Orpheus the king. Orpheus the Austrian poet’s muse. I wasn’t surprised to discover when I finally investigated his origins in Rome and Greece that Orpheus had never really been a single mythological character. Aristotle and his contemporaries regarded the poems attributed to Orpheus as being authored by many different writers. Modern studies of classical texts and traditions have further substantiated this perspective. Like Homer, Orpheus is plural. Rather than a heroic individual, the name Orpheus appears to have been used more as a spiritual title. You didn’t pray to Orpheus. You prayed as Orpheus: through lyric and poetry and ecstatic worship of the natural world.
Orpheus mushrooms up across cities and cultures, always adapted to a particular ecosystem. The Orpheus of Thrace is different than the Orpheus of Rome. The Orpheus of Ovid belongs wholly to Ovid. This plurality resonates with the mythic bones of his story: a man journeys to the underworld and then returns. A god dies and is reborn. Every time his story is summoned, it is reborn differently. Thinking with mycelium, we see Orpheus intimately looping with the landscape. Orpheus’ dismemberment by maenads is an echo of the Egyptian god Osiris’s dismemberment, the death of Attis, and the gruesome demise of Dionysus Zagreus. Each of these dying and resurrecting Gods fruits up from a similar underground mycorrhizal system that produces gods associated with vegetation, the underworld, music, poetry, love, and springtime.
By Sophie Strand, excerpted and adapted from The Flowering Wand: Lunar Kings, Lichenized Lovers, Transpecies Magicians, and Rhizomatic Harpists Heal the Masculine, forthcoming 2022 from Inner Traditions.
