Ann Wroe

A powerful and poetic work of history on the figure of Orpheus: his life and myth, and his representation and imagining from the sixth century BC to the present day.

The Song of Life

Orpheus

isabella

As a Dionysus-worshipper, Orpheus had become the god. As a devotee of Apollo, he could only paint the god, sing him or dream him from afar. Amid the wildness of the crowd, he had been one with all Nature; now, sobering up, he was on the edge, cut off, and merely an observer. His exile from godhead was made bearable only by the beauty he created in his separated state. In his loneliness lay the root of all the tragedies ever written, and all the sad songs ever heard.

note(s) to self: 1. the love bit is a romantization of it all but i love to see music/dance presented as fractals of the basic universe structure in religion slash mysticism 2. i gotta check more orphism (dualism and christians apologists aside)... im such a fake pagan, dawg

Ceaselessly, the same themes and patterns repeated. So Heaven was both aetherial and earthly; the stars were made of both Heaven and Earth; and man, too, had Heaven and Earth in him. Around him Nature was both finite and infinite, corruptible and everlasting, ‘whirling on the still-standing tips of her toes’: for in Orpheus’s theology everything, from the atoms to the stars, moved in circles of reciprocal desire, and Love made everything dance.

Orpheus quotes

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