The Last Song of Orpheus

  On the walls of his tomb were paintings, bright and wondrous, showing the gods of his people and the judging of the dead, Pharaoh himself standing before them to offer an account of his life and his reign. A strange god with a brawny body and a bird’s head weighed the heart of the king in a balance while the presiding god looked on, judging its merit. These gods, he said, are called Thoth and Osiris. The Egyptians have a multitude of gods, whom they call by Egyptian names, though of course all gods are the same, no matter what mortals may call them, certain names for the Egyptians and certain ones for the Babylonians and different ones for the people of the yellow lands: names are only names, but the gods are the same, be they Amon and Thoth or Zeus and Hermes, the patterns are the same everywhere: Osiris is a god who is slain and resurrected, and is that not true of Dionysus as well? Thoth is Hermes; Amon is not unlike far-seeing Zeus. And in the end all of them, Poseidon and Hermes and Dionysus and Ares and Athena, Horus and Osiris and Isis and Set, must be understood as mere aspects of the One God who rules the universe. I did not discuss these matters with Pharaoh, though later I would with his priests. What I did speak of with him was the art of music, and the methods by which his tomb had been carved into the rock, and when he showed me the colossal pyramidal mountains of stone that his distant ancestors had built as their own tombs at a time when such huge funerary monuments were in fashion, he explained to me the secret of how those tremendous blocks of granite had been trundled toward the site and lifted into position, telling me of the amazing levers and hoists and engines by which the job was done. But we did not ever discuss the nature of the gods.

  I stayed in Egypt five years, or perhaps it was ten. The days went by quickly and under that implacable sun my sadness began gradually to melt. I showed them how to make lyres from a tortoise shell and a sounding-skin, and how to attach the strings and how to affix the decorative horns. Pharaoh complained that these lyres were not like my own, and I explained that a god had fashioned mine out of gold and it was the only one of its kind in the world. “Which god?” he demanded, and I hesitated a moment and said, “Thoth,” for he knew nothing of Hermes. Since Thoth is the weigher of the souls of the dead the king did not care to have me invoke him, so nothing more was said about the making of a second lyre the equal of my own. But I could tell that he was displeased.

  I taught his courtiers how to play the lyres that I made and how to sing to them, and they sang well enough, in their way, though there was no magic in their singing. How could there have been? I am Orpheus, who was made by the gods to bring music to this world of ours, and they were only men and women of the court of Pharaoh, constrained by all the constraints that hold the court of Pharaoh in an iron grip. For they do everything at the court of Pharaoh as it was done a thousand years before, and three thousand, and ten thousand. Nothing must change, they think, or the skies will fall. So they sing the melodies of Orpheus but they sing them in their rigid Egyptian way, stiff and jangling where my melodies are sinuous and gentle, and so everything is quite different. But they were happy with what they achieved and music resounded day and night in the halls of the palace of Pharaoh.

  They are an interesting people. They have poetry and literature and painting, and do it all quite well. They have a kind of writing, too, a funny picture-writing, using images of snakes and beetles and owls and whips to stand for sounds and ideas, very cumbersome. I have devised a better system for my own people. I offered it to Pharaoh, but he would not have it: the more fool he, but Egypt’s welfare is not my concern. Anyway, they are happy with the things they have, which will serve them for a very long time. But my kind of writing will outlast even theirs. A time will come when no one in the world will be able to read their writing, and it will be understood again only because men will find a text that has the same inscription in their writing and mine, which will still be capable of being read, so that they can compare and decipher the mysteries of those owl-pictures and beetle-pictures and summon sense and meaning from them again.

  On the other hand, they have devoted many thousands of years to the study of the secrets of the soul, and have deep insight into such things. I learned all that I could of their magic. I learned of the Amulet of the Eye of Horus and the Amulet of the Two Fingers and the Amulet of the Collar of Gold. I learned of the Seven Cows and the Four Rudders, and of the Gift of Air and Water. I learned the names of the Seven Gates and the words of the Coming Forth by Day. And when the great priest of Pharaoh offered to initiate me into the most sacred mysteries of Egypt, I accepted gladly: I have never been too proud to learn when learning is offered me. (I am like far-questing Odysseus in this. Of all mortal mankind there has never been anyone I admired more than clever Odysseus. I had no love for him, because he allowed his men to sack my city of Ismarus when they passed the coast of Thrace at the beginning of their journey home from Troy, but it was impossible not to admire the workings of his mind, and we would become friends, after a sort, long afterward.)

  The Mysteries of Egypt were worthy mysteries, though they were not sufficient to the task, since they did not deal fully, as our Mysteries do, with the problems of creation and existence and death, though they do touch on the great matter of rebirth. Still, for all their gaps, they are excellent mysteries, full of truth. These Egyptian Mysteries I will not sing to you, Musaeus, not here, at any rate, because they are Mysteries sacred to those people and may not be treated that way, but you know something of them already. You know that they deal primarily with the fate of the soul after death. You know that they teach us that when breath leaves us we go before the judges of Hades and are consigned to our next existence according to our deserts, punishment for the wicked, happiness for the good. And then we drink the waters of Lethe and forget who we have been and are made ready for our new lives, and enter again a mortal body and are born once more, and the circle is complete, though at last a time comes, when one has undergone the full initiation, that final release from the body is granted.

  So it is, at least, among mortals. For us who are not entirely mortal it is different, a cycle of eternal return, a dying and a coming to life again, even as the cornfield and the grapevine spring to new green growth after the brown barren time of winter has passed. I often wonder what it is like to be truly mortal, to be ordinary, to be not in the least mythical: to live only a short while, sixty or seventy years, and then to die and be forgotten, even by one’s own sons, who are just like oneself and will quickly grow old and die in their turn. And when mortals return to life, as the Mysteries say they will, it is without memory of what they have been before, so that they must learn and do and suffer all over again. I have sired mortal children, Musaeus, many of them, your brothers and sisters, though you never knew them. Now and then I encounter them in the world, aging wrinkled people with thinning hair and sagging frames. Some of them are unable even to sing. It is all very strange.

  I returned to the Mysteries into which the Egyptian priests initiated me, the Lesser Mysteries and the Greater Mysteries, until I had mastered them. Now that I was an initiate I wore clean white linen robes every day and dined only on greens and cheese, for I could touch neither meat nor wine except at the time of the sacrifices to the gods. All the ancient strangenesses of Egypt were piped into my eager mind, holy secrets that have guided me ever since, and which I impart, sparingly and with caution, to those I think merit knowing of them. In the temples of Egypt I learned all that there was to learn of the struggle that awaits one when life has ended, of the judging of the soul after death and of the soul’s strange midnight wanderings through the twelve caverns of the Netherworld, surrounded on all sides by dread enemies that must be repulsed, and of the lake of fire, and of the boat that sails the waters beneath the world, and of the bull with four horns, and of the Great One kneeling in the sacred barge, and much, much more of which I may not speak. And although I had been to the Netherworld myself, not once but many times in the eternal cycle that is my life, I came to understand much about it from these priests that ha
d not been clear to me before.

  And then I knew that it was time for me to leave Egypt; for I always know when it is time to close one phase of my journey and begin the next. So I moved along from that sun-gripped land and set forth to return to my native Thrace.

  There I found my father Oeagros dying. He had just enough strength left to speak of making a final journey into the wild mountains of the north, as he had always said he would do when he felt his end approaching, a journey from which there would be no coming back. I offered him the consolations I had learned in Egypt, but he would have none of them. In our land Dionysus was the reigning god, the old fierce Dionysus whom they worshipped with wild torch-bearing processions and the drinking of wine and the rending of beasts and the guzzling of their blood, and so my father ended his days with what he saw as the proper homage to his god, making a last offering to Dionysus, eating of the flesh and drinking of the blood, and went on his solitary journey into the dark mountainous wilderness dense with mighty trees that surrounded our city, and that was the last of him. So for a time I ruled as king in his place. Knowing that this was what I was meant to do at this point in my days I dwelled placidly among the roughhewn Ciconians and was for a time their ruler, their lawgiver, their teacher. I gave them the art of letters and showed them better ways of sowing their crops and made songs for them that tempered to some degree their cruel and savage spirits, and attempted to inculcate in them some of the true Mysteries, though that was hard, because I wanted to guide them toward the cool and disciplined way of Apollo and it was plain that they preferred the riotous and bloody way of Dionysus. I did my best. The years went by, and still I tarried in the land of the Ciconians. I lived there as king and lawgiver until Cheiron the king of the centaurs came to me and and stood looming above me with his great beard flowing down over the vast barrel of his horse-chest, and said I must sail with Jason, whose foster-father he was, on his quest for the Golden Fleece.

  “Must I?” I said. “What good will be served by that? I am of great use doing what I do here.”

  Of course I knew in my heart that it is a waste of breath to question what has been determined for us by the gods. The voyage I would make with Jason would be an arduous and painful one, and plainly it was meant to be the next stage in my tempering; therefore it was mere folly to protest. But I had ruled long enough in Thrace to have come to cherish my role as teacher and counsellor, and it was my first response to balk at giving all that up merely to go off on some wild venture with a great fool like Jason.

  But Cheiron, that noble creature with the head and shoulders and brawny chest of a god rising from the body of a magnificent horse, was the wisest of all his race, himself a master of the arts of medicine and music and gifted with the skill of prophecy, and he was patient with me. “You must go because you must go,” he said simply, knowing that I would understand what he meant by that; but also he said, “Without you and your music, Orpheus, the voyage will not succeed, and the voyage must succeed, and therefore you must go.”

  That I had no choice in the matter was already clear to me, for one never has any choice in any matter; that there might be any merit in this quest of Jason’s was something that could well be doubted, but it is madness to attempt to understand the reasons the gods have for what they decree; and that Zeus had sent the command to me by no less a messenger than Cheiron, the wise centaur king, told me that there must be some necessity underlying what one might easily regard as an idle and even wicked enterprise.

  So I gave a great feast in honor of the noble centaur, and he and I sat up far into the night discussing high and serious matters, the subjects I had already devoted much of my life to contemplating: the nature of the gods, most particularly Apollo, who was as close to his heart as he was to mine, and the relationship of music to number, and the role of music in sustaining the movements of the stars, and the methods by which the dead can sometimes be restored to life, and many another subject; and in the morning I bade him farewell and began my preparations for joining Jason and his Argonauts. Which is how it happened that I went off with them to distant Colchis in quest of the Golden Fleece, and achieved much but suffered greatly in the course of those high deeds.

  10

  About this Jason—a brave man, but, as I have said, a great fool—and this voyage to steal the Golden Fleece, I will tell you many things, but first you must know this:

  In Thessaly in ancient times lived King Athamas, the son of Aeolus, with his queen, Nephele. They had two children, the boy Phrixus and the girl Helle. King Athamas in time put aside his wife and took another, and Nephele feared that her children might be in danger, for their stepmother did not love them. She prayed to Hermes, who sent her a ram with golden fleece; Nephele placed the children on that ram’s back and it vaulted into the sky, heading eastward across the strait that divides Europe and Asia. In mid-flight Helle lost her grip and tumbled into the sea, which is why that strait is called the Hellespont, but Phrixus held tight and was safely delivered to the land of Colchis far away on the eastern shore of the great body of water we call the Euxine Sea, which later men will know by the unkinder name of the Black Sea.

  Aietes, king of Colchis, welcomed Phrixus, for he was under the command of Hermes to be hospitable to him, and gave him sanctuary. The ram who had borne him there was sacrificed as a thanksgiving-offering to Zeus; Phrixus gave its golden fleece to Aietes as the bride-price for the king’s daughter Chalciope, and the fleece was placed in a consecrated grove, where it was guarded by a great serpent that slept neither by night nor day. But Aietes felt resentful that the gods had thrust Phrixus upon him, and when after a time Phrixus died, the king denied him a proper burial of the sort practiced in all the Hellene lands. In Colchis it is the strange custom that only women are given burial; the bodies of men are wrapped in ox-hides and they hang them up exposed in trees for the birds to eat, and that was what was done with the body of Phrixus. Because of that the ghost of Phrixus was compelled to wander disconsolately about in Colchis with no way to attain proper rest. This is the story as it was told to me; whether it is true or not, I cannot say. You already know of me that I neither confirm nor deny.

  Now to sing of Jason: like Phrixus a man of Thessaly and indeed his kinsman, Jason was the son of Aeson, who ruled the kingdom of Iolcus, close beside the land where Athamas, the father of Phrixus, was king; and Aeson was a son of Cretheus, brother of Athamas, so Aeson and Phrixus were cousins. Jason’s name at birth was Diomedes. King Aeson was a mild and gentle man, but his warlike half-brother Pelias, coveting the throne, forced him to yield his crown to him when Aeson’s son Diomedes was only a babe, though Pelias promised that when Diomedes reached manhood he would surrender the royal power to him. Aeson was kept a prisoner thereafter in Pelias’ palace; as for Diomedes, a kindly servant saw to it that he was smuggled out of Iolcus to Mount Pelion, where he was placed in the care of the centaur Cheiron. The centaur gave him the new name of Jason, meaning “healer,” and raised him there until he was grown. This much I know to be true, for Cheiron told me so himself.

  The usurper Pelias, ruling unchallenged in Iolcus, was haunted by the ghost of his cousin Phrixus, who told him in dreams that neither Pelias nor any of his kin would flourish until both Phrixus and the fleece of the golden ram that had carried him to Colchis were brought back to Thessaly. Pelias also was troubled by an oracle’s tale that a man with one sandal would come to his city and overthrow him. And indeed one day a man with one foot bare did arrive in Iolcus: none other than Jason, now full-grown and intending to restore his father to the throne. He had lost the sandal while helping the goddess Hera, in the guise of an old woman, to cross a river, and by so doing had won the gratitude and the protection of the queen of the gods.

  Jason was taken before Pelias, and boldly—or, one might say, foolishly—told him that the name he bore was one that his foster-father Cheiron had given him, but before he was Jason he had been Diomedes, son of King Aeson. He demanded that Pelias step down from the throne, a
s he had sworn to do long ago; and the deceitful Pelias, pretending great love for his brother and his brother’s son, replied without hesitation that he would, but on one condition.

  “And what may that be?” asked Jason.

  “This land is under the curse of our kinsman Phrixus, whose spirit wanders unhallowed in Colchis. An oracle has told me that there will be no peace for our family until he is returned to the city of his birth, and that must be done only in a certain way. Therefore build a ship and sail to Colchis, and bring the ghost of Phrixus home to Iolcus aboard that ship, and bring with it the fleece of the golden ram that had carried him as a fugitive to Colchis before you were born.”

  That seemed to Pelias the perfect way to rid himself of Jason; for the sea voyage to Colchis was so fraught with perils that it was almost impossible to survive, and in any event stealing the Golden Fleece from under the baleful glare of that unsleeping dragon was something that no one could achieve. But Jason, as I have said twice now, was a great fool, though a brave man, and he set out forthwith to build the ship and bring Phrixus and the fleece home from Colchis.