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| Orpheus, Scott Bodenheimer 1997, woven color plates, 18" x 14", 46 x 36cm |
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Orpheus was the son of the Thracian king Oeagrus and the Muse Calliope, and the most gifted poet and musician, who could make trees and rocks move to follow his songs. He sailed with Jason and the Argonauts to capture the Golden Fleece. A priest of Apollo, he mastered the god’s instrument, the lyre.
He lost his wife Eurydice to a snakebite, and charmed the god Hades into releasing her from the Underworld, if only he would never look back at her on the journey back to life. Eurydice called out before they reached the sunlight, Orpheus turned, and saw her disappear from him again. In grief he wandered, he sang and made stones weep, and then finally he was captured and torn apart by the Maenads, who were wild women, followers of the god Dionysus, Apollo’s rival.
The Greek Orphic Mysteries, a cult that flourished in the 6th century B.C.E., believed that Orpheus created its sacred texts. |
It named Apollo, or Helius, the sun, the supreme god.Some scholars believe it’s origin dates back to the 14th century B.C.E., and was created by a group of exiled priests of the monotheistic sun-god cult imposed in Egypt by the pharoah Akhenaten. The cult members taught that before mankind existed, Zeus and Persephone had had a son named Dionysus Zagreus.
Zeus wanted to place his son in charge of the world, but the Titans, a race of godlike giants rebelled. The Titans captured Dionysus Zagreus, tore him apart and devoured every piece of him except his heart.
The goddess Athena saved her half-brother’s heart and took it to Zeus, who swallowed it, where it eventually grew again into the reborn god Dionysus, who issued from his father’s thigh, as Athena had escaped her father’s head.Zeus destroyed the Titans with thunderbolts for their crime. |
Out of the commingled ashes of his devoured son and the Titans sprang mankind.
The Orphics believed that a person had a partially divine (from Dionysus Zagreus) and partially base (from the Titans) nature, and that through rituals and asceticism (such as abstaining from eating meat), he could rid his soul of the baser qualities, and become purely divine again. They also believed that love between people of the same sex was on a higher plane than procreative heterosexual love.
The Orphic Mysteries are tangled myths that poeticize historical and political conflicts. The way Dionysus Zagreus is reborn purely from his father Zeus, without a mother, points to the ascendance of an invading patriarchal people, and their imposition of a sky father god cult over the existing earth mother goddess religion. |
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In The Greek Myths, Robert Graves writes that the legend of Orpheus' attempt to rescue Eurydice from the Underworld, was probably a distortion of a depiction of an older story - that Orpheus, a priest of the sky god Apollo, had met with Hecate, the Snake goddess Queen of the Dead to intercede for special privileges for the souls of the followers of the Orphic Mysteries.
Perhaps there was an understanding, a sort of détente between the sky father and earth mother cults, that later disintegrated and caused the goddess’ priestesses to seek retribution against, and make a human sacrifice from, the god’s priest - Orpheus.
The Orphic Mysteries prefigured and coexisted with the beginnings of Christianity. Jesus, the son god, is like Dionysus who dies and then is reborn from his father Zeus. |
Orphics believed in redemption, and the ability to change one’s life and become pure. They believed that their souls could only join the divine if they were free from blemish, so they were forbidden to shed blood or eat meat, and they were taught to act as Dionysus did. The Orphics believed that the body itself was a temporary prison for the soul. These beliefs all have corollaries in Christianity: Christians must not commit violence against others, they should model their lives on the teachings of Jesus, they should look to this life as a staging ground for an eternal life in Heaven.
There’s no doubt in my mind that the Four Evangelists, writing in Greek, living in the Hellenistic eastern part of the Roman Empire, incorporated many beliefs from a then thriving six hundred year old religion: Orphism. |
The Evangelists wrote Orphic beliefs into their Gospels to increase the appeal of their nascent religion: Christianity. What Christian churches teach as divine revelation is obviously fabricated, it’s a layering of Greek religion on top of a Jewish framework.
This work in the series of headless torsi represents a desecration, it de-sacred-fies. The original desecration was of art itself, the cutting up images of art masterpieces: images of Orpheus, Christ, musicians and stringed instruments. But also the picture points to times when Christianity, now a religion approximately 1,950 years old, has been dismantled itself, and has lent aspects to other religions like Caodaoism and Mormonism. |
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