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Orpheus / Orphean
- Feb 13
- 2 min read
Updated: Mar 17
Thracian poet, bard, seer, and musician. Son of the Thracian king Oeagrus. Orpheus is also renowned as the founder (or most likely, the patron) of the Orphic Mysteries. His sign or symbol was a golden lyre, an instrument that he received, according to legend, from the god Apollo (who was also Orpheus’ father, as the poet Pindar claimed). Nowadays Orpheus is thought of as a mythical figure, though most of the Ancient Greeks considered him an historical person. Aristotle, however, seemed to doubt the authenticity of a body of epic poems attributed to him (De generatione animalium 734a and De anima 410b). Orpheus was said to predate Homer and Hesiod (both late 8th century BC) by many generations, and he appears as a character in Jason and the Argonauts (Argonautica)—written in the 3rd century BC, parts of which may have been older, going back perhaps even as far as Mycenaean times.
Orpheus’ greatest claim to fame is his descent to the Underworld to return his departed wife, Eurydice, to the world of the living. This story was told in a number of versions, including by the famous Roman poets Virgil (late 1st century BC) and Ovid (early 1st century AD). Even Plato mentioned Orpheus’ descent to the Underworld to bring back his dead wife, though he accused the poet of cowardice: A real man would have killed himself to be with his beloved, argues Plato. As punishment, he relates, the gods showed Orpheus only an apparition of Eurydice (Plato had little regard for musicians):
“But Orpheus, son of Oeagrus, they sent back with failure from Hades, showing him only a wraith of the woman for whom he came; her real self they would not bestow, for he was accounted to have gone upon a coward's quest, too like the minstrel that he was, and to have lacked the spirit to die as Alcestis did for the sake of love, when he contrived the means of entering Hades alive.” (Plato, Symposium, 179d. Perseus)
Orpheus remains an important mythical/cultural character in the Balkans today. He is particularly popular in the Rodopi Mountains in Bulgaria, where many caves are associated with him—including the Devil’s Throat Cave which served as an inspiration for the Orphean Cave in Masks of God as it contains an underground river plus a waterfall into an impenetrable abyss.
