxes in our language system?
Tells us, Orpheus, why did you decide to challenge the gods, to enter the world of the dead?
I propose that Orpheus not answer us, that he only hear our questions. The entire enigma of his journey is already contained in these our questions:
“Listen, Orpheus! It was an absurd thing, to go down there! Most of us would not be that fooolhardy. It’s not human. We could not tolerate to breathe the night of the dead. This is no horror movie we see to pass a Saturday evening.”
“Look: many people are dear to us but we have to let them go. We have to go on without them. And we surely do not descend into Hades to recover them.”
Indeed. We mourn. It is painful to lose our lover. We weep. And we let go. Life goes on. We find new partners, new love, even though they too may drink a Scotch after they make love. We shall try, nonetheless, to talk with them, to communicate. To stay alive.
“And something else, Orpheus: Does your choice really have to do with Eurydice’s death? She did not ask you to come down there. She is dead. She drank Lethe, the water of forgetting. And in the entire remaining story, she does not say a word. The dead no longer make demands, they are silent.”
“No: Apollo did not ask you to go. Neither did Aphrodite. Nor Zeus. You cannot blame the gods this time. You failed, the gods did not provoke your loss. They did not send you.”
‘And by the way, if you really had loved her, if the two of you had been in contact with each other, you would not have, at the end, you know, when you were about to reascend in Thessaly. . .
Why did Orpheus descend? Was it hubrus, the human desire to penetrate the riddle of the unknown? A kind of occult science which has led mankind astray so many times? Pride, genius, concern, altruism?
Why does Mother Teresa take on the slums of Calcutta, the darkness of a Continent? Masochism? Insanity? Sainthood? Why should any of us choose darkness, touch the powers of destruction, find the shadows of love?
‘Go ahead, Orpheus, just go ahead. We cannot stop you. But one question, before you depart: do you really intend to save her? If you already know that you will lose her, why on earth are you going? She is dead! That’s all there is to it!!”
The trip begins. We do not need to wait for his answers which are included in our sentences. He goes. He will go. He has gone.
The encounter between Orpheus and the laws of darkness is a frightening vision. Gluck wrote an opera about it. The model has existed long before ancient Greece, before Persephone, Christ and Dante, in the Sumerian tale of manna, the queen of heaven who descended into the realm of darkness and got killed there.
Why does manna heal Ereshkigal, her sister and her own darker self, by entering the underworld and being slain in the darkness? Does Orpheus heal anyone by his pact . . . which after all he will lose?
We reenact Orpheus’ journey. We share his fear, his risk, his awe of demons which from St. Antony to Grünewald have been the domain of dark and unknown forces beyond the surface of normal life. The singer cracks the barriers of forgetting. He conjures the space of death. He plays when Cerberus wants to prevent his coming in. He plays when evil forces want to force him back. He plays against the odds. He plays to recover the dead.
Orpheus meets the judges of the underworld, the forces of death, Minos, the law court of darkness. The scene works so powerfully, because it is etched into our biography, from earliest childhood on. Way back in our past, the cries of the unconscious, the encounter with the demonic forces that work through us, against us, beside us, arose for the first time; we have never really left behind that desperate pantomime between our fear and the forces that shape that fear.
It is of no use to appeal for mercy. When we face emotional or social destruction, a suicidal rope, the cruelty of state or family, pleading often does not help. Sadism loves the plea, for it whips the sadist up to more of the same. The confrontation between Orpheus and the Judges of the Underworld has no ethical pre-scripts, only the risk.
No one has ever freed a dead person from the underworld: such is the law of life. Eurydice had to drink the water as she crossed the river, and it was an act of mercy. To become conscious, to recover the past, is a hard task, as Orpheus was about to find out. Orpheus takes on an entire cosmos of social and emotional, let alone theological convictions about the limits of human boundaries. The confrontation with death is not a matter of reflecting or planning.
It is valuable for our mastering the genius of the myth if in our play the judges at first will not bend. They enact the immovable flow of destiny, they are neither catholic nor protestant, neither liberal nor conservative. Yoga does not help and phenomenology of religion does not help. We enter the scene by renouncing the categories with which we want to “argue” the case. Healing is not a matter of argument.
Eurydice does not say a single word in the rest of the tale, being present as from a distance, while Orpheus penetrates the consciousness of Hades.
What remains is the Gestalt of death. The secret of the underworld thrown back unto our own being, a mythic midnight breathed if only for an instant by our own fragile selves.
There is no theology of hell. There is only hell. And because there is no explanation of hell, no theodicy of Tartarus’ cruelty and pain, nor of Hades’ shadows and forgetting (you cannot talk when you have forgotten!), the pantomime of Orpheus’ descent is different from any explanation.
We cannot really enter it, that underworld, the shadow of our past; death remains a mystery. What we can do is mirror the night of that journey, the savior’s ominous hybris and his loss, and in the powerful words of Dylan Thomas: “rage, rage, against the dying of the light.” Orpheus wants her back at all costs, the woman, whatever she means to him, and if Orpheus is played by a woman and Eurydice by a man, the same holds true: we want her back, whatever “back” means, and whatever it is we are so desperately trying to “recover.”
He sings the mantra of the woman, in the face of death, she sings the mantra of the man, the confrontation with the mirror of our self, the entry into the “other world” of our partner, the no! of love, the loss of love, the defrocked sanctuary, the turned-about wedding ceremony.
He does not give a lecture to the underworld, he plays the flute, he chants that dark side of the upper world. Orpheus takes on the watch-dog of despair, the midnight of no-more, the annihilation of meaning, and in that gestus penetrates the veil.
It is a fragile enterprise, to play the gestus of our death. We enter the moment, horrifying as it is, of the last breath. One more embrace. A requiem. The final farewell at the wall of East Berlin. And then the judgment of the end. No longer. Orpheus does not see her in the underworld. And when he looks at her, she will be gone.
It is a play against the mythic wall of death. The gesture against the unfairness of limited existence. Perhaps the judges have no eyes, they cannot smile back, they cannot argue, relate, mediate on our linguistic terms. They are the ultimate Super-Ego, the absolute ananke of futility. Death thrives on an unthinkable law.
And yet, what is it that changes the underworld’s minds? Is it the song against all odds? The hope of Orpheus, even though, in mythic synchronicity, we know that he will not succeed? Is salvation conditioned by the reality that we shall not succeed? Why did they put the Orphic flute into the hands of the Christian savior? Did they want to remind us that salvation can only come, when we have lost the bargain?
There is something in us that would like to codify whatever it is Orpheus does. If he does it, we can do it. There lies the origin of dogma, of school and metaphysic, of law and tradition; if we could say: “That is why Orpheus could change the judges’ mind!”, then we could repeat it. Do the same, say the same. “Learn” from Orpheus.
It does not work that way. There is no blueprint of that Orphic journey, no way to appropriate its success, its cash value, as a black on white page in the score book of salvation. How well Augustine understood this predicament in his painful arguments on grace.
The play in the underworld allows the rage against hope, the bargain with our future. It lets us encounter our own destruction, and the fascinating aspect of the Orphic myth is its juxtaposition of desire and death. In the bargain with the underworld, Orpheus loses; Eurydice is not saved.
To play the descent into Hades is the alternative to that hermeneutic exhaustion, in which we try to tell ourselves again and again that we must finally explain and understand the dark night of the soul. We cannot perceive the encounter between Orpheus and Minos. We can only play it. The world is dark down there, after all. We cannot argue with the judges, nor with or against Orpheus. We can but go with him. For it is here that the myth of Orpheus reaches its point of change.
He looked back and lost her! It is a bizarre experience, to play the tale of separation, the experience of shadow and rejection, that final betrayal of love. To play the failure of salvation! It is at that precise point that the healing character of this myth begins to operate.
I want to throw some light on the mythic process by an experience from our daily life. When we find someone in deep trouble, in a hellish marriage war in which Eurydice’s death is repeated, in deep alcoholism, depression or loneliness, most of us have an honest desire:
we want to make things better. We want to turn people around. And so we tell them how to have a meaningful relationship, we give advice on how to drink moderately or come to full abstinence. We suggest how to change the patterns, Alcoholics Anonymous, a course in marriage counselling.
But as we find out, and so many times, our talking does not help. Every one of us has surely had alcoholic, depressed, or lonely friends and our preaching did not help. In fact, giving advice has the tendency to aggravate both the victim and the talker. Both tend to get annoyed because they realize, the longer the process goes on, that the process does not work. To tell people to change does not make them change.
It does not help to tell a person to change, as every parent, counsellor or priest has learned through bitter experiences, just as people cannot tell us what we should do. To preach the myth does not help. We have heard so many sermons in which people preached salvation through Christ, and people were not saved. Healing does not come by talking about healing.
What is healing, then, not only in this myth, but in replaying it? It is in answer to that question that the myth of Orpheus becomes a paradigm for change. And it is also at that point that we begin to understand why the ancient Christians chose Orpheus as a model for their hope.
The myth of Orpheus does not preach an ethic of salvation. It does something much more subtle and much more powerful: it draws us into its loss. Orpheus loses Eurydice. He turns around. He is not the savior for which we have hoped, he is not the successful television preacher who heals with his Cadillac waiting in the parking lot. Orpheus crawls through the opening of the earth back into daylight, and he has lost his gamble.
“My god, my god why did you forsake me?” It is that consciousness of loss that turns this tale into a paradigm of hope. For hope does not come by preaching hope: how many times have we been deceived by promises? Hope comes by not preaching hope, by entering the space of hopelessness, by sharing the pain of the dying, by sitting with the homeless, the depressed, the suicide victim. Hope is not a product of ideas, it is the response to a loss. It is the mimesis of descent.
The story of Orpheus in his inability to bring back his beloved woman, and the rage with which this myth ends, contain basic therapeutic elements. The healing power of this tale lies in its reversal, in its imagistic tours-de-force. The myth allows us to enter its hell. Not simply to think about its hell: that too, but only after the fact, just as the liturgy precedes any explanation of its path. Before we think about salvation, and after we think about salvation, we enter with Orpheus, we follow his descent, and we experience his failure. The artists who created the stations of the cross knew what they were doing: such is the gestus of and initiation into suffering, the pantomime of the passion.
When I sit next to the sweet woman in my family who has Alzheimers, and I want to do something, bring about change, bring healing reality into her darkening years, it will not do any good to tell her that a hundred scientists are working on a serum against thisdisease. She will not believe me, for it is too late for her. I cannot talk about a future life for she shakes her head: it does not change the agony of Alzheimer’s humiliation. Instead I sit next to her, I share her deep sadness, her last attempt to think before thought will finally disappear from her life. Orpheus did not succeed. He shared with Eurydice the space of hell. Kafka. Dante. Good Friday.
Healing is the path of hospice, a descent into the realm of the shadows, not just as an interesting Jungian display of symbols, which can be just another tragic escape; we share the rage against the law of sickness, we play the flute against the injustice of society. Healing is an initiation, the Orphic path from hell to life, even though, precisely though it did not succeed.
Ar1d so the flute of Orpheus creates the magic song by which the darkness is bent. The curse is turned in on its own cruelty, and the music dares to hold and transform the cruelty. The flute, as in the hands of the Christ on the floor of Aquileia, is the magic of hope, the symbol of healing.
What do they say, Orpheus and Eurydice, when they face each other at the end of the play? Has anything changed? What is healing, what is change of consciousness?
Is it that they have shared the pain, touched their death, their loss? And now life can begin?
Will they never meet, did the journey end in separation, and Eurydice will go elsewhere, no more relationship, and Orpheus despises woman and he will finally be done in by some enraged feminist? The unhealed poet of an unhealed earth? Is the flute of Orpheus the surviving shard from a healing that could have been, without glorious prime time exposure?
Or will they start their lives, only now, only here, a synchronic initiation into the song of death? Can they understand, feel, recapture, penetrate the reality of man and woman, the loss, the longing, the impossibility and the risk? Will the initiation allow them to live as an authentic couple, with struggles and with laughter?
Does the play lead to awareness: Orpheus and Eurydice are watching our history, their own biography. They have embraced the parameters of Hades. Having faced the mirrors of their deaths, they speak no more, they are, they are aware, they share? And they muse in awe what their tale has shown the world?