[Greetings, friends, from Memphis! This weekend, I was able to watch and support two close friends, incredible creators, and better humans (Danny Miranda and Zach Pogrob) as they completed their first marathons. It was an amazing experience with people I love that I will cherish forever. (And they immediately convinced me to sign up for the Half Marathon in Austin on February 18, 2024, if any of you are interested in joining.)
More than once, while walking the streets of downtown Memphis both before and after their race, we passed by a theatre called the Orpheum—a popular name for musical theatres worldwide. (I lived across the street from one in Minneapolis for three years.) Named after Orpheus, the great Greek bard, Orpheum means something like “house dedicated to Orpheus” in the same way that Museum means something like “house dedicated to the Muses.” Of course, the first time we walked past the Orpheum, I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. I almost instinctually let out a long and boring monologue about the story of Orpheus and Eurydice (which I’m practically certain Danny and Zach tuned out immediately… God bless their souls).
But it got me reflecting: for reasons unknown to me, the story of Orpheus is one I think about often. Perhaps because his influence is everywhere in the modern arts. Or perhaps because there’s something deeper. So, as a forcing function to get me to reflect deeper, I decided this week’s essay would be about Orpheus—whose legendary lyre was as sweet as King David’s and whose spirit lives on in theatres that bear his name.]
Greek legend tells of a man given a golden lyre and taught to play it by Apollo. Pindar called him the father of songs and made him the son of the Muse Calliope. Simonides of Ceos said his music could charm the wild beasts, convince rocks and trees to dance, and divert the course of rivers. In the Argonautica, Apollonius Rhodius tells of how he helped Jason and the Argonauts safely past the Sirens by playing a song more beautiful than the voices of the Sirens.
But the most famous story of them all—the one we are focusing on today—is his journey into the Underworld and the tragedy that strikes all because he decided to look back before the deed was done. His name is Orpheus, and Ovid tells his story in Book X of Metamorphoses.
Orpheus to the Underworld
Just after Orpheus and Eurydice get married, the newlywed wife is killed by a snakebite to the ankle. After mourning her loss in the upper world, Orpheus dares to go down to Hades to “see if he might not move the dead” and win his wife back with his music.
Then striking the lyre-strings to accompany his words, he sang: ‘O gods of this world, placed below the earth, to which all, who are created mortal, descend… I beg you, by these fearful places, by this immense abyss, and the silence of your vast realms, reverse Eurydice’s swift death… but, if the fates refuse my wife this kindness, I am determined not to return: you can delight in both our deaths.’
Orpheus played his lyre as he spoke, and the lifeless spirits of the Underworld wept. The unending motion of Hades was brought to a halt.
Tantalus did not reach for the ever-retreating water: Ixion’s wheel was stilled: the vultures did not pluck at Tityus’s liver: the Belides, the daughters of Danaüs [see On the Inner Ring for their story], left their water jars: and you, Sisyphus, perched there, on your rock. Then they say, for the first time, the faces of the Furies were wet with tears, won over by his song: the king of the deep, and his royal bride, could not bear to refuse his prayer, and called for Eurydice.
Being reunited with his bride, Orpheus is told he may take Eurydice back to life with him on one condition: “that he must not turn his eyes behind him, until he emerged from the vale of Avernus, or the gift would be null and void.” Assenting to the condition, Orpheus grabbed her hand and took the upward path—silent, steep and dark, shadowy with dense fog.
Approaching the threshold of the upper world, Orpheus’s willpower runs out, and he can no longer hold himself back. As Ovid tells it, “[a]fraid she was no longer there, and eager to see her, the lover turned his eyes. In an instant she dropped back, and he, unhappy man, stretching out his arms to hold her and be held, clutched at nothing but the receding air.”
In Ovid’s version, we read that Orpheus turned around for two reasons: (1) he was afraid Eurydice was no longer there; and (2) he was eager to see her. In Gorgics, Virgil retells the story and describes Orpheus as a man gripped by the madness of love and unable to control himself.1
But even for these two takes, we’re still left scratching our heads: why did Orpheus turn around when he was so close? And why did his looking back result in losing Eurydice?
Boethius answered the second of these questions in his Consolation of Philosophy, making the case that the story of Orpheus was a word of warning for those seeking the light: looking back on darkness past will take away the light to come.
Ye who the light pursue,
This story is for you,
Who seek to find a way
Unto the clearer day.
If on the darkness past
One backward look ye cast,
Your weak and wandering eyes
Have lost the matchless prize.2
Pillars of Salt
We find still more insight in another story—that of Lot’s wife being turned into a pillar of salt for looking back on a destructed Sodom. Genesis 19 tells the tale.
Just before God destroys Sodom and Gomorrah for their wicked ways, he first sends two angels. Sitting at the city’s gateway, Lot sees them coming and goes out to greet them, eventually convincing them to take refuge in his home. When the rest of the Sodommites catch wind of what Lot is up to, they storm his house and insist he hand over the travelers. When he refuses, the angels reveal their true mission to Lot: God has sent them to destroy the city. “Run for your lives!” the angels warn Lot and his family: “Do not look back, and do not stop anywhere on the plain! Flee to the mountains, or you will be swept away!”3
Wasting no time, Lot grabbed his family and immediately acted as instructed—escaping to the edge of Sodom just as God rained down sulfur and fire, destroying the cities and everything in it. But then, just on the edge of being home free like Orpheus, “Lot’s wife looked back, and she became a pillar of salt.”4
Now, if the strange story of someone violating orders not to look back and losing everything, in consequence, was found in just Lot’s wife or Orpheus, we might be able to dismiss the tale as nonsense. But to have the two stories—one classical and one biblical—follow the same general arc seems to suggest something deeper at play here. The command not to look back also appears countless times in Dante’s Inferno, when Dante is warned by Virgil and by others not to stay or linger too long (though Dante never violates the order so he escapes the fate of Orpheus and Lot’s wife).
Perhaps Boethius’s insight was spot on, and there’s nothing more to it: “If on the darkness past / One backward look ye cast, / Your weak and wandering eyes / Have lost the matchless prize.” But like an itch I cannot scratch, something in me thinks there’s more.
Why? Why did Orpheus lose Eurydice, and Lot’s wife turn to salt for turning around? Why is the punishment so harsh?
Maybe it’s less about what did happen and more about what does happen. Maybe it’s not about the history of Orpheus or Lot at all but about what happens to our spirit when we cling to what’s behind us: when we fix our gaze on the past, we lose out on the promise of the present. When we look at what’s behind us, we sacrifice what’s in front of us. Living in the past means death in the present.
For whatever else they might be accused of, the sin of both Orpheus and Lot’s wife that stands out to me is the failure of their faith—their doubt in the divine (at least part of) their downfall. Orpheus’s doubt that the gods would keep their promise makes him turn. In the stare back at Sodom, Lot’s wife longs to return to her past life (even if it was among the depraved), doubting that God would make her life better than what she was leaving.
For both of them, new life was the offer, and they simply couldn’t let go of the past that was preventing them from getting there. Something in them doubted that there was anything ahead better than what was behind. Maybe that’s why Paul talks of “[f]orgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, press[ing] on toward the goal to win the prize...”5
Because the way home is not the way back.
Godspeed.
Plato (who was generally hostile toward poets to begin with) saw Orpheus in a different light, calling him a coward in Symposium and Eurydice only a shade shown to him by the gods who were mocking him for trying to cheat death.
Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, Song XII.
Genesis 19:17.
Genesis 19:26.
Philippians 3:13-14.
Amazing sir