The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is a literary manifestation of what it means to lose love due the the inevitable fallibility of human instinct, but more importantly the elucidating rebirth that heartbreak causes to transpire. As the myth goes, Orpheus wins over the heart of Eurydice through his ungodly musical talent. They were in love for a while, until Orpheus loved her too much which pushed her away, running into a lethal encounter with a snake. Overwhelmed with grief, Orpheus utilizes his musical abilities to plunge into the deepest layers of the underworld at no cost except for one. Eurydice may be resurrected, if and only if Orpheus is able to blindly place his faith in her. He must believe that she is following him back to mortal life without seeing, hearing, or feeling her presence. Unable to deny his heart’s desire and his burdening fear, he turns back to realize she has been following him the whole time and that he has failed as he witnesses her vanish back into the pits of Hades’s domain with no hope of ever returning to her. Until one day, the nymph women of thrace grow rotten with jealousy. Spiteful because he writes songs of such deep understanding and catharsis, but can never love another woman. They take his life, sending him back to hell, where he can be reunited with Eurydice once more. Able to view her as much as his heart desires. Using Euhemeristic and neo ritualistic methods of analysis led me to believe that this story is a monomythic symbol for the hero’s journey through love and rebirth.
On the subject of Neo-Ritualism, Death and Rebirth are essential to ‘complete’ the hero’s journey. In this story, our protagonist, Orpheus, must die as a heartbroken man stricken with encumbersome grief to be reborn as a soul who could once love again. It bears a striking resemblance to Neo’s expedition to save Trinity’s life in Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revelations where we see both of their demise, but with it the beautiful afterlife that blossomed from their sacrifice. Trinity dies to save Neo’s mortal soul which he sacrifices to ensure her immortal soul can rest easily. For plot purposes, Eurydice dies to force Orpheus through a transformation, and he dies to be born a new man. Someone who has experienced enough perspective in his life to understand all sides of the human heart, all people who have suffered from loss. Author’s J. Mellenthin and S. O. Shapiro suggests its themes are synonymous with origins of early religious development because it is “said to have been inspired by Orpheus. Orphic religion told of a life after death. It hinted that the soul did not die with the body, but went on a journey to another world” (Mellenthin & Shapiro Mythology Unbound – Orpheus 35). Love, loss, life after death are embedded in human ritual. In Orpheus’s journey his heartbreak grants him the ability to understand a new side of human experience and all people who have experienced it. Approaching this with the neo-ritualistic model, it is clear that Orpheus fell victim to his own biological ineptitude to prioritize his own life over his love which could be his unconscious intuition attempting to preserve his bloodline. However he cannot foster children from the underworld and he has no interest in being the father to anyone else’s children. It is his own ability to love so overwhelmingly much that costs him his chance of resurrecting Eurydice. Meaning that love is powerful enough to pervade logic and override the biological need for consummation. Implying that the journey of being human is not just a meaningless cycle of procreation, but that life is simply not worth living without love.
Complimenting the neo-ritualistic aspects with Euhemeristic approach, the myth lives up to its potential to have universal meaning. While there is no record of a man named Orpheus traveling to hell and back, then back to hell for a woman he loves in the literal sense. But just about everybody who has been in love can certainly resonate with the hyperbolic sentiment. The non fictional true story of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee indulges a subjectively ‘talented’ musician who won his true love’s heart and sent her through the darkest underbelly of 90’s pop culture where she endured humiliation and exile from polite society. While Tommy Lee did not follow Orpheus’s path of death and rebirth to a tee, he and Pam’s escapades did embody key elements from the myth. Such as the idea that love can be your demise, and forgetting or ‘killing’ the old self to forge a new identity can be the only way forward. Eurydice can also be interpreted as not just the subject of a relationship but the personification of the relationship itself. In a way Eurydice never died, she just went somewhere else. A place where Orpheus could not go unless part of him died. In the mythical sense, his physical body dies, so his soul can be reunited with her. But his soul would never have reunited if he never changed. In a way the love between Pam and Tommy died, and along with it a piece of themselves. Once they let go of each other they were able to change into the people they needed to be to find their next Eurydice in someone else. Once a scandalous model, pigeonholed into a career of being subjected to male gaze, became philanthropist of her own foundation and a mother of two thanks to the death of her relationship to Tommy along with her old self (Tempera & Talbert- Where is Pamela Anderson now?). The true stories behind this myth did not necessarily revolve around life and death, but rather the process of falling in love, then out of love, and moving on to do it all over again. The description of life and death is simply an exaggerated depiction of what it feels like to have loved and lost as it is a pain that feels more real than death-a rather instant process- itself. Although my Euhemeristic approach is speculative, it highlights too many similarities between real life relationships – Represented by Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee- and the mythical relationship between Orpheus and Eurydice to ignore.
In the mythical sense, Orpheus and Eurydice symbolize all relationships through its message that to find love again after it has been lost, one must go through ego death and be reborn anew. In my personal experience and observations of others, it is human ritual to find love, lose it and along with it the faith in the ability to ever love again, only to prove themselves wrong by caccooning into a metaphysical butterfly. Few stories symbolize that process quite as universally as Orpheus and Eurydice do.