Orpheus (the one on the side of the stream), the poetic artist, and the tragic story of the loss of their loved one and his descent to ask for revival will serve us as the inspiration and understanding of several
. sections of the human psyche
The myth will emphasize for us some important points in the unconscious decline in the expenditure from it and from its mental materials, as well as the possibility of the failure to get out of the depth in the
Rilke says:
With this amazing myth, we will also deal with the creation and art as well as the creative experience and the dissolving of the ego and its boundaries when confronted by art, in the face of the proximity to sainthood and the influence of the power of worship
Orpheus was the son of the King of Tarka and there are rumors that his heavenly father was Apollo. He was the son of the muse Kaliope (a beautiful face) and was also the most important and famous poet and musician in this mythology alongside the artists: the blacksmith god, Hephaistos- (Vulcan), the architect and inventor, Daedalus, and the sculptor, Pygmalion, each with his own story.
Apollo, his heavenly father, equipped him with his instrument, the lira, and his mother's fellow muses taught him how to use it. The muses were the same mythological
The equivalents of muses, those who were the companions of the god Dionysus, active in the rituals of and the excitation of erotic joy, were also women with less spiritual sublimation called the Mendes. The maenads will also be part of the story of Orpheus and his destiny.
Orpheus traveled the world, was in cultural Egypt, and even traveled with the Argonauts on their journey to the Golden Fleece. He, with the help of music, lifted the morale of the heroes in their journey.
Orpheus the poet carried Euridice the beautiful nymph to a woman, but the myth tells us that he finds it difficult to hold her and keep her safe. Immediately after their marriage, she is chased by a hunter named Aristaeus who is half-god, (best of all). Aristaeus' mother was a nymph of the work of the hunter from the daughters of Artemis' companion.
Aristeos the hunter grew up in Chiron, the centaur (the wounded healer), and Gaia and the seasons. He himself became a hunter but also studied medicine, including bee theory, olive harvesting, and cheesemaking.
In our story, it symbolizes the hunter who is more connected to the earth and constitutes a kind of contrast to the poet!
As Miss Euridice escapes from the huntsman's persecution, she is bitten by a snake and dies!
Orpheus, who loses his wife, goes into terrible grief, and he cannot and will not accept the loss.
He asks the gods for the possibility of descending into the underworld and has the power of art, poetry, and playing to cross boundaries and go down there.
With his singing and playing, he finds the opening and manages to charm both the three-headed dog Cerberus, both the leading sailor's car and the three judges of the underworld. It is said that Orpheus even manages to soften the stone heart of the God of Saul Hades himself.
Orpheus is one of the few people who go down to ask to bring back to life his lost loved one.
The idea was that he was given permission to bring her back to life, to take her out with a condition that it would be without turning around to see her all the way up.
He has to believe that he's going to stick to the process, give up control, and not crave to know all the time if she's behind it. On this mission, Orpheus failed.
After Orpheus leaves and loses Euridice again, he undergoes a jolt, a crisis, and a change in his destiny. He enters a life of excess control, a creative and emotional detachment, and apollonicon use – only in his head.
There's a choice here on t
he apollonian path and a total concession to the Dionysian side.
It is a concession that effectively detaches him from his physical, inclined, and erotic power. It immerses itself in an apolitical approach, which later becomes the way of an Orphic sect: a concentration of religion, mysticism, and spirituality. He preaches against death and against the moon. He clings to the religion that is for the sun god Helios
. Dionysus, the God, who loses his status, is furious with Orpheus. He is angry about the imbalance that will probably arise in the wake of Orpheus in all Greek culture and for us psychologists who deal with an imbalance between the Apolloni side and the Dionysian side, i.e., a change in the soul in general. Some would argue that he also preached homosexuality against the nymphomaniacs of the pariahs.
Even Aphrodite is unhappy with the situation for creating a new Greek direction of leaving the urges, sex, experience, and love and instead of walking with his head and conservative religions
The dedicated maenads, the accompanying, powerful and zealous women of Dionysus, are sent to the Temple of Apollo, where Orpheus preaches. They pounce on him and tear his body apart. They throw Orpheus' head into the river Hibers, a head that continues to sail towards the sea to the island.
The grieving, tearful muses collect Orpheus's organs and bury them at the feet of Olympus, it is said: in the forest where the singers now sing especially beautifully…
And the maenads of Dionysus' girls, unable to cleanse, were punished and turned into a forest of oak trees and no longer harmed the Orphean priests. Orpheus' head was finally placed in a sacred cave to Dionysus and continued to predict day and night.
In contrast, it was precisely the lira Orpheus' instruments were placed in the Temple of Apollo and eventually became a gram of heaven.
In this powerful myth, we witness a struggle between the wild barrel, the flute of Dionysus, and the civilized lira of apollo's instruments.
There is no doubt that the fate of Orpheus is tragic.
For his head rolled into a sacred cave to the god Dionysus and there he constantly prophesied! Whereas the instruments drifted to the island of, where it was placed in the Temple of Apollo and later became a gram of heaven.
With this amazing myth, we are then engaged in creativity and art, as well as the creative experience and the dissolution of ego and its boundaries when confronted by art in the face of proximity to sanctity and the influence of the power of worship.
The myth invites us to also engage in the encounter with death and the descent to ask, as well as touches on the rift between the contrasts of the head and the body and their fragmentation in the soul.
And the myth also raises other themes such as the power of the sun and the moon, the collision of the intuitive intellectual side – the Apollonia, and the sensual, emotional side of the soul.
The myth also opens us up to an understanding of processes that can occur after crises, and the power of spirit and art in the human psyche, to be useful in these crises
. The myth emphasizes for us some important points in the unconscious decline in the expenditure from it and from its mental substances, as well as the possibility of failure to get out of the depth in the fall and then in the consequences of the trauma that the creator undergoes.
We also learn about unconscious entry processes, the need to believe in the process, to release, and not to adhere to control. Even in therapy, do not rush too much to the intellectual solar analysis versus the lunar, which is the emotional experience. We should find the critical point and be aware of the difficulty of maintaining a balance between the contrasts.
The poet Amen Orpheus's stay and the aspects that pass precisely when he is in the underworld are the inspiration for many works: precisely the entry of a living person into the underworld, the spiritual world of souls.
Rilke is one of them in the series of poems composed by Orpheus and Euridice, as well as the opera of Gluck: Orpheus and Eurydice about power, weakness, and fragility of love.
In all these works, the artist himself descends to extract materials to create, the artist creates from the loss, and the artist must know how to be for a period within a creative "pregnancy".
As Nietzsche thought when he composed the birth of tragedy: the balance between the Apollon and the Dionysian side must also be preserved in the soul, of course in culture and especially in art.
Because it is a balance between the low and high inclinational parts and the intuitive intellectual parts.
This is the integration between Apollo, which represented the spirit and intellect of intuition and dreams, as opposed to Dionysus, representing the inclination, eroticism, sexuality, and madness, the mixing and indiscretion that arose in the madness!
But it is also the union of contrasts between Apollo that represents the sublime, analytical, as precise as Bach's music versus the excitement, the ecstasy, the rhythmic, the creative, the rock 'n' roll that represents Dionysus.
In every treatment but mainly in expressive treatments, art therapy, theater, and creativity, it is important to integrate correctly and not necessarily adhere to a dynamic analytical model in which the main thing is the word, speech, analysis of content, and symbolic work.
The Dionisio requires the apolitical -emotional-experiential lunar-lunar awareness that requires the solar-thought-intuitive awareness and can easily skip the physical and emotional experience.
The different way of the mythological birth of these gods, Apollo and Dionysus also represent the variance expressed by these two archetypes:
Dionysus is the only God born out of Zeus's mating with a human. He does so by storm, with great fire and a double pregnancy: first, a female pregnancy of the symbolic mother and secondly, a male pregnancy of Zeus himself that saves him from the mother who burns in the flame and passes it to him and gives him away from his loins (Dionysus, therefore, he is masculine and feminine). (Commentary
In Greek-born twice, in both doors) Dionysus was born with it in a convoluted way full of contrasts: he is masculine and feminine, sane and crazy, man and God, child and adult, life and death.
And the animals that belong to Dionysus, according to tradition, are the leopard, the bull, and the snake in the turbulent, powerful, or predatory inclination animals. Dionysus himself always appears as a gentle boy, on the one hand, with leopard fur and grapes of wine, and he symbolizes in the soul the most important face of the work.
As the philosopher Nietzsche writes at the birth of tragedy: the important demonism, the strong emotions, the drift, and the ecstatic ascension split from the apollonian
In contrast, Apollo (10th of the sun) was born when Leto and Zeus dressed as two birds, two serenities mating in the air. He was born with his twin sister Artemis at a large, majestic birth, in a special place after searching for a suitable place when no place would accept this enormous birth. He is apollo a god of the sun, of wisdom and balance, a god of a bow and arrow, playing in the lyric, a measured and distant thought.
The temple of Apollo reads, "Know yourself " and "All in size." This God has celestial beauty and aesthetic balance of any kind. It creates distance from its surroundings, does not mix itself, does not melt or blend, and always has an appropriate distance. It is typical of refinement and sublimation.
Apollo always appears either with a bow and arrow or the pound or a refined and dignified bagpipe. And the animals representing him are the dolphin and the crow, who are the most intelligent animals.
Again, compared to Dionysus, who lives and is in the satirical group, the forest spirits, in nature with a semi-animal characterization, sometimes phallic, sometimes feminine, and in his old drunken group Silenus who understands wine and women. And its symbols are theater masks, drunken rampages, and loss of senses.
And a return to Orpheus, which ranges from these contrasts: the archetypal Jungian addition to the subject is that in each one, there is also the creator himself, the artist me, with the possibility of such journeys and descents. From such a conception, we can see on these sides the Orphean as a central and critical element for the self and its development through art and creation. But it should be remembered that these are faces that can sometimes also bring the person, the artist, to tragic situations.
And if we look at the underworld as the unconscious world, we can better understand how entering there, into the spirit world, can be a source of the influx of content, ideas, and spiritual and emotional elements to create from them. They can be connected to the material. The spirit, in connection with the material, will give creation. And what about the place, the underworld?
The Underworld and the Spirit World as the Unconscious World
The idea that the underworld is a world of spirits, an afterlife, and a world that preserves all wisdom and wisdom, everything humanity has accumulated, is a very ancient idea, and there is little need to talk about this world
It is an invisible world with gods Hades and Persephone and boundaries guarded by the dog Kerberos. Within the underworld, several rivers flow, and various areas are also prestigious and poor, areas of suffering and areas of joy, such as The Boulevard of Aloysius.
The spirits that reach this world are led by Hermes and transported by a sailor named Chron, the one that moves by boat across the Stitches (the hated river).
It is necessary for the dead to bring a coin, and it is necessary to face the scary winds that are there. All that gets there, as part of a journey, like Odysseus, for example, his goal is different. The rate will differ for all incoming, and the exit will also be different …
In Hades, there is cumulative wisdom, there are spirits that continue to predict, and some have perpetual punishments. There's a spiritual life of their own there.
We'll mention a few other characters besides Orpheus who enter Hades, heroes, and heroines:
We will also mention figures stuck there as eternal punishments, such as Sisyphus and Tantalus, Ixion and the Danaids.
The idea of going down and entering Hades is dual. Sometimes it is a decrease that expresses development in midlife as in Odysseus and sometimes at the beginning of life as in Hercules. And sometimes, it is an area that can also be thrown into depression, even in permanent schizophrenic psychosis detachment.
We as therapists who meet in the Negredo phase in therapy, will be interested in the idea of death that enters into life and can lead to rebirth and development.
Published on June 5, 2020, by Avi Baumann
(18.10.2017) To my brother David
Hell, on the sides of the stream
On the shore, hiding somewhere in the shadow of the rocks,
You lost your way, my brother
Even in the golden days of youth, you fought the hordes of corn in the field,
The cows in the barn,
And stopping your ears to the colicky clack of sprinklers, heaped fodder on the wagon
Like a slave toiling pyramids
When you preferred to roll in clover
Tumble in the hay and flutter up up up up like a bird
Far from the crematoria among the tamarisks
You, like an innocent roebuck, leaped into the dreams of the survivors
Welcomed into a bank of sandy-yellow soil
And the caress of a refugee mother, certain she’d found safe haven here at last .
Who would have guessed that the colorful ball, your gift, is First-born?
Would become the burden of Atlas on your back
You, brother, you walked along resisting life’s imperatives,
Painted dreamy as a child in a flight of fancy, brushstrokes of simulacra
Under a splendid parasol that vanished long ago,
Holding a dove-blue gosling to your heart.
Like the wind against a windowpane, life blasted you and rolled the ball away
And as a fallen leaf that soared too high, your spirit plummeted…
Who wrested from you the spirit suddenly, the joy of creating?
What happened to the gray light of decaying autumn spreading poetry for you to paint?
To sing it as you the way wished before an audience,
Declaim the words and hum a gentle protest
But when the crowd fell silent, you, forlorn, did too.
Brother, bright twin who suckled at the breast with me and shared our mother’s womb,
Forgive me for abandoning the early days and setting off to seek my destiny,
For stopping my ears to the siren call when I sailed away.
I met my beloved in the desert after tears of war,
I sired children, built a home, and gathered suffering souls.
You, my brother, elected to forego that fearsome quest.
Your painted ship remained at anchor in the port of home.
Now and then, you rafted off to faraway shores,
Wandered naked as the day you were born, no masquerades for you.
Why, brother, did you let go, of life, of time, of a lifetime
Why did your paintbrush cease and your wellspring of a world of color?
Become as striving after wind and vanity?
The dove blue plumage molted, and with it, all your poetry.
Your boyish face, the sparkle of your soul submerged into an aging body
You, my twin who sold your birthright, where art thou?
I understand you know how to paint your life
But trembled at taking it into your hands
You tied your raft and landed unabashed
And the unrelenting wheel kept turning while
You lingered, pressing yourself to the breast and suckling it dry,
Shutting your pale eyes to the blinding sun, turning instead to the lunar orb
Until like Orpheus, you descended to retrieve the lost paintings of your childhood
And vanished there with the secrets of your soul
written by Avi Bauman (translated by Betsi Rosenberg)
Yom Kippur Eve, September 29, 2017, two weeks before the fire.