From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Sun Apr 03 2005 - 23:49:47 BST
Sam Norton asked dmb:
Something I pondered on whilst on holiday. You've often said that the
Orpheus myth corresponds to Christian mythology. Can you spell that out?
dmb replies:
For starters, the motif central to both myths is death and resurrection. The
rescue of Eurydice and the horrowing of hell both depict a journey to the
underworld and back again. Orpheus was dismembered in the mannner of a
ritualistically sacrificed animal and Christ is the sacrificial lamb.
Orpheus is the son of Apollo and Christ is the son of God. Orpheus is placed
in the heavens (Vega) and Christ ascends to heaven. In Plato's day Orphic
literature was something like their Bible. Orpheus' mother was the Muse of
epic poetry and Christ's birth was divine too. And I should point out that
these same motifs can be seen in the Egytpian myth of Isis and Osiris,
Dionysus was dismembered by the Titans and them reconstituted. (RE-membered)
We can see in Jonah and the very big fish, where being spat out after a
period of darkness in its belly, is a kind of resurrection too. Or even in
the book of Revelations, where the whole world is destroyed only to be
re-made in a better version. Myths have a way of popping up everywhere.
Sam also said:
And also, in a related fashion, can you link it with the story of Phaedrus'
incarceration and 'resurrection' in ZMM? because that seems to gain
resonance from echoing the Christian story, but I can't see a link with
Orpheus there.
dmb says:
If we view death and resurrection as a depiction of the mystical experience,
then we can that all three are similar. But Pirsig is sort of playing around
with the idea, with the motif, more than giving us a full blown hero's
journey. I mean, he chooses in ZAMM to mount his attack from within the
"church of reason" and the "rational" narrator is trying to resurrect
Phaedrus only so he can bury him forever. Pirsig gives us much more
explicitly mystical musings in LILA. "Be a dead man" and all that.
I should be careful to point out that I'm thinking of Pirsig's descriptions
when I say "mystical experience". It is not a literal death, of course, and
as far as I can tell has very little to do with your church's conception. It
refers to the dissolution of the ego, to a unitive experience. Being
initiated, being led to this experience, was one of the key features of
Orphism and of the pagan mystery religions in general. The following book
quotes actually come from a review by Sarah Belle Dougherty...
"Nearly all the peoples around the Mediterranean had at some point adopted
the Pagan mysteries and adapted them to their own national taste. At some
point in the first few centuries BCE a group of Jews had done likewise and
produced a Jewish version of the Mysteries. Jewish initiates adapted the
myths of Osiris-Dionysus to produce the story of a Jewsh dying and
resurrecting godman. , Jesus the Messiah. In time this myth came to be
interpreted as historical fact and Literalist Christianity was the product".
Jesus and the Lost Goddess, p 123
"In synthesizing the perennial myth of the dying and resurrecting godman
with Jewish expectations of a historical Messiah the creators of the Jewish
Mysteries took an unprecedented step, the outcome of which they could never
have guessed. And yet, upon analysis, the end was already there in the
begininng. The Messiah was expected to be a historical, not a mythical,
saviour. It was inevitable, therefore, that the Jesus story would have to
develop in a quasi-historical setting. And so it did. What had started as a
timeless myth encoding perennial teachings now appeared to be a historical
account of a once-only event in time. From this point it was unavoidable
that sooner or later it would be interpreted as historical fact. Once it
was, a whole new type of religion came into being - a religion based on
history not myth, on blind faith in supposed events rather than on a
mystical understanding of mythical allegories, a religion of the Outer
Mysteries without the Inner Mysteries, of form without content, of belief
without Knowledge." The Jesus Mysteries, p.207
"My favorite defintion of religion is 'a misinterpretation of mythology'.
The misinterpretation consists precisely in attributing historical
references to symbols which properly are spiritual in their reference."
Joseph Campbell
And this one comes from a book I've actually read and presently hold in my
other hand, Joseph Campbell's "Thou Art That: Transforming Religious
Metaphor", page 14....
"It is clear that, in Orpheus and Christ, we have exactly the same
archetype, with the motif of leaving the physical world, still symbolized
with a cross in astronomy, for the spiritual. They leave the Earth, symbol
of the Mother, to go to the realm of the Father.
In the translation of a Neolithic fertility rite into a spiritual fertility
rite, we see the death and ressurrection of the grain refigured in a symbol
of the death of the old Adam and birth of the new. As I have observed
before, although I do not know how to prove it, the great insight of St.
Paul on the road to Damascus was that the calamity of the death of this
young rabbi, Jesus, was a counterpart of the death and ressurecton of the
saviour found in the classical mysteries."
This may raise more questions than it answers, but it should give you a
pretty good idea about the correspondence between Orpheus and Christ.
Thanks for asking,
dmb
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