BY TORSTEN SCHWANKE
Dedicated to the memory of I.K.
INVOCATION OF THE MUSE
O holy Moira, thou Fate, triune one, who ruleest over the gods in thy awesome wisdom, come and bless me this song of Orpheus, let me sound in thy counsel the secret rejoicing out of the manifest lamentation! And thou, O beloved Mnemosyne, thou mother of memory, Zeus-loved Virgin, come forth in the white veils of thy appearance and glorify to me the image of those who have vanished into death! And you too, O Muse of Lamentation, Melpomene, lend me your voice, your feeling, your strings and your mask, let me walk in your cothurns the aisle to the sacrifice, in which love is the touchstone, the holy one that never perishes, and yet let us lament over her death, O Muse of Lamentation!
FIRST CHAPTER
„What is all that men have done and thought in millenniums against One moment of Love? But it is also the most successful, the most divinely beautiful thing in nature!“
(Hölderlin)
EURYDICE
Orpheus wandered through the countryside in a resigned mood, ready to abandon himself to his fate, to surrender to the triune fate, ready to go wherever it led him, and so, seeking nothing, he wandered over the hills, always following spontaneous inspirations, turning here and there, until he came to the foot of the Rhodope Mountains. He gazed at the magnificent mountains that rose like stairways of heavenly beings into the ether, where the holy sun ruled with a golden sceptre, the holy all-liberator.
He was drawn to climb the eternal stairs, higher up, into the pure ether, to enquire there at the tables of the celestials about the content of the cosmos, the content of history, the meaning of his heart. He longed for holy love. He had already had to recognise the intoxicating passions as stale and empty in his foolish youth; that was not what he was in the mood for.
Urania! he cried, you heaven-born, you love with the spirit of stars, you heavenly maiden, heavenly girl with the blue eyes, beseech the Most High for me and send me, as you sent Helen to Paris, the holy beloved with whom I can unite to become a whole man! For, as the ancient poets teach, in the beginning of the Golden Age we were one, man and woman, and only the violence of Time separated and divided us, but we long for our counterpart, for the companion of the soul, that we may become one in soul, a perfect image of the heavenly love that blessed you so richly, heavenly Virgin Urania, daughter of heaven!
With these prayers he had climbed the winding rocky paths. On the lower slopes of the mountains were vines, higher up on the rocky plateaus were silent shepherds grazing their kids, higher up the mountains were entwined by the chaste veils of the clouds into which Orpheus stepped. The soft wind passed through the strings of his lyre. Sparrows, feathered messengers of Urania, darted twittering through the air and sang their merry songs of happiness. On top of the loftiest mountain was an ancient pine forest, into whose darkness Orpheus dived. He walked through the pine forest on his walking stick, the last rays of Hyperion sank golden-red through the dense dark green and gilded the forest floor in mystical alchemy. In this magic light and magic shadow, Orpheus walked across the soft brown ground, half floating, as if on carpets. Darkness fell around him. He saw coming up through the high tops of the pines Luna, the innocent-white darling of heaven, the white woman, dressed in a silvery-white veil, she gazed with deep blue eyes upon the night landscape. Orpheus came to a grove.
Above the grove, the round Luna floated along like a silver pomegranate, letting her shimmering dew fall in rich blessings on the dark green grasses of the grove. In the midst of the meadow lay a round pool, a flawless mirror of Phoebe's glory. The celestial maiden gazed at her snow-white cheeks in the mirror, let her ivory-white pearly teeth gleam in the crystal of the water, and the dew of her blue eyes was scarcely purer than the dew of the pond.
Phoebus Apollo had unharnessed his white swans from his triumphal chariot, which had drawn him from the land of the Hyperboreans, north of Germany, to Delphi, but now he had gone down in the west, in the west of Hesperia, in the Atlantic halls, and bedded his golden-white limbs, woven in the purple mantle, in a bedchamber at the bottom of the sea, there he rested in the moist embraces of Amphitrite. But here his white swans bathed their foam-white or snow-white limbs, let their angel-like wings rest on the crystal of the pond, dipped their prophetic singing heads in the white wine of the lake.
The swans were just stirring the water to restless waves when three nymphs rose from the dark grass on the shore of the pond, one more beautiful than the other, but the middle one the most beautiful. They all wore long white robes, finely woven, with golden belts and embroidered with beautiful floral patterns. In their hair they wore garlands of myrtle, entwined with wreaths of roses. Then Orpheus realised that these three nymphs were dedicated to Urania. He did not need to be afraid of them, they were not Kerens, not death spirits, they were lovely nymphs, probably melic ones, who had been conceived by the heavens in the foaming sea at the beginning of creation. Orpheus stepped quietly up to them. His lyre began to sound.
„I am Charissa“, said the one in a soft thin voice. She had black curls that curled prettily at the nape of her neck. Her eyes were brown and lay in deep dreamlike grottos, as if absorbed in the dreams of Endymion when Luna the shepherd and sleeper caressed in her dreams. „If you will, dear Orpheus, holy poet, I will teach you the secrets of wisdom. I know ancient sacred lore, the secret meaning of which is not unknown to me either.“ Charissa was slender, like a line, her countenance was full of character, it had not the even majesty and virginal symmetry of the nymph at her side, who spoke to Orpheus with a laughter, „I am Doris, I will be a gift from heaven to you, and with me as a gift you will become a prince, a ruler over yourself and a king of Thrace, who with the lyre in his arms will conquer the barbarians and cultivate them in a utopian state.“ Doris had red curls that fell long down her back. Her dress was particularly colourfully embroidered, almost like the tail of a peacock. Her eyes looked proud and a little cool. Her laughter was as proud as her eyes.
Both nymphs were dazzled by the heavenly shimmer of the third nymph. She had fine golden-blond hair, a milk-white, narrow and soft face and eyes like blue morning skies. Her lips were like young rose petals on which the dew of the dawn was awakening. A shy touch of blush flitted tenderly over her white cheeks. Tender glances flew from her eyes, not like the lightning bolts of Jove, but like the diamond rays of the star of Venus. Her robe was pure and white, but from her golden hair fell a rose-red veil. She was as if a rose had undergone a metamorphosis and become a nymph. She was as if Urania herself had not been able to decide whether she had wanted to appear to Orpheus in the form of a nymph or in the form of a rose.
„I am Eurydice, Orpheus, and I have nothing to give you but my love“, she said simply, more breathing, more lisping, more sighing than speaking like a real person. She was like the breath of Zephyr and Aura when it whispers through myrtle groves in the spring. A sweet fragrance emanated from her, sweet as the bee's friend, the golden-green balm. Orpheus stepped towards her.
„Eurydice“, he said softly and a little anxiously, „your name was embroidered in my nappy by the Parcenes, you shall be my destiny.“ Then he held out his hand to her, and she put her white hand into his tanned one, her hand sinking light as a snowflake and light as a woollen flower-seed into his manly hand. He held the hand like a dream of happiness, like a dream of love. And she looked at him with the wise eyes of a pure dove. Together they walked away from the other two nymphs, the pond and the swans, the clearing and the forest, towards the morning light.
They arrived at the foot of the Rhodope Mountains in the most glorious realms. To Orpheus, the earth seemed transformed into an Elysian garden, love had rejuvenated and beautified the old Gaea with its magic wand, and Orpheus and Eurydice walked through the soft golden-blossoming grasses like blissful, intimate lovers. The beautiful sun laughed serenely from the light blue sky into the most beautiful lime gardens, at the edge of which stretched wide beds of fragrant violas, but behind them in the meadow grazed a herd of young white horses, all of which seemed to embody the peace of the earth, sniffing the heavenly air and snorting tenderly. They bowed their heads and listened to Eurydice's voice, tender as the song of a blessed one.
„My dear Orpheus, you singer of the holy heaven, you know the beautiful ode of the blessed Sappho, which she wrote on the shimmering throne of love? Will you play me this melody, this sweet intimate melody from the island of Lesbos on your lyre? I will sing you a song that I learned from an old pilgrim who once dwelt in the forests of India, but returned to his Greek homeland when he felt the end of his life approaching. It is a beautiful love song.“ And Eurydice sang, while Orpheus softly, softly, to hear her voice, stroked the lyre:
„That deity who sustains the world
And weighed softly in father's arms,
Gentle in mother's arms, in sea's waves,
Magically veiled,
That deity loved all men,
Who so foolishly strayed, ascetically abiding,
In the dark woods and serpent's caves,
Therefore, she resolved,
To come down to the people,
To walk softly among men,
She left her halls, the thirty three
Heavenly halls,
Stepped with light foot on the snow-covered
Himalayan summit, froze a little
On the cold earth, and hurried down
Into the sunlit
Where the shepherdesses by the wells
Sadly watering sad animals, crying,
That they were so caught in the magic veil
Of eternal deceit.
But to a shepherd the deity approached,
A shepherdess from among the shepherdesses
To be the sweet darling of his soul,
He kissed her softly,
Softly overshadowing her with his eyes,
He called her his nightingale
And mango, his sandal tree without snakes,
His gazelle.
She was much beguiled by the sweet beautiful
Holy sensations of his love,
And to the shepherd's flute, the simple, she sang
Praises of love.
Then she recognised in the beautiful shepherd
That divinity, all sustaining, all creating,
Creating out of love, destroying,
But creating anew.
So she praised in the youth, the beautiful shepherd,
Who vanquished the serpent of deceitful lust,
Love, invisible, the invisible
Became visible!“
How her song crept into the poet's ear, how the song dripped the sweet nectar of the gods into the soul, how on the wings of her song her soul came into his!
Her soul was beautiful, her soul was all through the apparition, a pure innocent apparition. That deep wise look from her sky-blue eyes shone the peace of her soul through the gates of his soul deep into his heart. Not desire produced the clarity of her eyes, but the peace of heaven, a calm enthusiasm to the light of the ether. Those eyes were soft as blue May evenings, deep as pools reflecting the stars, those eyes were living sparks of an Olympian fire, in them shone the eternal light of life. Their passion was a divine, holy passion for the highest love!
Her lips were fashioned by the soul. The softest, mildest smile was in the corners of her mouth, like Cupid in a rose blossom. This smile was never a smile of mockery, never a smile of irony or sarcasm, was not even a beguiling seductive smile of a Phryne, but it was the smile of kindness of a heavenly maiden. In her smiling lips clothed the goodness and gentleness of her soul.
When she rejoiced, she did not become joyful like the foolish, but showed a deep joy in her eyes and on her whole countenance, which shone with the inner joy of the soul. When she rejoiced, she never rejoiced over trifles, perishable things, but she rejoiced in the immortal soul, in the light of heaven, in the holy love that will never let its eternal light go out even in the chambers of bridal death. Even when she spoke of death, which is a terror and a calamity to all men, there was a heavenly peace on her shining face.
She believed in a judgement on the living and the dead, and her love, her holy love for all things heavenly, reassured her about the judge of the dead, she was full of hope that she would be allowed to ascend from the chambers of Hades to the islands of the blissful. Where she got this hope from, she could not express in language, not in human words. But a deep secret, a holy love of heaven expressed her soul, when she sang, her tones, the tones of her whole being, reached Orpheus' centre and made him unshakably certain that she was immortal and enjoying eternal joys.
She seemed to him more like a blessed woman from the islands of bliss, overshadowed by bridal death, than an ordinary mortal woman. Nothing was ordinary in her, everything was veiled by the mysteries of the hereafter, an unfathomable secret rested in her soul. She was born of a mystery, she was like one begotten from heaven.
Scarcely she was aware of her carnal beauty, scarcely did his praise of her cheeks, her hair ever reach her ear, her soul. When, however, he spoke of the reverberations her whole being made in his heart, when he called her his echo, the invisible nymph who, when he tried to utter the whole meaning of his soul, gave it back to him in clearer words, she smiled with a quiet, deep-secret joy.
She was an angel from the regions of beauty, a messenger of the heavenly Virgin, a pure blameless image of holy love. And the pure fire of her being, this quiet glow of purity, produced in the soul of the poet a heavenly longing for eternal love, which celebrated its immortality through the chambers of bridal death, like Helen and Menelaus in Elysium.
The pure euphony of her being was expressed most perfectly in music, in the singing of her voice. Orpheus, the wordy one, could not find words for the perfect beauty of her voice. She taught him first to understand and sing the essence of music, the secrets of songs, the praises of sacred love. Her love was his initiation. She was his mystery master, through whom he was crowned a true poet. She was his laurel tree, she was his good genius, she was his muse. A single kiss from her, and he began to sing the following, the first true ode of his life:
„O true goodness! holy love!
O glory of eternal beauty! Thou
Art my life's innermost life,
Thou sweet seal of immortality!
I will sing thee, holy love, thee,
Thou hast planted in my heart immortality
And hope of the deep joys
Once of the Elysian island gardens!
You tuned my lyre to praise,
Yes, you gave me my voice to praise,
Thou art the wisdom of my song,
Thine is the beauty of praise.
Thy kiss is more than the kiss of sweet lips,
Thy kiss is the touch of my heart
With blissful bliss,
Is rapture to heaven's delight!
I will glorify thee in the bridal realm of the dead,
Glorify thee with heavenly jewels, and praise thee,
Once in Elysium praise thee,
When with Helen you praise love,
The love that is your essence, the holy one,
That of thy heart, and of thy inmost being,
To whom all the gods are subject,
She, as a godhead, shall receive my homage!“
When he had sung thus, Eurydice went to a laurel and plucked branches, from which she wove a beautiful crown for him, pressed the laurel wreath into his curls, and said, „Let love breathe our life, let love be our bliss!“ and kissed him.
NATURE
In Eurydice Orpheus praised the sum of nature, in Eurydice Orpheus loved nature. All nature was to him a glorious metaphor of Eurydice's glory, and Eurydice herself was to him an infinite, inexhaustible parable of sacred love! With this love, which had come into him like a breath and like a flame of fire, he loved nature through the mediation of Eurydice, and just as holy love had power over Orpheus through Eurydice, so Orpheus had power over nature. For nature was to him a glorious creation, created towards the crown of creation, which was man, and the most glorious man was to him the beloved and loving man: Eurydice, and the crown of man, the dignity of woman was to him holy love! And under this crown, and through this dignity, holy love, the loving human being was to subdue the earth, but not for himself, but for the beloved being, for holy love in person, for Eurydice!
Therefore Orpheus went into the Thracian forests with his lyre, which his muse had so wonderfully tuned for him. There, from the deep brown-green thickets, he called first of all the wildest animals. He called the wild sow and the she-bear, for in both of them the motherliness of holy love and the masculine fighting spirit of mothers, who are willing to sacrifice themselves for their young, were to be glorified. The two wild mothers looked at him warily from the darkness of the thicket, one with her roar, the other with her grunt, both groaning for safety from violence, for protection for those entrusted to their care, for life without war between creatures. Orpheus tuned his lyre to wild sighs, to immoderate moans with which he touched the souls of the she-bear and the wild sow, for they instinctively felt that their soul was in this moan, that their drive and instinct had found a melody, that here a more powerful one had come to express their longing, to open the eyes of their blind longing. And they submitted to this thinking creature as if it were a revelation, as if Orpheus were their saviour. And as he walked along in the power of holy love, so they were drawn through him into what they had hitherto known only as a blind drive, a blind mating and mother drive. They recognised the poet as a mother who could roar and grunt like a mother and better than a mother herself, for in his voice, illuminated by holy love, lay the longing of all motherhood: Longing to be loved and sheltered by a mighty one, by a strong protector who created the framework and gave the strength to be able to love the weak, longing for a lover whose love made one the lovers, a lover of the strong and profoundly also of all that is weak, and even in the strong still to love the weak. So they looked at the singer and lyricist almost maternally and wanted to strengthen him with their wild motherly strength. And Orpheus, guided by the inspiring genius of his muse, the holy love herself, led the wild sow and the she-bear into the paradisiacal lime grove with the viola bed, where, as tame animals, as liberated creatures, they were to be a reflection and a parable of Eurydice's invincible motherliness. O Eurydice, how Orpheus saw in you the mother of his children!
And Orpheus wandered on, to the endless pastures in the mountains, there to sing to the wild mustangs, the heroes of the land! Orpheus hurried through the stormy winds, the winds struck the strings of his lyre with gentle wild hands, so that it sounded like a battle song over the plains, but like another battle song, where love was the banner, the word the sword, the genius the battle leader, when, in the name of the celestial Muse, they went forth to rid the land of the haters, clothed with the flanks of gentleness, with the flashing glances of meekness, to draw all creatures into the village of love, to free Thrace and its meadows, to kindle the light of a holy passion over the grave of hate!
Then the singer came to the Mustang, and his mind was softened, for in their brown eyes he saw the real gentleness dwelling large and gentle. This was no worldly, despondent gentleness, not the gentleness of an anxious dreamer and fantasist, this was gentleness in power, softness in strength, heart in muscles and nerves, love in action! And so the singer saw what he had to bring to the Mustang, the essence of their being that they had lost with the Golden Age. Since the Elysian time of the first days of the earth, the Mustang had lost their perfection. They had often been subjugated by the people. Often they had been beaten, often slaughtered, often sacrificed to bloody Mars in the war of barbarism. But in this hour of meekness the poet brought back to the Mustang the message of their sublime freedom, he sang to the beautiful steeds of Hesperian peace!
O you steeds, how you snorted harmoniously and mightily to the moaning and wild tempest of the Orphic lyre, which testified and brought to light your innermost being like the gold from the ore! Then your flanks quivered when he spoke of the coming glory of your bodies, and then you were healed and already had a more glorious shine in your dark skins. Then, as his lyre grew softer, ever softer, your eyes grew large too, looking out into the world that stretched to the fertile meadows of Hesperia, so childlike-naïve and full of the peace of childhood! There to play, in the fields of hope, there to graze and pasture amidst the golden grasses of the land of hope! There to storm in the storms of peace! There to rest, head to flank, and feel the sacred love between steeds, and between steeds and men, in the mustang hearts proud and mighty!
This feeling for horses became song in Orpheus' lyre, this snorting became word and spirit in the song of the lyre, in the song of the singer. His word came upon the mustangs like a salvation! Full of confidence they trotted towards their master and nestled their mustang heads against his cheek, snorting tenderly with the first awkward language, hoping that his string, his genius would translate their snorting more beautifully into the meek and powerful sighing of love! Then they shook their manes, shaking off all that was old and dead and servile and cattle-like, stamped their fetters and hoofs to become conscious of their new freedom and to live and feel their new pride!
And their pride was the pride of a gentle humility, for they submitted to the poet who had become their master through his spirit and his word. And they followed him to the paradisiacal lime grove with the viola bed, there to graze amidst golden grasses, and amidst their snorts the song of the Master lived on. And they lived there to the praise of gentleness and strength and redeeming holy love. And they grazed by Eurydice's side, and thought her their fairest mare, and she held them like gentle wise children, which let her play on their back, and carried her, as the winds carry the genii, through the meadows of the melodious land.
Eurydice played with the brown bear, and a brown-eyed mare smiled at her. Then the Muse looked at the poet with a clear, gentle, open-hearted eye and said softly, „We love singing, thou spirit of the lyre, we want to bring to our home also the sparrows of Aphrodite and her turtledoves, that they may praise us with a heavenly concert of holy love!“
Thereupon Orpheus set out, slung the lyre on his shoulder, and wandered into the beech forests at the foot of the Rhodope Mountains. Hornbeam, copper beech and copper beech stood there in beautiful alternation. The golden sun let its white rays sink through the leaves. When Orpheus entered the forest, it was as if he had entered a temple of nature, where winged genii sang their praises to the spirit of creation to the sound of the organ in the sky, the rustling wind.
And then Orpheus sat down under a mighty, hundred-year-old beech tree and listened. A little sparrow hopped from branch to branch in the sunshine above him. Beep, beep, beep, the little bird chirped softly. It was such a sobbing, languishing sigh after the great „I love you“ of the genius of creation that it softened Orpheus' heart like wax. And he became fond of the little bird. He had hardly seen such grace, such tenderness and daintiness anywhere else, it so wonderfully reproduced the image of his grace, his Uranian nymph, who was also like a sweet zephyr, gentle and lovely like the heavenly Aura when she breathes her life's breath in the May groves. Now become a song, little bird, and be gifted with the language of wisdom! Let it teach you song, which is a song of praise to the genius of creation, let it teach you the great dithyramb of holy love!
And the little bird sang again its timid, shy, anxious beep, beep, beep; and Orpheus stroked the strings of the lyre with his hands as gently as the breath of a lamb, and sang, Love, love, love! and the little bird answered prettily and daintily, Beep, beep, beep! And Orpheus fluted a little artistically as if for idle play, for beauty's sake alone, for he was an ordained minister from the theocracy of the beautiful, then he returned to his loving pedagogy, and sang softly to the sparrow, Give love, give love, give love! And the little bird gave back as a chorus the artificial squiggly melody that Orpheus had fluted to it. And Orpheus sang, Love rests, love rests, love rests! And the sparrow gave a supreme trill from his golden throat and flew rapturously and exultantly into the open ether in inexpressible euphonies. Above, above the blood beech, he flew in wave circles, always exulting and cheering: Beep love, beep love, beep love! and so quite senselessly beautiful in the most tender turns, just like Aristophanes' muse. Up in the blood beech, the sparrow settled down and looked from his golden bird's eye directly into Orpheus' soul, as if Aphrodite's sparrow were trying to find its own soul in the revered master, to recognise that it was taking shape, sanctified by the song of holy love. And Orpheus fluted, Darling, darling, darling!
And Orpheus rose, for he longed with all his heart for Aphrodite's turtledove. He found her sitting in a young hornbeam. The white plumage lay on the soft branches like a fuzzy snowflake. Then she looked out of her soft-hearted eye at the coming man, who was walking towards her with a soft song, sung entirely in the rolling tone of Thrace. She did not feel disturbed at all in her sweet tranquillity, and with a brooding tone she continued to practise her cosel sounds as if she were practising for an aphrodisiac May.
And thus led into the peace of the primordial calm, into the tranquillity of the Golden Age, into the eternal-Hesperian security, as into a nest in the tree of Atlas, the turtledove of Cypris hopped down from branch to branch and sat on the poet's right shoulder. The poet went out of the forest. Then the sparrow of Cypris flew after him and sat on his left shoulder. And so it went on - Love remained - until they arrived in the lime grove with the viola bed, where the two birds bathed in the little stream at Eurydice's feet. But she caressed them tenderly, as if she herself were a little bird of Urania. And all loveliness, all tenderness and softness, all prettiness and delicacy, all grace and gracefulness was gathered in the play of the birds with the nymph. There was realised the theocracy of beauty, in which Eurydice was the nymph overshadowed by the genius of holy love and queen of loveliness.
Behold, how beautiful was the lime grove, but holy love wished to build a richer cedar dwelling! „Orpheus“, said the beloved, „how I love the trees, how I will impute souls to them! May your song give souls to the trees, that they may live and love as we do! Lure them, lure them, lure them with your lyre song! Build us a new Golden Age, a glorious Arcadia here at the foot of the Rhodope Mountains in Thrace! Your love, our love can do it! Love is all-powerful because it is true!“
And Orpheus, with his lyre, went out into the meadows and forests. He called the cypresses, „Cypresses! High trees of the grave and the night of death! I sing to you resurrection into immortal life! Flame like black flames, flame like blue flames, flame like green, life-green, evergreen flames into the sky of Thrace! Turn your sadness into a quiet melancholy and the gentle melancholy into the heartfelt beauty! Be a sign that all mortal things want to be beautiful, be a sign and symbol, a holy symbol that all beauty wants immortality! Be a tree of life to the dead, that they may read from your beauty the thought of the immortality of the soul and the eternity of holy love!“
„You also, cedars, you mighty ones of the Rhodope Mountains, come down and follow the cypresses! There is a queen above all mighty queens, a crown above all blue cedars, a heaven above all evergreen trees, and this is the love which I possess and of which Eurydice is the likeness! Bow to her, and your mighty heads with evergreen crowns bow to her, and lay at her feet your blue leaves! She will smile at you with the smile of grace, there no leave, no branch will be lost for you, for by the grace of the love that created creation you also live, and of the holy love and the beloved's smile is grace and your incorruption!“
„All you pines of the rushing torrents, come to the song of Orpheus' lyre! Come hither as one Thyrsos! Offer your staffs and golden pine cones to love! Let the Greek wind rush through your treetops with lust and wander to Arcadia, girded by the Archipelagus, rushed by the Mediterranean! You most sensuous trees of the Mediterranean, and yet evergreen, you eternally immortal sensuality, look with golden senses as with glorified pine cones into the rushing eyes of holy love! Sacrifice yourselves! Be eternal in eternal youthful voluptuousness of a new Arcadia under the southern sweet sun of heaven!“
„Ivy, let thy head droop, let thy eager tendril! Follow the song of Orpheus' lyre! Come and follow his moaning tones, for he will guide thee to the sublime beautiful elm, on which thou mayest grow up, that thy silver leaves may touch the feet of Luna! Grow up, O ivy, intoxicated with the awakenings of holy love, and form a ladder to the moon! Form the wonderful concatenation of heaven and earth, and let the ever-beautiful life play joyfully and sensibly like children in your silver-green tendrils!“
„You, last and foremost, you vines, come with your wood-bearing branches, which are like women's arms, and with your violet grapes, which are like stars of the midnight or eyes of nymphs, come with your bower, which are wreaths in the ever-young curls of the genii, come and draw near with your intoxicating blood of joy in the green veins! Splash joy into the day like sparkling wine! Let the blood rejoice in all the veins of life! Delight yourselves in the holy vine, whose spirit is creative love!“
O a garden of love surrounded Eurydice, and Orpheus had also tamed the serpent, and not murdered him like Apollo murdered the Python, but charmed him with his strings, that in a metamorphosis he became a bridge over the brook, and on his hem iridescent butterflies bloomed.
O a garden of love surrounded Eurydice, and in the middle of the garden the singer had lured with the gloriously tuned lyre a splendid pomegranate tree, for the pomegranate was the symbol of the inexhaustible wealth of love! A thousand, ten thousand, nay myriads of golden children had holy love, like stars, and all nature blossomed towards it in the colour of blood, and all was resolved in the imperial pomegranate which, like a bell from the temple of creation, the beloved being held in her right hand: O Queen, O dear being! All creatures, all nature, all creation set out to pay homage to you, for in Eurydice they see the image of the immortal love that enchanted Orpheus to become a sorcerer, chosen by the Queen of Love!
ARISTAEUS
On the slope of a green, fertile hill grazed a herd of goats, thrusting rams among them, pied goats and leaping kids. Their shepherd was Aristaeus, a tall, lean man with long black hair and a black beard and burning brown eyes. In his bony hand he held a gnarled stick with which he often drove the high-spirited kids back to the pasture. He loved his kids. He was a taciturn but thoughtful man. Not that he philosophised, but he lived his life in his imagination. He often thought of death, and he shuddered. He feared the rush of the shadowy night and the deadly emptiness of Hades. He tore himself violently from such thoughts with a powerful lust for life. Oh, this life must still be exploitable, some happiness must still be snatched from these poor, creeping days. But what happiness and from where?
It was the great time when nature had rung the hour of fertility, and the bucks had fought their battles. A particularly strong buck had emerged victorious from the fight with a smaller one. This huge buck, bleating, jumped on a bitch and copulated her with loud rutting cries. Aristaeus was shaken to the marrow of his bones. What a triumph of the power of life! How the power of life screamed! How the law of fertility asserted itself with omnipotence in this great time! There was life, there was overcoming of death! Here was no empty, bloodless shadow in eternally sighing twilight mists, but here the power and lust of life blossomed!
Up, Aristaeus! said the goatherd to himself, seize an equal happiness! Let all your powers of life gather together and in the supreme act of strength of fertile nature bear you away into eternal life, which continues in ever earthly existence, from year to year, from life to life, victoriously propagated, because the generations, like the marathon runner, have passed on the Olympic torch, lust and desire for procreation and the fertility of nature! In addition, shouts of joy, hymn-like whooping of young beautiful people! Loud rejoicing of naked people, wreathed with the myrtle branches of the goddess of lust! Praise to the goddess Pandemos, the goddess of lust! Praise to the god Pan, the goat-footed one, that he took the dead man into such a school of lust for life!
Oh, a woman would have to come, the beautiful life of the fair sex would have to surrender to him, that he might live and bear witness to the life of the future. But where would he get a wife, for who would visit a stinking shepherd of pungent goats? There was only the potter who lived in the little village at the foot of the hillside with a little bastard. She was beautiful, she was a woman of blossoming health, a true disciple of Pandemos! She seemed suitable to him and her beauty made to promise a success, to secure his future and his survival! All earthly happiness and vain delight lay resolved on her bosom, on her lips!
Gnida was the potter's name, she was just wiping the red clay from her hands. She had made a bulbous jug, which Aristaeus looked at with bittersweet lust: curves! And let his gaze wander to the figure of Gnida. Her eyes were as large as moons, her pupils were blue violets in a lake of motherly milk. Her face was slender and beautiful, but her lips were long and full. Then Aristaeus desired kisses.
„Kiss me!“ he said, straight as a goat.
„No, I'll never kiss a man again, after the previous one left me with a bastard and stole away to Hades by a noose on the tree!“
„O speak not of death, speak not of Hades, thou art the blossoming life! Thy breasts a pair of pomegranates, rich in fruitfulness! Your eyes pools in which naked nymphs bathe! Thy lips swells of rosy shells from the sea of Pandemos! Come, kiss me as if you were the goddess herself, be her priestess, and let me enjoy life as a bee might become drunk on the Olympian nectar of a red hot rose!“
He wrapped his pithy arm around her slender hip and pulled her against him. Reluctantly, she let herself slide against his chest. He saw her form and found femininity perfect. In the frenzy of his impulses he mistook her for the goddess Pandemos herself, and himself for the goat-footed Pan, and an Olympian courtship went on. She let it come over her, lying like a plank beneath the labouring man. Cold as a marble statue, cold and lifeless as an idol, she lay there, but he did not notice. Like a goat of his herd, he had satisfied the urge of nature and poured himself out.
Emptied, he stood up. O nothingness, how you tormented his soul with Hades‘ emptiness. That was life? Ah, was death present everywhere with its consuming shadow? How had such a blossoming life become a cold winter shadow? How had such blossoming lips turned so bitter? How had such a beckoning womb remained so indifferent? How could such an incarnate goddess of lust be with him like a frigid earthen idol?
But then the idol began to speak, „You dog of a man! Now that you have had your fun, provide for my sustenance! How will you, a goat-herder with a stinking goat, provide for me and my bastard? Become a merchant, visit all the islands, trade in pearls, bring home silver and Indian gems! No, be silent, I don't like to hear your voice any more! First you men flatter as if you were Apollo when he woos Daphne, but then, when you have poured out your marrow, you are the slave masters of woman and her downfall! Will you also steal away from your duty to Hades? How will you survive? You have no life in you! A mere boredom are you, a useless dreamer! Go back to your bitches, you may have your sodomitic lust with them, that suits you better, you love your pied bitches with the plump udders more than me, a poor, abandoned widow, a retard, a creeping through the dust, badly paid, starving potter of brittle pots! Away with you, you starving, stinking goat, and seek your pleasure elsewhere! You will never be allowed to copulate with me again, you son of a bitch!“
Aristaeus turned away. He cursed Gnida, he cursed the goddess Pandemos, the goat-god Pan, himself and the season. He turned to an old man named Phillip and drank with him a quantity of wineskins of the best wine of Chios empty. Drunk in the evening, lust returned, and having cursed before, he now blessed the body of the woman Gnida.
For some time he wandered through the night, the stars of which eagerly suckled the milk of the moon at the bosom of the night; lust made him behold everything libidinously. The same lust that revealed itself to him in all the life and weaving of nature also degraded his wounded pride, subjugated with this pride the last vestige of self-respect and kindled a consuming fire in his limbs, and its flames all only cried out, Gnida! Gnida!
It was well into the night when he came to her hut. She knew he was coming, her demon had told her he would come again. She knew he was gripped by lust for her flesh, with her limbs she had chained his soul. Cupid had bound his libidinous soul with prickly rose fetters and dragged him to the feet of his empress that she might place her proud foot on his neck.
He stepped into the hut. On the wooden table were two clay wine goblets, both half-filled. The little bastard was still up, looking mischievously at him from hungry eyes. Gnida gazed at him with demonic sweetness, seductive loveliness and ensnared him. Then, looking at the two cups, he said, „Was anyone with you?“ And the hemlock of jealousy rushed burning through his limbs. „No, no, none may come to me but you alone, my sweet,“ she lisped sweetly, too sweetly. Then the skinny bastard stepped up to Aristaeus and whispered in his ear, „Mom has hidden a man behind the hut in the myrtle bush.“ The embers of hell shot through his soul and limbs as if he were struck by lightning from the thunderer's fist. At the same moment the bastard received a slap in the face from his wrathful mother. This confirmed Aristaeus' jealous suspicions. He rushed out of the hut, jumped to the myrtle bush and bent its branches apart. Sure enough, there squatted Phillip, grinning mockingly at him. Aristaeus was a roaring sea in the storm's violence. „What is this?“ he shouted at Gnida, „explain this, why are you doing this to me?“ She looked at him with the prettiest eyes, her lips smiling sweetly, like a May in bloom, and lisped sweetly like May honey, „Oh come, my dear Aristaeus, my sweet Aristaeus, oh come.“ But he kicked angrily at the hut and cried out, more and more incensed, „Explain this to me!“ But she smiled all the better, pulled a childishly sad face and looked at him seductively, „Come to me, my sweet darling.“
Then the last thread of his patience broke, and angrily he stormed away. For ever and ever Gnida was torn from his memory, burnt out and wiped out every memory of her. This whore of Pandemos' whorehouse! This traitor to his love! This personified vice! This scourge of Zeus! Away with her, may her name be banished forever from the convolutions of his brain and her image murdered behind his brow! Curse upon her, curse of all the thousand gods upon her! Curse Pandemos! Curse Phillip! Curse to himself that he had been so foolish! Curse Cupid and curse lust! And it was to him as if the screaming ravens cried through the night a demon-final Nevermore!
Aristaeus renounced his flock, renounced the land of Macedonia, and wandered through all the Hellenic lands as a beggar, becoming more and more insane. Living on the alms of the merciful, on the crumbs of the poor, for the rich gave nothing, and so he came as far as the Mediterranean.
As if under a curse (perhaps because he had cursed himself), he could not get rid of the thoughts of Gnida. She became more and more beautiful, more and more lovely in his dreams. He wandered in the nights, begging his bread in the morning, and then lay down to sleep by the rushing Mediterranean. Be it that the rushing foam of the Mediterranean made the whispering shell of Aphrodite sound in his dreams, be it that he was under his own curse, be it that his soul shoots had been glued to Gnida in her unique act, she rose as a rushing Pandemos naked from the sea of his dreams and smiled at him sweetly, sweetly seductive as the last time. When he awoke from these dreams, he realised that in his sleep he had lost his semen. He hated himself for it. In his sleeping dreams he loved Gnida more than anything, no, he desired her more than anything, but in his night watches he despised her. Yes, he went so far as to despise all beautiful physicality. He now wanted to love nothing but a soul, a pure soul, stripped of all flesh. But in his sleep the dirty foam of his accursed lust rushed up again. He fled the sea, to which he attributed an unpleasant influence on his brain.
So it came about that Aristaeus came to Thrace. And it happened that one night he entered the lime grove where the hut of Orpheus and Eurydice stood. Eurydice, unable to sleep, let Orpheus rest and went out into the night. The light of the stars and the moon fell glorifyingly on the slender trunks and gave a romantic spell. As in another world, as in Hesperia's gardens, the grove lived and breathed. The violets exuded their enchanting, beguiling fragrance of loveliness. She wore a fine white robe through which her figure shone, for she thought she was alone.
But the goatherd, the beggar, had hidden in the bushes to watch the beauty. The silver moonlight fell on her white cheeks, her rose petal lips dawned sweetly enticing him. Her eyes shone like stars, like diamonds through the night. He saw her bosom rise under her light robe with every breath. This thin white veil revealed more than it hid. Then the foam of dreams, the intoxication of sleep, the impulse in the limbs of Aristaeus threw itself with new hope of life on the beautiful image, and all his desire flew like Cupid's arrow on the lovely Eurydice.
Then he stepped out of his hiding place. Eurydice was frightened when she saw him. For one thing, to see a man in her loneliness and at night terrified her, and for another such a feral one, with a long unkempt beard, emaciated figure and hungry flickering eyes, horrified her. But he, inspired by his lust, began to speak with the most flattering flutter,
„Fairest, what is thy name?“
„Eurydice is my name, but who are you and where do you come from?“
„Where I come from is of no consequence at all, I have fortunately been able to forget all my past at this moment when I caught sight of you, lovely one!“
„Don't let my Orpheus hear you say that, he loves me and wouldn't share me with anyone.“
„Orpheus? Hated name, and so enviable a man! Is he yours? Yes? But do you think that the ancients taught that a woman could only love one man alone? Is not love free? Should the gods have commanded that thou shouldst not yield and give thyself up to the enchantment and loveliness of such a night and such a wondrous meeting with thy fate? Behold, lovely one, my love is rich, it is unfathomable like the sea and full of pearls. From these pearls I would make you a necklace. It is full of rock, white and pure and washed by the floods, from it I would make you the statue of your glorious body. I would glorify you as the most beautiful, as the Aphrogenea incarnate! Under the blessing of Aphrogenea we stand, and she loves nakedness and lawless love! Let us follow her commandment of free love, and the goddess will transfer you, you charming nymph, to heaven! Think there were a constellation of Eurydice to which I could pray! Let me adore thee, for by my love thou wilt become a goddess! Away with Aphrogenea, who comes from the sea, for now I know the goddess Eurydice, who comes from her constellation!“
She looked at him indifferently. This fluttering did not touch her heart, it seemed to her void like dirty sea foam. Orpheus' love was as faithful as a young elm tree on which the vine of her love could climb. She was about to turn away from Aristaeus and go to her Orpheus in the hut, when Aristaeus came greedily to her and desired to fornicate with his goddess. He succeeded in pressing a kiss on her cold, indifferent mouth, a kiss that did not quench his desire, but only fuelled it all the more. Then he wrapped his arms around her, pulled her violently to him and pressed himself against her as if he wanted to penetrate her. With more than feminine strength, Eurydice broke away from him and fled. Horror had closed her throat, it was as if fear was strangling her with an ice-cold fist. She wanted to cry out to Orpheus for help, but she could not. She only cried out in her mind, Orpheus! Orpheus! But no human sound escaped her. Aristaeus pursued her, he was driven like a man possessed by the wild demon of unbridled desire. He must have this woman! Faster she fled. Inside her spirit she cried out in despair, „O genius of my love! O good genius of my Orpheus! O holy genius, almighty God of love, save my life! If I must die - O I fear I must die by the hand of the enemy - then die my death with me and do not leave me alone in the fear of death! Almighty genius of love! Make haste with me to my death, lead me into the realm of shadows, let me see bliss and Elysium! Let me enter the Ideal State, where Zeus wields the sceptre and his deified son, whom Zeus has raptured from death to Olympus! O Saviour of my soul, Nameless One, Unknown One! in this hour of death be thou with me!“
Prophetically she had prayed. But not by the hand of Aristaeus was she to die, undefiled was her virginal soul to remain. The fear-driven one had been quicker than the lust-weakened one. But at the moment she made the last desperate cry of her prayer, a python snake shot up from the damp meadow, struck its poisonous fang into Eurydice's slender heel and injected death into her blood. She fell and remained lying in convulsions of death. Aristaeus saw it and fled in horror. In the final agony, Eurydice's throat was freed, as if by the hand of a god, and she cried out with dying strength, „Orpheus!“
EURYDICE'S DEATH
Aristaeus saw the beautiful nymph die, was horrified and fled away. The Furies had seized his spirit and taken possession of it, so that he strayed completely into the dark abysses of madness. He hurried up the slope of the Rhodope Mountains, into the higher forests, through their nightshades, lost his way in the thorny bushes of the summit and hung on the uppermost peak, a split rock. There he hung in dreadful mortal fear and lustful death-greed, torn between Gaia and Hades, Pandemos and Persephone. He held on to the last stump of a tree that jutted out of the crevice and looked into the horrible abyss. Down! Down! cried all his torn soul forces. „O Gnida! Gnida! You fury in the garb of the beautiful goddess of love! Thou python dragon from the Acheron, disguised as a messenger of the gods! Now I will descend to embrace thee in the Orcus, to embrace thee as a shadow in the lust-glow of Phlegeton, and to satisfy all my lust in thee, thou angelof death!“ Into thee do I plunge, into the abyss as into thy infernal womb! cried his spirit within him, so he let go the last stalk and threw himself into the shuddering depths, at the rocky bottom of which he shattered and went into the embers of Phlegeton, there to complete his agony!
In the meantime, Orpheus had heard Eurydice's cries for help and had risen from his deep sleep. He followed the cries, which grew fainter and more stertorous, and came to the bride lying pitifully in the grass.
„Eurydice, beloved! What is the matter with you?“
„The python dragon wounded me to death! I must die!“
„How? No, Eurydice, you must not die! By all the gods, you must not die! How shall I live? How without you, beloved? O by the holy love that blessed our union, it must not be true!“
„It must not... but it shall come to pass...“
„O come us help from the mountains! from on high! Uranos from heaven, come and deliver from death Euyrdice!“
„Only be still, Orpheus, it is time, my last hour approaches. I am ready...“
„How, Eurydice! How, ready! Was our love life already complete? Have we not only just enjoyed the March of our love, the first beginning of our life? Where are summer and the ripe autumn and the worthy wise winter? No, Euyridice, summon up your strength and come back! Do not vanish from me!“
„I see... Orpheus, I see...“
„What do you see, Euyrdice? No, don't look! Shut your beautiful woman's eyes to the abysmal-terrible visions of death! Come, my life! Come back to life! Wait, I will fetch herbs, I will save you! Stay calm, I'll be right back!“
With that he rushed away, trembling in all his limbs, his heart pounding furiously, his pulse choking in his throat, his temples hot, fear stifling his breath, his spirit dull and blackened. Nevertheless, as if guided by the hand of a holy god, he found his way to the bed of healing herbs. There he gathered what he needed. He rushed into the hut, poured water and oil and wine into an earthen jug and put the herbs inside. Then he took a linen poultice and soaked it in the healing decoction. With this he hurried back to Eurydice.
„Come, beloved, I will put this poultice on your wound!“
„But it is of no use now. I am written in the Book of Shadows. Fate, mightier than the gods, ancient fate, according to whose laws life and death proceed, my fate, it will meet me. I will see...“
„Nothing you will see! Blindness is the law of death! Only on earth you can see, Eurydice! the blue skies of love! the beautiful violets of the most tender desire! The sea-shells on the mountain-top, Euyrdice, which we so marvelled at, and compared to our kisses, these thou shalt see, and me, let me not out of thine eyes! Eurydice, keep your eyes awake, keep your eyelids open, come, come back to life! Mortal!““
„Orpheus...“ she breathed, „immortality.... Orpheus, Minos, the judge of the dead.... Orpheus, what is written on the brazen tablet of fate: Phlegeton's floods of fire or Elysium's gardens and Athens' heavenly castle?... Orpheus, I don't know... Dear, whom, whom shall I trust of all the gods?“
„Trust the holy love that blessed us and created us as one!“
„Orpheus, by our love, Orpheus... By the holy...“
The poet was speechless with pain. Weeping, he threw himself at the feet, at the sore feet of his beloved and wet her sore feet with his tears. With silent kisses he covered her feet. No, no, by Zeus! she could not be dead. He had to call her back to life! For Eurydice there could be no death and no realm of the dead, she was born for love and eternal life! Had not his lyre, through the beloved Muse, been powerful to tame wild beasts? Could he not conquer death? He leapt into the hut and fetched his lyre, and struck the out-of-tune with a terrible murmur, tormenting his soul! No, by the celestial harmony that alone can overcome death's discord, Orpheus, control yourself! He tuned his lyre, sobbed out, conquered himself and, interrupted by sobs, began to sing softly, then ever more powerfully, ever more desperately wildly.
„By all the gods, by the true one,
The only one who is victor in the contest
And wears the laurel, before death,
Wears the immortal wreath of victory!
By thee, thou nameless one, thou terrible one,
I beseech the heavens, Eurydice
To hold at earth's breast,
To breathe into her the breath of life!
Look at the violet and the lime tree,
They suffer because the lovely mistress dies,
The moon dew, like drops of blood,
Falls weeping in the night‘s garden.
And all the nymphs tear their hair,
The goddess of love beats her bosom,
The muses scatter ashes on
On sadly immortal heads of curls.
And all weep, and holy tears are
Of the sea's floods, holy tears are
The stars all in the black sky,
And my eyes are black tears!
O Father Ether, accept my life,
Dionysus, tear from my breast my heart,
O genius of pure love,
Let Orpheus die for Eurydice!“
Awakened from her doze by the eerie after-play of his storming, heaven-storming, death-summoning lyre, Eurydice lightly fluttered open her trembling eyelids and whispered, „Myrrha, are you there?“
„Eurydice! You are alive! It is I, your Orpheus! Evoe, you're alive!“
„Myrrha, where is Orpheus?“
„Here I am, love, here I am!“
„Call me my son, you girls, call me my dear little son...“
Then Orpheus realised that the childless one was speaking in error. He held her hand and stroked it softly with his own. He stroked the golden curl from her forehead, wiped a drop of sweat from her brow, kissed her forehead.
„I see my son... Is it not he who comes with the wreath and plays a merry May song?“
„Ah, Eurydice, I am with you, just rest, my love. You have come back to life. Thanks be to Zeus! Now you are only a little weak, but that will pass, just rest.“
As if she understood, she closed the weak lids again over her dulling eyes. A final sigh fled from her paling lips:
„Son - - -“
With that she surrendered her spirit into the hands of her eternal destiny. - Orpheus saw that her chest no longer rose, he put his ear to her mouth, there was no more lisping breath of life. It was over. Life was over. The mortality of man had claimed its right. Here lay the beautiful shell, the beloved shell, but the more beloved soul was in other places. The shadow of Saturn, the god of melancholy, fell on the singer's soul.
Follow her! was his whole thought.
Aiaiaiai! She is dead! She is dead! The beautiful life is gone! Ai!
Woe, woe!
A terrible shuddering howl escaped from Orpheus' chest. Senseless and delirious with pain, he staggered into the nearby woods to hide there in even deeper night. He could not bear any light, not even the tear-flowers of the stars, not even the balmy dew of Luna. Darkness and grave were to be his home. Saturn‘s scythe had mown him down, the god of gloom had put his astral ring around his heart.
Orpheus picked an intoxicating mushroom from the forest floor and chewed it. Then he lay down in the humus, weeping and stammering with sobs: Euyrdice! Dead! Aiaiaiai! Woe, woe! Woe is me!
When the morning began to dawn - not a beautiful dawn, but a damp haze creeping up - Orpheus thought he sensed his beloved's soul.
She is here! Her soul is floating around me! Eurydice, blessed Eurydice, her immortal genius floats around me! Holy Eurydice, under your banner of victory I will live, be you the banner of love above me! I will follow you, blessed one, up to the stars and their spirits, up, blessed one, through the endless seas of the ether my soul shall surge, a pilgrim on the way to Athens' castle in the midst of the Elysian garden, where I shall meet you, and where I shall feast with you, as Menelaus did with Helen, on the ancient wine of Chios, already drunk by the Maeonide, and shall eternally, eternally celebrate the immortality of holy love!
Then an unspeakable languor overwhelmed Orpheus, his spirit was lost wandering in the ether, his body sank to the earth tired of life, he buried himself in the dust, pressed his mouth into the dust and swore, „Only to you, beloved, and to our Godhead shall my lyre henceforth be consecrated! But thou, Blessed One, surround me with thy blessings and guide me through this madness of dust!“
SECOND CHAPTER
„And Orpheus' love / went down to Acheron.“
(Hölderlin)
THE DEPARTURE
Infinite loneliness had befallen Orpheus in those days. The bright summer had gone to him under black clouds and the tears of the sky, and autumn was approaching. He did not see the golden shine of the leaves, the red-cheeked laughter of the fruit, the sweet ripeness of the wine; he saw only the yellowing and brown withering of the leaves, he saw the sighing mists, he saw the weather clouds hanging like a fate over Thrace. His soul was withered like the leaves, his mind sighed like the fog, on his spirit weighed the black doom cloud of fate. He felt abandoned by all the good gods and thought that evil demons were weighing too heavily on his soul.
His only hope was to see Eurydice again. But since his beloved was in the realm of the silent ones, he had to go down. He knew that he had to purify himself before he could dare to descend to the king of the silent ones. Therefore he wandered into the Attic country, to the holy Eleusis. There he let himself be purified by the priests.
But his heart was full of longing for the dark god of madness, for Orpheus knew that he was afflicted with madness. Therefore he went back to Thrace to a small community of Dionysus, who celebrated the mystery in a rocky cave. Especially charming young women were gathered in this community. They sang ecstatic praises to the glorious one, beat the zithers and cymbals and danced with bare feet, clapping their hands and shouting, „Hail, you glorious sacrificial bull!“ They greeted the mad poet with passionate embraces, inviting him to create a song of praise for Dionysus with his lyre. Then Orpheus praised the god:
„Hail! Hail! you sacrificial bull, bloody one,
You who make atonement with the blood of the vine
And with the golden fruit of Ceres,
To thee, to thee do I lift up my hands, Jacchus!
O Bacchos, holy father you
Of the Orient, creator of the vine and
Thy staff on which the vine grows up,
Glorious ruler thou over satyrs!
O Jacchos, dripping Thyrsos staff,
You heart ravisher who died
And came again with your ship
Flying over the Mediterranean!
Dionysus, you god over Dia,
Thou wondrous bridegroom who didst call
The lonely and beautiful Ariadne,
You were her comfort and her heart's ravisher!
O son of the virgin Semele! Son of Zeus!
You human youth, Evier! true god!
O come to us in the blood of the vine,
Come from Olympos to the maenads!“
After this praise, Orpheus was led into the depths of the dark cave. Around an altar stood youths with golden locks, in white robes and red undergarments, holding burning pine torches. A mature priest distributed the slaughtered sacrificial bull and drank the ivy-wreathed cup of the blood of the grape empty. Orpheus ate of the god's flesh, for he ate the god; Orpheus drank of the god's libation, for he drank the god. With bacchanalian jubilation the youths, the maenads and the drunken poet praised the entry of the father Bacchus into his sanctuary! They stepped out into the open night to the sound of cymbals. A round full moon hung in the firmament and illuminated the night. Orpheus was filled with enthusiasm and the courage to die. He was ready to descend into the depths.
He walked to the gate of Tainaron, there was the gate to the darkness of the deep. It was night. He was in that shady grove, surrounded by tall black alders, and saw the silver vapours rising from the maw. After he had sacrificed a white lamb to the third person of the trinity that rules in the depths, he saw three doves fly over and settle in the black alder above him. He entrusted himself to his fair genius that he would not leave him when he descended into the realm of darkness.
He stepped into the bay of Cocytus, as the nocturnal tides of Tartarus washed in. Void mist lay over the tide. Sharp vapours of Avernus surrounded Orpheus. The flood of Cocytus descended into a yawning maw. Orpheus lowered himself, down the Aornos, to enter the stygian grove of Erebus. „O by the most holy deity and the silent shadows that surround us!“ prayed Orpheus, „be my genius with me with his light torch, when I enter the spaces of nocturnal silence!“
Darkly, his lonely soul wandered through the night space until he came to the first maw of Orcus, where the Acherusian Lake began on the shore. On the shore lay the black bark of Charon, the ferryman of the dead. He was an old man, old in days, with a long white beard and fire-spitting eyes. In his hand he held a long pole with which he steered the bark across the Acherusian lake. „By the virgin of the silent ones (began Charon) thou art a living soul, walking in the body, what dost thou begin here in the realm of empty shadows?“
„In the name of holy love I come, from the realm of shadows, if it be possible, my beloved, to bring up blessed Eurydice to the bright day of the upper world.“
„If that is your intention, I doubt you will succeed, for Hades is a terrible prince of darkness who will not let anyone go and will take them all one day, even if they do not know the hour, for that is what is decreed for men by the all-powerful Fate“, Charon growled.
Orpheus boarded the bark, which sank dangerously deep into the Acherusian Lake, and Charon steered the barka with his long pole to the other shore. There Orpheus stepped onto the black beach. Close to the black beach began a meadow where asphodel flowers bloomed. In the flowers, the younger brother of Death, the god off sleep, Morpheus, lay slumbering. His eyelids were drooping and trembling, for he was dreaming. His limbs twitched, he rolled from side to side, tipping over the horn that stood beside him, and from the horn flowed the white milk of the wild poppy, with which Morpheus dripped dreams into the brains of sleeping men.
Orpheus passed Morpheus and advanced into the depths of the Stygian grove. In the middle of the grove stood a magnificent peach tree, the fruit promised beautiful immortality and sweet delight, and a man lay under the tree and tried to pick the fruit. But because he had never feared the gods in his life on earth, his fate had destined him to starve eternally under the unattainable peaches of immortality: Tantalos was his name.
A mountain began in the distance. At its foot, a man sat beside a boulder, sighing. „Again I must begin to roll up the boulder, but it has fallen to me that the boulder will roll back from the summit to the foot of the mountain, where I must begin again. Oh futility of all toil! Oh eternal striving for emptiness! Oh futile languishing of the spirit is all toil in the realm of shadows!“ sighed the man. It was Sysiphus.
Orpheus wandered on. From afar, the terrible barking of dogs pierced through the thickness of the night. Orpheus shuddered at the roar. Then he saw the beast's flame-spitting eyes pierce through the blackness. Its breath was a tank of sulphur. In its mouth its teeth were long and sharp like boar's tusks. His body was that of a dragon, his tail that of a serpent. The infernal beast roared hideously and wanted to pounce on Orpheus. Orpheus, however, played a few beguiling notes on his lyre, with whose soft melody he put the beast to sleep.
A tall gate opened before him, with a sign above its architrave, an erotic tablet in which was written with a diamond stylus, „Whoever enters here, abandon all hope!“ Orpheus made his incredible love death-defying. He was ready to abandon all hope, even to abandon his own immortality and the bliss of Elysium, if only he could free his beloved, his bride from Hades!
Orpheus stepped through the gate, which was made of the most precious agate, and there he saw before him: the sublime, holy ruler of the silent ones! O Persephone, how terrible-beautiful was her otherworldly appearance! All shadow, all otherworldliness, all spiritualisation! Her eyes flashed like dim stars from the deep dark sockets! She was dressed in a long flowing black linen robe with blue cyan flowers embroidered on it. Her hair was covered by a veil, also black, but which left her face uncovered. It was of a milky pallor, from which the black eyes looked deep and sad. Her eyes gleamed moistly with a deep sadness. Her lips were narrow, nonsensical, a little pale, of a delicate purplish-pink colour.
„What dost thou desire, mortal, of the Queen of Shadows?“ she asked him in a sad whisper.
„Is love a stranger to thee, exalted queen? For then I can never bring my request before you, you would never understand me.“
„Ah, the power of love holds back no agate gate, it penetrates to the realms of shadows and silence. Nay, mortal, be not afraid: love is known in the hereafter!“
„Dost thou love thyself, exalted queen? Art thou thyself acquainted with this unhappy and wretched feeling of the mortals?“
„Not as the mortals do I love, but as the queen of the silent must love. Thou shalt know it, for when thou departest from here, thou shalt drink of the Lethe waters and forget what I shall secretly reveal to thee. The most beautiful of the demigods, the beautiful Syrian Adonis, the son of Myrrha, I love him with a holy love! The beautiful Anadyomene also lay at his feet, when he bled to death, she wept the tears from which the roses blossomed, the tears from which the amber gates of her palace are built. The son of Myrrha, the Syrian Adonis, him I love, no less than the free Anadyomene with the dissolved golden tides of curls and the light white dress. But which of us the beautiful Adonis loves more, the lovely Anadyomene in the flowing shirt or the sad Queen of Shadows in the black veil, only the King of the Gods can say. Now thou knowest, O mortal, what is the state of my love.“
„O Persephone, holy ruler with a face full of sorrow, queen of sorrows! How did it happen that such a lover came to the realm of shadows? Is she not appointed to the easy life of light and air and lust and love?“
„You ask foolish questions for a poet, yes, I know who you are, Orpheus! The queen of the silent was not made for light and air and lust and love, but it was sealed by Providence, but it was my own folly, that I ate of the pernicious pomegranate, I did not spurn its seven seeds. By the owl! It did not remain hidden, and that is why the almighty Providence banished me from the realm of the living into the shadow underworld, where I must dwell. What shall I say? Should I speak like Achilles and say, I would rather be a maid in life than a queen in the underworld? To submit to one's fate, that is wise. In my grief, O mortal, I have become a bride of the most mysterious person of the divine trinity, who rules over Greece and the whole ecumenism, who judges all the dead, whether they are destined for Phlegeton with its floods of fire or for blissful Elysium and immortal happiness on the islands of the blissful!“
„Now then, O queen, entreat the terrible ruler, who is terrible and makes darkness his tent, to release to me my beloved bride!“
„I will entreat him, and for thee, O poet, I will cause thee to appear before the terrible one himself. You may ask him. And may the God of life, may the God of love be with thee!“
With that, a path paved with black onyx stones revealed itself before Orpheus, leading directly to the throne. The throne was bright as lightning, entwined with seven-coloured serpents, overarched by an emerald canopy. But the king of the dead was not to be seen. Yet his voice sounded like thunder.
„You desire the beloved bride, the nymph Eurydice, back from the Silent Land? Well then, hear, O mortal in thy courting! She may accompany you on your way back to earth. My messenger will escort you. You will go forth as befits the man. You will walk towards the light. She will follow you, for she will be willing to sacrifice Elysium for the sake of your love - a sacrifice is sacred love - but you must not look back. If you look back before you behold the pure light of the morning star that shall bless your love, the bride will slip away from you into the insubstantial nothingness in whose silence she will again appear before the judge of the dead to receive her eternal judgement, which will no longer belong to mortals. Now go, the messenger will escort you, and trust, trust that she will follow you!“
With that the terrible majesty dismissed the trembling singer. The messenger stepped up to him, his wings rustling, even his sandals winged, holding a staff in his hand, and led Orpheus back the way from the thrones, towards the light of life.
THE RISE
Orpheus entrusted himself to his guide, in whose nature he recognised sacred traits of divinity. As they walked the path through the shadows, he praised him and addressed him, „You who are the inventor of the lyre and the flute, may I dare, as a mortal poet, to sing your praise even on our walk through the shadow world?“
The guide replied, „Can you sing anything but the praise of your beloved?“
„Is it not the most beautiful love song for the now soon-to-be-saved, when I praise the Godhead who leads us up from the realm of the dead to life?“
„So praise!“ Then Orpheus tuned his lyre and sang:
„O shepherd, from the land of Arcadia,
Home of all perfection!
Son of Maja! in the cave
Divinely born to the Pelasgians!
You wear the Caduceus, O shepherd-god,
On which hangs that brazen serpent!
In the sign of that Caduceus
Thou lead from the realm of the dead thy praiser!
Thou messenger of God! Guide of souls thou,
O Psychopompus, god of poets,
For thou art the master of the word:
Nothing is mightier than the Word!“
The Guide of Souls smiled in his ideal beauty. Like a crane he flew proudly into the light, like a shepherd at the staff he wandered with Orpheus, like a shepherd's dog the sheep he guarded the souls of those entrusted to him.
They came to the bank of the Lethe. As the Queen of the Silent commanded, Orpheus had to drink from the water of oblivion here. But Psychopompus instructed him to wet only his tongue with a few drops, so that he forgot Persephone's words but not the instructions of the King of the Dead. Otherwise Orpheus would certainly have looked at Eurydice and lost her immediately.
Orpheus was a poet, and as the sages teach, all artists and wise men drank only a few drops from the water of Lethe when they came from the divine home of all that is perfect into their mortal bodies at the hour of conception and birth. All other men, drunk with the Lethe water, would be completely oblivious of all that is perfect in the divine world of ideas, but not so the wise and the artists, who would still have the memory of truth, of the only good and the beauty of glory.
A high hope welled up in Orpheus' soul and he enthusiastically expressed hope before the guide of his heart, „What mortal, except the king of the Athenians, has succeeded in coming up again from the realm of the dead? Now, according to the will of holy love and the divinity to which I consecrated myself, I shall succeed! Life, life is what makes us Thracians, us Hellenes, us ancient men, beautiful men! Down with death, let it no longer have power over us! Let love be beautiful, beautiful in the land of the living, in bodies gilded by the sun's rays, in bodies kissed by the heavenly air, let immortal souls dwell, who have seen death but have not tasted its bitter pomegranate‘s seed! No longer shall we dwell in the realm of shadows, no longer vegetate in the insubstantial, in the void, in the sighing mists of the underworld; but up and up! to the sun of life, O golden one, with your youthful face of eternal youth and heavenly bliss! Let joy dwell in the midst of our huts, and inhabit the holy palace of our love, the palace in our hearts, the fair daughter of Elysium, who so often weeps such fervent tears of joy! O the fair, kindly hope has not left me, though I did not see her face in the days of my death-pain and lamentation, but she hovered around me like a heavenly genius, she did not leave me in the day when I lamented, nor in the night when I descended into the land of the dead, for behold! thrilled by her blessings I lead my bride up from the realm of the dead, so that we shall celebrate our wedding in Zeus' tent on earth! Blessed life, since only the universal law of love, with its liberating duties and its blissful rights, applies to us! Verily, holy love does not leave its servants in death, but those in whose hearts it, the beautiful one, lives, are not carried off by Thanatos into the sulphurous abysses of the fire-breathing Phlegeton! But, behold, my guide, under thy direction, inspired by holy love, and accompanied by the genii of the most beautiful hope, the lover and the beloved, who is a lover no less, return to the heavenly tent on earth, where our love lives and never ends!“
Dark, sighing shadows pressed against Orpheus and sought to drag him down, for envy welled up in their lost souls. They were not able to hear a single hymn of praise to life without the desire awakening in them to drag the praiser down with them into the hopelessness and eternal forlornness of their doomed shadow souls. They breathed on Orpheus with cold, hateful breath. He shuddered. Fears flew to his heart like vultures to the liver of the bound Prometheus.
„Woe is me, wretched man, if all my hopes should be lies and deceit! Will the gods be kind? Is Dionysus powerful enough, by the strength of his flesh and the blood of the vine, to raise me up and Eurydice with me? Can I escape the fate of death? Can my love, planted in me by the motherly hand of holy love, raise Eurydice to the light of day? What power has death! Can I, who am nothing but a poet, only a poet, only a fool, can I compare myself to the holy king of the Athenians? Him, after all, Zeus' son freed from the realm of the dead! But me, wretched me! who freed me from the clutches of Pluton, did I not undertake it by my own strength? What can a poor mortal's little strength do against the work of the gods, what can even these do against the work of fate, and what can a mortal do against his fate, that he must live, once, and then die and stand before Minos' judgment seat? Where is help? Whom from the heavenly circle do I call as my saviour? Who is the saviour from the snare of death?“
He covered his face with his hands and wept in his helplessness and hopelessness. But in the depth of his sadness he saw with his inner eye the face of Euyrdice as she had met him for the first time. And for Eurydice's sake he overcame all scepticism, all doubt, all fear and wandered on, towards the light, for though there was no hope, yet for Eurydice's sake he must hope!
„Eurydice, do you hear me? I certainly hope, I trust, Eurydice, that you will follow me, that you will come up from the realm of the dead with me and our spiritual guide. Behold, beloved, let us live beautiful life of love! Where shall we go? Shall we go to beautiful Paphos, to Cypris‘ isle, there on Salamis' shores, or live in Marion, wreathed with myrtles, surrounded by doves, where the nightingale sings us her sweet song from the shimmering oleanders? We want to bathe in the Pedhieos and graze our lambs among the myrtles on the slopes of Olympos! Or, dear bride, do you want to go on pilgrimage to Chios in the footsteps of the blind poet? Will you listen with me to the wise men in the sacred halls of Athens? Shall we drink wisdom from the motherly breasts of the goddess, like pure milk? Oh my love, I will go with you wherever you want! Whichever god you want to worship, I will worship him too! Among whatever people you want to live, I want the same! Wilt thou go to Nyssa in India, and rest in mango groves, and caress sandalwood trees? Wilt thou go to Byblus under the skies of Zamen? Wilt thou go to the fertile precincts of Egypt? Shall we seek the sacred remains of Atlantis by sea? I will hoist the sail of our love in the boat of our marriage, and the mast be holy fidelity! With you, O my Eurydice, I will also ride on the backs of snow-white dolphins to Lesbos, to dance there in the gymnasia, like Sappho and Phaon! Will you embrace the olive tree Orthygias, bearing me a son, on Delos, the sea-girdled, the swan's haven? Wherever our love leads us, we shall wander together! Hymenaeus shall carry the torch, Cupid shall sneeze at each of our kisses: auspicious sneezing! Ah, I fool, I only fool, only poet, but wise will I become, Eurydice, if you teach me holy love! Without you I am in the daylight an insubstantial shadow! with you even in the stygian grove a man full of life, for where love is, our love, there is life, be it in this world bedded in beautiful roses, or in the hereafter on blue flowers and asphodel meadows: Love is our Godhead! Love is our genius! In the name of this glorious power we begin a sanctified life in the arms of good Mother Earth! Eurydice, I will write epics! Eurydice, we will milk our goats and make cheese, breed our bees and harvest honey, cultivate our fields and reap the cereals, we will plant the vine and press the grapes in song and dance! Children shall swarm around us, Lucina be our midwife herself, for Eurydice, children are a blessing from Zeus, and the fruit of the womb a gift from God! Eurydice, we are almost there, behold, is there not a twilight? or am I mistaken, no, it was a flickering on my retina. But presently, beloved, not long now, O bride, and our redemption is at hand!“
„Patience, my Orpheus!“ said the soul guide, the beautiful messenger. „I will shorten the time for you, so that your wandering through the shadow lands will not be too long, and I will tell you about the man Admetos.“
And the messenger reported, „Admetos learned through a prophecy that he would soon have to leave the tent of his earthly body, that he had fallen to Hades with its subterranean rights; unless another man, inspired by holy love, gave himself up to death for Admetos. Admetos loved life. He lamented that he should die. Therefore he went about with his parents, who preferred mortal existence to the soul of their son, and with his friends, who wanted to save life at the breasts of their wives, the cup of wine in their hands, and not to die for another. But greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for a man, and such love had Alcestis, Admetus' wife. She was ready to die for her beloved husband. No sooner had she declared herself ready to redeem her beloved than the black shadow of Thanatos approached her from the gates of Orcus, seized her and led her down into the realm of shadow. In her departure she cried out to the Son of Zeus, the God of Life: Do not leave me, do not leave me! But she had to descend in order to be able to redeem Admetos. Admetos wept bitter tears for the death of his beloved. He mourned for three days, when on the third day the strong son of Zeus entered his house and asked the reason for his grief. Admetos poured out his heart with tears and sobs before the son of Zeus. The mighty son of Zeus resolved to save! He wanted to save and lead the dead woman back to the house of her loving husband. Therefore he went to the grave, to the rocky cave, and waited for Thanatos to creep up and snatch the offerings for the soul of the dead with a greedy spirit. The son of Zeus wrestled with Thanatos, finally overcoming the deadly demon. At noon that day, the son of Zeus entered the widower's house with the resurrected woman, who was veiled. The widower had promised his bride that he would not even look at another woman, but that he would live eternally in memory of her all the days of his existence, even if it was in perpetual sadness. Therefore Admetos did not want to look at the woman who had been brought in, not even the veiled one. He, however, directed his eyes to her appearance, where he found a striking resemblance to his beloved Alcestis in the nature of her appearance, indeed, she seemed a little more graceful. He forbade himself this thought, the thought seemed to shake the foundations of his undying loyalty. But the Saviour opened not only the eyes of his flesh, but also the eyes of his heart, that Admetos recognised: It was Alcestis, a transfigured Alcestis, purified in the intermediate worlds, who had returned to life. He lifted her veil and looked into her pure, radiant eyes, whose gleam gilded the whole white face, but he did not dare to embrace her, for he thought she was a blessed goddess or an immortal nymph. Then Alcestis came close to him and embraced him with her soft womanly arms in her pure white robe and drew him to her; and he, feeling that her heart was beating, awoke from his dream of sadness and kissed Alcestis. Found again, more beautiful than I have ever seen you! he stammered and wept tears of joy. Silently the son of Zeus departed back to Olympus. Praise of the saved echoed after him.“
While the spiritual guide was telling this parable, it seemed to Orpheus as if dawn had broken; or was it only a bleaching of the night? The sun had not yet risen, but its reflection gleamed prophetically from afar in dull shadows above the horizon. But they themselves were still in deep night. No stars, no moon could be seen, for they were still in the Acherusian worlds. The bushes were of black silky gloom, the shadows sighed around them, fearful shadows that fled when Orpheus, the living, came near them, they fled with an anxious whisper, with a despondent whisper.
Orpheus longed for the light, perhaps with such longing as no other in Greece had at that hour, O morning star! Come down from the womb of your Mother Night! Tread with thy golden feet upon the Grecian earth, thou bright morning star, and kindle thy fire in my longing sighing heart! O morning star from your eternal kingdom of heaven! Come, O come, and deliver Eurydice from death, lead us with your eternal torch into the bridal chamber, lead us to Corinth that we may there sing to you the song of love, lead us to Marion in Cyprus that we may shout to you in eternal love! Come down, thou bright morning star, and rise above the Helicon, the fountain of Parnassus, the muses will follow thee, and I in their midst, for thy muses' son, O divine morning star, will praise thy splendour! Come, O divine morning star, from the eternal halls of dark divinity, come hither with thy world-illuminating light, and deliver me from fear, and Eurydice with me! O Saviour!“
Then it seemed to Orpheus, consumed with longing for the light, that the dawn was already the radiance of the morning star. Everything in his soul urged him to see Eurydice at last. Touched in the soul by the parable of the soul guide, the myth of the glorified Alcestis, Orpheus hoped to see Euyrdice rising in divine perfection from the realm of the dead! O she had already been a blessed one on earth, the holy nymph, but purified by death, he hoped to behold a bride who deserved to be called a goddess, because the word of the god who promised life, the god of life, had gone out to her! But who was he?
Was it not the one under whose blessing they stood, to whom Orpheus had consecrated himself before his descent into the realm of the dead by participating in the mystery, by consuming his flesh? He was the god whose being was torn, whose sacrificial flesh, above all whose return, promised victory over the shadows of death! In his name Orpheus tuned the lyre and greeted the moment when he might dare to behold the glorified bride with a praise of Jacchos:
„My Eleleus! thou glorious one! thou death
In the garden of gloom! your blood like wine
Poured out in the sacrifices,
Whom in the mystery celebrates women!
My Eleleus! Thou that comest, thou that comest,
Swarming with lark's song in the springtime,
O golden daffodil of Nyssa!
Fiery rejoicing of the May moon!
My Eleleus! wreathed in gold by the morning star
And in curls of sacred vine leaves
Thou comest with clouds of the sea,
Heavenly mighty one! Lightning-begotten!
My Eleleus! To thee I dedicate Eurydice
And sacred poetic life to thee
And all the life of my love
To thee, thou hallowed Liber! Son of Zeus!“
Then Orpheus' longing became too great: What time that is in the hands of the dark deity? Now is the time! This is man's freedom to choose his own time! Looked down into the maw of death at this moment, to behold the beloved‘s face! For the beloved‘s face, for the face of holy love, Orpheus seized such longing that he forgot the law, transgressed the commandment of the hour and turned around!
INFINITE MELANCHOLY
„Eurydice!“ cried Orpheus, overcome with love and terror of death!
But she looked at him with a forgiving smile on her sad face. „We are not destined“, she said in a thin, fine voice, sweet as buzzing bees, „to enjoy our happiness in earthly love, for another bridegroom's love draws me down into the world beyond, there to put on the blue garland at the altar of the Silent One, which seals me as the child of Death.“
„Eurydice? What speakest thou? Shall you go down again to Hades?“
„Orpheus, my dear husband of my earthly days! Thou hast willed it and tried it, but the gods grant thee not to follow me into the world of immortal souls who no longer walk in the flesh. Over there is now my home.“ She sank slowly and silently, like a sighing shadow, down the dark path, moving away silently and ever more mysteriously. „Not will we live in Marion on Cypris‘ isle, For no more do I belong to thee, but to another. This one holds the white mantle and the garland of asphodel flowers. In the grove of Aneslasleja, in the grove of Aneslasleja I shall walk like a breath, like a breath woven into the otherworldly breath of the world soul, will it be sweet? He will breathe like the immortal spring on the islands of the blissful! For in the vast sea of the cosmos, beyond the Pillars of Hercules, lie those islands, and heaven-bearing palms grow there and white walls surround the halls where Achilles and Helen, the hero and the fairest, also walk. In snow-white blossoms the genii bathe there, swing their all-seeing wings, look up and tune their ivory lyres to the song of Zeus! Down, down, into the mysterious world of the other way of being I must go and leave you, my beloved, on earth! Bear your fate! Bear your fate, bear it silently and wait for the day of liberation! You will see me when the higher love comes, in the blessed grove of Aneslasleja…“
Orpheus wept. His voice broke out in sobs, „Beloved, stay, O stay with me! Has fate decided otherwise for us? How, beloved, shall I weep forever? Shall I wriggle in the dust like a worm because love, love has left me? Shall my soul bleed? Shall thorns pierce through my side and my heart bleed? Shall I weep tears of blood for my beloved who is slipping away to death? Is there no saviour? Is fate so cruel? O is fate then a demon? Zeus forgive my blasphemy! I must submit, I must endure everything, everything, but my fate seems too cruel! I cannot bear it! Eurydice, help me! Carry with me, enfold me, come and plead for me to the mighty heavens, that they may have mercy on us! Come and bless, bless my bleeding heart with your appearance! How, Eurydice! thou vanishest? Speak to me, O bride, speak to me and comfort me with thy parting words!“
„Orpheus, let me be thy oracle! Behold, the Saviour, the Ram, was sacrificed in the terrible grove! His golden fleece, it hangs in the tree! Behold, parting ones speak drunkenly! Orpheus, do not give in to the frenzy of lust! Remember our blessed hope that holy love is the essence of the God who created us! Be holy, for I too am sanctified in this hour of divorce! Behold, Orpheus, thou shalt be sanctified, but not by drunken rejoicing, Orpheus, but by thy suffering!“
„My suffering! Eurydice! Holy love, that is my suffering!“
„Certainly, my Orpheus, love must bleed and sacrifice itself! But not for ever is thy hope lost, for, dear one, there is the blessed grove of Aneslasleja... There within the sacred white walls, amidst the snow-white genii, praising Zeus, I will await thee, there I will drink with thee, and with Achilles and Helen, at everlasting tables, the best wine of Chios, and Homer shall praise Charis, the Grace! Have mercy on me, son of Zeus! Orpheus, I know not, I go, I part, but I shall open mine eyes yonder in the blessed grove of Aneslasleja, and shall behold the truth and the highest good - Theos alone is good! - and the glorious beauty of the blessed spirits and genii!“
Eurydice's voice died away in the distance. Already Orpheus saw her no more. And as if from an oracle's sacred shrine, her voice rang out for the last time: „Suffer! Die and see!“
Orpheus lay on the ground. Black alders surrounded him, stripped of all adornment of leaves. Frosty wind passed through their branches like clashing flags. It shook him. It was black behind his eyes, black before his eyes. Deepest night surrounded him. All fading words of hope had been lost in his soul and only the cold scythe of Saturn had mown the ears of his heart, now he took the stubble, now he lived like a beggar from what time had left him, little, only enough to live on.
For a long time he lay like this in the black alder grove, thinking no thought, seeing no image in his soul, speaking no word. Only tears ran down his cold face, cold tears ran down his pale cheek. Older he had become in an instant. No ideal, no deity seemed to him, no comfort came from the celestials, no wing of a genius soothingly touched Orpheus, who felt abandoned like an orphan in the infinite cosmos, the seemingly inanimate, the ornament, that he no longer knew how to adorn anyone.
Finally he rose, not in hope, but in a desperate resolve to begin his suffering, to bear the pain, yes, to set out towards greater pain. He threw himself, like a suicide, into his pain. O pain for the dead, O pain for the cruelty of fate, O pain for the silence of all the gods! How cynically they looked from their Olympian joys, with Olympian sneers, at the sufferer and said, „Ha! There we see the poor man, and it is our kindness that he is not yet quite at the end! Ha, ye mighty ones, see if he is not able to bear a still heavier fate! Let us send him a demon to load on his cross a heavy pack, a stone, to carry him up the mountain! Ha“, the Olympian gods laughed mockingly, „he can carry even more, he must still bear our silence! and if he is able to hear us, he shall hear our mocking laughter! Venus, show thyself charming to him, and mock him! Mars, show him wars in the world and make him despair! Apollo, show him with your rays the emptiness of the world and the absence of his beloved! Ye heavens, rain, ye clouds, rain dew, and bring forth sorrow to the sufferer, and thou, O Mother Earth, sprout a terrible fate to the sufferer, that he may endure torment in his soul! Ha, ye mighty ones, ye demons of Olympus, our goodness is that he is not fully ended!“ Thus Orpheus heard the Olympian laughter of the gods, and it tormented him to the bottom of his heart.
He wandered through the thorny thickets, his clothes torn by the sharp branches. He wandered over rocky scree, and his sandals were torn by the sharp stones. He wandered over snow-covered rocky hills, and his toes turned blue from the frost of the earth. He got lost in dark forests and could no longer find his way home. But what else could have been home to him since Eurydice was no more? He was a homeless man, the earth had become a stranger to him, and only over there, over there, was his dear home. But she, she had called to him with a testamentary oracle, „Suffer!“
Oh he walked daily the paths of his pains and tears, but he found her no more, not in the green woods among mossy trees and ivy-clad boughs, not on the rocky heights where the roses blossomed as if in mockery, and all that remained to him, his most faithful companion, was his pain, which drove deep furrows into his countenance. Yes, fate had taken an ox, a bull in strength, and a yoke, and ploughed on the back of Orpheus, and bruised his cross with wounds of sorrow for the beloved!
No more did she speak to him, and no more did she sing to him her magic songs, with which she often sang to him in his black man-soul heavenly consolations. There she was, and for ever! Never again to be brought up from the shadow of death! For at the end of all human life stood death and all human hopes, and even love for the beloved, the love of lovers itself, it could not overcome death! Woe to Pandora, that woman brought disaster into the world, and woe to Prometheus and his outrage of pride against Zeus! Woe and misery have reigned over the earth since Eris brought the golden apple! Orpheus lamented the fall of the Golden Age! For since that time death reigned, ruled the whole oekumene and reigned to the ends of the earth! Death seemed to him the last word and strangler of all that is beautiful! The mightiest demon, mightier even than all the Olympian gods, death horrified him!
Come and be my friend! Orpheus thought, for if death is so mighty, it is good to have him for a friend. Embrace me brotherly, terrible demon! Behold, I die all the days of my earthly life, and the way that lies before me is a way in thy shadow! Then come with your scythe and reap me and bring me to your eternal barn! I may no more live! I can no more live! Forsaken by all good gods, I will throw myself into thy murdering arms, O terrible death!
But then Eurydice's testament sounded in his soul again, „Suffer!“ - Now then! Dying is too small a suffering! Death is too small an evil! Death is a gentle saviour, and even if it often approaches terribly, it is still the nuptial one who rules lovingly over the grove of Aneslasleja and the islands of the blissful! Life, that is the greater suffering, to die daily and yet not to be allowed to die, that is worth enduring, as Eurydice promised him! That is why he chose you, O life, as the more terrible alternative, as the greater torment, as the more powerful demon, for above death reigned as the most powerful of all the terrible, dreadful, horrible god of life, and this Orpheus feared more than death! Oh woe, woe!
And when the morning of spring broke, Orpheus came into a gilded laurel forest. The pure light of the sun also soothed his soul a little. A river ran through the laurel forest, in which he washed and then dried himself in the sun.
Then he heard from afar, softly approaching, the beautiful playing of a guitar. A dark melancholy melody touched his soul, the tender soft tones were like a holy consolation sent to him by the muses. Which god was the god of his consolation? Then a girl emerged from the laurels, playing the guitar. She had golden blonde hair that fell in smooth floods on her slender shoulders. Her eyes were sky blue like the eyes of Zeus' blue-eyed daughter, the maiden Minerva. She did not sing to the guitar, but her string playing was like the conversation of a sorrowing genius with Orpheus' soul, or like the consoling, silent heavenly lament of a muse from the Mount of the Pierides.
„Brother Poet!“ the heavenly maiden greeted him, „what do you look upon so terribly miserable and sorrowful? Behold how this flower blossoms.“ With that she pointed to the dream of a blossom that bloomed sweetly in yellow and gold and green and delicate purple, and bore all the spring gathered in its ineffable beauty. „Behold“, she said, „beauty has not quite left the earth, and this flower blooms for your comfort.“
„Oh, girl, I have been in deep sorrow, but thy stringing has comforted my soul. Who are you, where are you from?“
„I call Zeus my father and a blessed nymph my mother. My name is Maa, like the name of the mother of Jacchus in the Mystery. I am a shepherdess, and with the heart of a shepherdess I will comfort thee, yea, I will comfort thee, as a mother may well comfort her son, though thou mightest be my father, and therefore I play for thee on the strings.“
„You play very beautifully, so sadly beautiful, and the notes of your strings speak the language of my heart.“
„I know you mourn for Eurydice. I know you wanted to throw yourself on the sword like a defeated Persian on the shores of Salamis, but live! Orpheus, and seek Theos! Behold Zeus, the beginningless one, the king of the gods, was once born of the blessed mother Rhea in a cave on Mount Ida. She is worshipped like the Magna Mater on the mountains of Ephesus, and young men became eunuchs for her. She is like Maa, the mother of Jacchus. She is like the daughter of Zeus, the virgin with the heavenly eyes. Let your tangled hair be brushed from your forehead by her comforting motherly hands. When I lie down sadly on my bed in the midst of my lambs, she appears in golden sandals, like the queen of heaven, and lays my weeping head on her lap. Last night she appeared to me, balmy as the moon, and sang me an ode for thee, that I might bring it to thee.“
„O wonderful maiden, dear shepherdess Maa, sing me this ode, for my strings are broken and soundless within me.“
And Maa sang:
„Listen, suffering son, listen to my heart,
Listen with your mind, dearly beloved son,
Nothing shall ever frighten thee,
Nothing shall be a gloom to thee,
Nothing shall darken thy face dreadfully,
Nothing shall darken thy childlike heart,
Nor shall thou fear sorrow and pain,
Nor fear any more illness, nothing,
No srrow of thy soul, nor pain of thy mind.
No pain of thy mind. Behold, am I not
Thy loving mother?
Are you not in my shadow?
Are you not under the protective shelter of the Virgin?
Not wrapped in the mantle of the heavenly queen?
In the crook of the arms
Of my holy love rest for ever!“
Orpheus' heart sank as it once did when he sat on his mother Calliope's lap and listened to her songs. His heart was so touched. Was the shepherdess Maa a daughter of the Muses? or even his sister? He loved her from this ode on as his sister and was grateful to her from the bottom of his heart for the heavenly comfort. He wanted to reach out to her, hold her hands in thanks and bless her, he sought to find in her the person who would illuminate the world for him, which since the death of Eurydice had been as if in a daze. But then the dear shepherdess went on, with soft sounds of strings, „I must go to my lamb that lies sore!“ she called softly to him, and she, too, disappeared.
Yes, had she been a genius of the God of his consolation visiting the earth, and not a mortal? Was she returning to the heavenly temple of her God, there to share the heavenly bread with him? As she vanished into the distance, a sweet golden glow vanished with her. But her traces dripped blessings in the soul of Orpheus. And even though he was lost, even though he was lonely and a single lament, as with a passing genius, a God had touched his heart, comforted him, strengthened him for new sufferings!
THIRD CHAPTER
PHRIXUS
Nephele, the nymph, went to a clear spring, drawing water with a pitcher. Next to the spring were the most beautiful orange lilies. Around it stood old broad plane trees, giving her shade from the bright sunlight. She sat down under an old plane tree and rested a little, the zephyr of the May evening playing in the green leaves. Soon the sun was setting. Red fire sprayed from the wheels of the sun‘s chariot, the purple steeds pulled the triumphant vehicle of Phoebus, steered by him, across the western firmament towards the Hesperian gardens. Mother Night rose on the horizon and spread her blue mantle in which she sheltered her children. Hesperus, the evening star, shone with diamond sparkle on the brow of the firmament. Nephele could not part from her resting-place, all the evening-silent nature walked past her. The lilies smelled more beautiful, the plane-trees rustled more softly, Hesperus gazed so glitteringly at her, who looked with beautiful hopes to the god of the Hersperian garden, for she longed to dine there one day on the apples from the tree of the Hesperides; so she dreamed idly.
She heard a turtledove rustling in the treetop of the broad plane tree with its white plumage and cooing sounds of peace; she looked up and looked into the dove's gentle eye. It kept a silent fire, like Olympian life light, in its eye and looked so sweetly from the gentle soul into the mirror of the soul of the nymph Nephele.
Then the divine Psychopompus came to the Hellenic nymph with a soft rustling of wings. She rose before his glory. He wore a long crimson skirt, with a golden belt around his chest, and over it an evening-blue cloak, out of which peeped the most beautiful golden wings, rustling softly in the evening breeze. On his bare brown feet he wore golden sandals, which were also winged. His head was covered with dark brown soft hair, on which rested a golden sheen. His face was sun-brown, his eyes golden-brown, his mouth narrow and fine. He was of a wonderful loveliness and beauty. His form was perfect, his face the purest grace of a youth with mild features.
Nephele stood before him. She wore a blue pleated skirt and a dark blue cloak, which also served as a veil for her head. Over her hands, stretched out towards the holy Psychopompus, was a purple, gold-fringed byssus cloth. Her face was light brown, the fine eyebrows questioning, the light brown eyes almond-shaped, the nose long and fine, the mouth light and softly curved. Her hands were delicate and slender, which she held out to him to receive him devoutly.
At that moment, the cooing turtledove swooshed down from the top of the plane tree and perched on Nephele's right shoulder, cooing softly. Psychopompus also raised his melodious, beautiful voice, and like a song in the language of heaven, his sacred speech rang out, „Graceful Charite! Zeus has gazed upon you with love! Thy son, young Phrixos, shall be saved!“
Nephele was pious before the saints and gave in reply, „O holy Psychopompus, thou master of the word and guide from the realm of the dead! I will do in all things as Zeus commands me!“
Out of the darkness of the night emerged at that moment a gleam of gold, and as it drew nearer it was a pure ram, whose fleece was of refined gold. It had sprung directly from the hand of the Creator. Now the golden ram stood before Nephele and nestled at her side. She leaned towards him and caressed his soft golden-stranded coat. Then the ram, which the gods had gifted with speech, began to speak to Nephele, „I am sent by Zeus to rescue your son Phrixus from the intrigues of the evil world! Behold, because I am with thee, Zeus Cronion grants thee to dwell this May on Olympus in the Hall of the Celestials.“
With that, Psychopompus rose and began his winged ascension into the hall of the almighty Father. Nephele was caught up by the Golden Ram to the summit of Olympus, as Zeus had once caught up Ganymede on the wings of the eagle.
Nephele once bore two children to King Athamas of Athamania: the first-born, the son Phrixos, and the younger sister Helle. They lived with the king in his castle when Nephele was raptured to the Olymp. But the king had a second wife, the quarrelsome Ino, whom he desired because of her beauty. She had large dark eyes, full lips that were soft, a long slender figure, and when she walked her breasts shone through her light dress.
This one was jealous of the Nephele's children, for they were the ones born before her two sons and would inherit more richly. That is why Ino made life difficult for the two Nephele children. Since she was the regiment of the household in the royal castle, she imposed menial tasks on the two royal children. Early in the morning she roused them from their bed and gave them work such as Hercules had had to do in the stables of Augeas. Athamas was a will-less man, in bondage to his second wife, who let all this happen. He could not deny Ino any wish, for if he did not follow her whims, she refused him in the evening in the marriage bed.
But it was not enough for Ino to torment Phrixos and Helle, she wanted them both dead! So she devised a wicked intrigue. There was a soothsayer in the village, to whom she went and bribed him with the royal gold to give a false prophecy. He then announced that if Phrixus and Helle were not sacrificed to Hades and his Erinyes, a pernicious plague would come over the whole land of Athamania.
Athamas was horrified by this prophecy. However, he had become estranged from the two Nephele children in the course of time. Ino also persuaded him that, as king, the welfare of the country and his subjects must be more important to him than the personal welfare of two children. She said, „It is better that your firstborn should die than that your whole nation should perish!“ Athamas then decided to sacrifice the two children. He set a day on which the two human sacrifices were to be performed in a solemn act of consecration for the reconciliation of the god of shadows and his spirits of retribution!
But Nephele saw from the Olymp the fate of her children, the afflicted Phrixus and the fearful Helle, and decided to save them. What else could a loving mother's heart have decided? Therefore the mother came down from the Olymp with the golden ram to the earth, to Athamania in front of the royal castle, and called out her children. The night before, Phrixus had dreamed that Daedalus was coming with his son Icarus, and the two taught Phrixus to fly and escape from his misery! This dream had filled him with hope. And now, stepping out of the castle, he saw his glorious mother, the nymph Nephele, and the Golden Ram! Full of wonder and delight at this miracle, he called his sister Helle into the open. The Golden Ram said to the younger girl and the older boy, „Sit on my back, I will save you! Just cling tightly to my golden fleece!“
So the Golden Ram mounted and flew away through the air from the kingdom of Athamania. They flew towards the rising sun. Aurora awaited them with her golden rosaries and heavenly smile. Titan rose in his golden majesty, with the golden royal crown, the golden staff in his hand, and greeted the exiles with the song of the sun. Clouds, flowering fleeces of heavenly lambs, drifted softly rustling around the flying golden ram. Airy genii, delicate erotes, drifted around them through the blue sea of the ether. All was laughter and jubilant song, all was serene sun-golden joy, as in the Golden Age, as in Hesperia at the end of days!
But Helle became careless, no longer clung tightly to the golden fleece of the ram and looked back to the earth and the land of Athamania. Even though it had been a pity under the rod of the wicked stepmother, and many tears had flowed for her in the castle of the weak-willed king, it was still the land of her childhood, where she had played under saffron, grazed amidst violets like a little lamb, bathed in the lovely babbling springs, and always enjoyed listening to the cooing of the doves in the broad-leaved plane trees in the evening. There she had chirped songs on blades of grass, like cicadas, glorifying Pan, Arcadia's god; her heart was attached to this land.
Since she no longer clung recklessly to the Golden Ram and pernicious longing for the land of her tears seized her with maudlin sentimentality, she fell from the Golden Ram's back and fell and fell, staggering through the air, unstoppable, lost, screaming cries of anguish into the depths, and drowned in Pontus, the maw of the sea. After Helle, this was henceforth called the Hellespontus. In this sea the light-headed woman was baptised to death, but it is said that the god of the Golden Ram, the inventor of this heavenly creature, out of great pity for the light-headed Helle, finally saved her.
Phrixus cried after her, and while crying he hardly heard the soft words of the Golden Ram, who spoke to him amicably and promised him that Helle was not lost. Finally Phrixus calmed down. He felt good, wonderfully good in the midst of his sadness for his sister, so secure in the golden fleece. The ram slowly began to land. Below them lay the Sea of Marmara with its motherly waves, from which Aphrodite of the Bosporus emerged with her heavenly smile. The muses of the Crimea stroked their golden lyres to welcome the saved. The nymphs of the Dardanelles exulted and clapped their hands. The river gods of the Danube and the quiet Don thundered songs of praise to the rescuing ram and the saved Phrixus. On the banks of the Pontus Euxinus, the golden ram set its magnificent hooves on the earth, and Phrixus descended. Here was to be his refuge.
And with the Golden Ram Phrixus entered Colchis and came to the royal castle of Aietes, king of the Colchians. High, brazen gates, ancient gates stood open to the arriving, protective supplicant. Two mighty pillars, bearing nothing but beauty, stood at the entrance, consecrated to the gods. He stepped over the threshold into the forecourt, which was girdled with vine arbours on which the most splendid grapes hung. Sweetly rushing fountains of living water sprang up before him, powdering the water dust in the air. From the forecourt he came to the central courtyard, surrounded by a portico, behind which lay the chambers. At the entrance to the interior of the royal castle stood King Aietes: a tall man, with long black hair, a mighty black beard and glowing brown eyes.
And he took Phrixus in, indeed he promised him a wedding. From that day on, Phrixus, saved, lived happily until the hour of his departure.
But the pledge of his happiness was this. When Phrixus had come before King Aietes, the Golden Ram had spoken these words to Phrixus, „Behold, you who have been brought out of sorrow, one thing is needful, that you should offer a sacrifice to the King of the gods in thanksgiving for your salvation. He is truly the mighty one, the helper of all who cry out for help, the almighty protector and guardian of men! He is the holiest of all gods, for he is the King and Father of gods and men!“
„What sacrifice shall I offer to the Mighty One, the Father Almighty? Shall I pour him wine sweetened with honey for a libation, or water from the fountain of the Danube? Shall I make a bull go up in flames to him, or give him the fragrance of Syrian incense?“
„He has no pleasure in your sacrifices, for they are all not perfect enough. There is only one sacrifice for you to make in thanksgiving for your salvation to Zeus, the Father Almighty. This sacrifice is ready.“
„What sacrifice is it? Shall I sacrifice myself? Shall I, whom the Almighty saved from mortal peril, throw myself in gratitude to him into a freely chosen death, and in final human freedom cast from me all my liberty? If it pleases my Saviour, I will also descend into the Orcus for His glory!“
„What sacrifice would that be, if a heartbreaker like you sacrificed yourself? If you were to sacrifice a bull from a herd, would you choose the best bull for your sacrifice, and not the weak and limping one? No, a perfect sacrifice thou must offer, and that sacrifice is ready.“
„Open my eyes, O Golden Ram, that I may see that which is ready!“
„Behold, it is so, for it is manifest and yet hidden from thee. Behold, it is I!“
„Thou shalt be the sacrifice? My Saviour shall I sacrifice?“
„Zeus commands it. So obey!“ said the ram, and strode out of the royal castle to the mound of war outside the walls of the castle, where the accursed Ares tree stood. There he lay down on the sacrificial altar. Phrixus was terrified when he took the butcher's knife and cut the Golden Ram's throat so that the sacred blood gushed out! „Aiaiaiai!“ cried Phrixus, „my saviour had to be sacrificed!“
Then he pulled the Golden Fleece from the ram. The King of the Colchians stepped in, holding in his hands five nails with which he fastened the Golden Fleece of the Saviour Ram in the cursed Ares Tree.
Night fell. Phrixus sat on the shore of the Black Sea. Thick clouds veiled the pale face of the Virgin Moon, only her silver tears dripped to the earth. Dindymene wept, with flying hair she chased over the night hills and beat her mighty bosom. The youths of the gods stood mute in pain. Zeus had turned away his father's face. With terrible rumbling thunder he sounded his dooms through the ether.
But in the morning Himeria, the nymph of the morning star, with the sweet-smelling myrrh of her beauty, rose above the forests of Colchis. The reflection of the morning star shone gloriously on the Golden Fleece. Dazzling radiance filled the soul of the mourning Phrixus, rejoicing like the sun that smilingly rose from the depths to the heights of the sky. All exulted in life, triumph, immortality, the eternal counsel of Zeus and the holy justice of the all-governing Fate! The celestials poured joy and bliss into the heart of Phrixus. He walked to his bride to celebrate the wedding.
To King Aietes the prophetic saying had gone forth that his life would be safe as long as he was in possession of the Golden Fleece. No spear, no poison, no tiger could harm him, for he was protected by the Golden Fleece as long as it was his property.
Aietes was afraid of losing the Golden Fleece. Mortal fear gripped him. It was like the hour of his birth, when he had to go out through the confines of his mother's womb and had difficulty breathing due to the violent contractions of his painful mother. He had had to leave the warm womb, had been expelled from the deep security of his mother's heart. This was the beginning of his fear of death, which had now been terribly reawakened in him by the oracle, just as a sleeping dragon is awakened by the magic song of a witch.
Dragon! Yes, a mighty dragon had to be brought by Aietes to guard the Golden Fleece. No one was ever to lay his hands on the Golden Fleece! It was to belong to no one but him alone! The Golden Fleece was not to spread its blessings over all of Hellas and Asia Minor, nor was its splendour to reach Thule or Nyssa in India, but was to be the sole property of King Aietes.
So the king of the Colchians had his army drag a dragon of the forest, who lived in a rocky cave, and bind him to the cursed tree of Ares, so that he would watch over it for all time, until the end of days, so that no one would lay his hand on the Golden Fleece.
THE ARGONAUTS
Jason, the son of Aeson, the son of Cretheus, came wandering to take his throne after the death of his father. But in the royal castle of the city of Jolkos in the land of Thessaly, on the coast of the Aegean Sea, sat on the throne of Jason cousin Pelias. Pelias was terrified of Jason, for he knew that the gods were with him. He saw Jason's majestic and beautiful stature, his extraordinary beauty of face, he saw him dressed in the black panther skin, and he was afraid of losing his power. Even against the will of the gods - what did he care about the gods? - he wanted to sit on the throne of Aeson, the son of Cretheus, and rule over Jolkos. Therefore he cunningly gave Jason a task that seemed impossible for him to fulfil (this was also how Heracles was once given his job), with the promise that Jason, if he fulfilled the task, could ascend the throne of Jolkos, for then he, Pelias, would willingly resign. This, thought by Pelias to be a deceit, was quite in the sense of fate, and was thought so by the three who held Jason's fate and his thread of life with all its entanglements in their hands, for in this way the Golden Fleece was to come to Thessaly. This was the task Pelias gave Jason, to bring the Golden Fleece from the land of Colchis to Jolkos.
Jason therefore had a ship built which was to be the fastest and safest ship in Greece, the Argo. The virgin Minerva blessed the construction of the Argo and placed an oracle tablet of talking wood from the Dodonian Grove before the Argo, since the word of Zeus was going around.
Jason recruited the bravest heroes of Greece to go with him on a journey to find the relic. They gathered inside the Argo, which lay in the harbour of Jolkos. When they were all assembled, having prayed devoutly and entrusted themselves to the auspices of the Virgin Minerva, the prophetic tablet from the Dodonian Grove of Zeus spoke:
„Behold, I will give tidings of the hero and his heavy lot! Tiphys, O son of Agnius, you will be the helmsman. You will let yourself be tied to the helm in furious storms and be whipped by the waves of the sea when Poseidon comes with the blows of the trident! Under your guidance, the Argo will crash on the waves into the deep troughs of the waves, so that the waves collapse above it, but then the Argo will be hurled upwards so that it touches the edge of the sky, dancing on the tips of the waves. In all the courses of fate, in all the downs and darknesses, and in all the sunrises and glorious effects of power, you will faithfully stand at the helm and lead the crew in the safe Argo through the floods. You will entrust yourself to the holy Deucalion, who in the primeval times of mankind sailed through the Flood, you will guide the Argo into the land of the Golden Fleece, as once Deucalion came in his nutshell and landed on the summit of the Helicon, where he planted a vine and greeted Zeus' daughters, the dancing Muses! But, Tiphys, you are not immortal, you will have to die. But you will die in the land of the Maryandines and there you will be given a worthy grave by Maryander the hero. You will die of a disease that will take you away painfully and pierce your heart. But your soul, Tiphys, your better part, will hover around your grave, the rocky cave, in the land of Maryander forever! Only take heart, for the soul is an indestructible atom!“ Tiphys bowed low before the prophetic tablet and kissed the wood.
„Behold, I will tell you about the hero and his difficult fate! Lynceus, son of Aphareus of Messenia and the maiden Arene, you are the far-seeing and the keen-eyed! Behold, Messenian son, one day you will go hunting with the demigods, the Tyndarids, but it will be a cruel slaughter. Thy brother Idas also earned the wrath of the gods, for the god of seers wooed the maiden Marpessa, he wished to appear to her as a fragrant sunbeam. But thy brother Idas was inflamed with mortal passion for Marpessa, and enticed her with the assistance of Peitho, the persuader, who is a handmaid of Venus. She made sweet enticing honey words and flattered the maiden that she surrendered to the mortal Idas and left the god of seers. She gave birth to Cleopatra; but the god, the son of Zeus, was angry in his spurned love and cast a sinister shadow on the souls of Marpessa and Cleopatra and Idas. Sharp-sighted Lynceus, you are advised, and let me advise you, far-seeing one, to fear the gods and to honour them with pious prayers and never to seduce a maiden whom a god chooses with the intoxicating enticements of sweet Peitho! For otherwise the wrath of Apollo may come upon you!“ Lynceus bowed low before the prophetic tablet and kissed the sacred wood.
„Behold, I will give tidings of the hero and his heavy lot! You, O Heracles, shall put on the nettle shirt of the curse of your bride and die in torment, whom you came to beatify with your heroic love! Know, Heracles, she knew not what she did, for she listened to the seductive arts of a beast-man who was offended by thy glory in his depravity. Thou thyself, O glorious hero, shalt plunge into the fire that shall consume thee, thou shalt mingle the dust of thy bones with the ashes! But thy immortal part shall exult in the flames, for thou shalt be raptured by Zeus thy father, and in the halls of the celestials, in the Olympian castle thou shalt feast at the eternal tables, there Ganymede shall serve thee the drink of the gods, and Hebe shall inform thee of the secret of eternal youth, for thou shalt eat the ambrosia of the Genii, and the apples of the Hesperides shall be to thy taste, and thou shalt be as an olive tree in the hall of Zeus!“ Hercules bowed silently before the oracle wood and humbly kissed the prophetic beam.
„Behold, I will give tidings of the hero and his hard lot! You, Peleus, have an honourable lot, for you have become the father of the hero Achilles! Peleus, may all Asia and Hellas, India and Egypt and the lands of the Hyperboreans honour you as the father of the hero. Behold, Thetis became your bride, the Sea, all the gods of Olympus gathered for your wedding. Thetis' hair flowed like foamy brown waves, her eyes like blue flowers, her lips like coral blossoms, her breasts white as swans, her womb like a shell. And thou art a mortal, for so would Zeus have it that she whom thou callest thy goddess should take a mortal man to husband. But wilt thou partake of her immortality? Or will you live on in the exploits of your son? Will the blind Maeonide, when he praises the hero Achilles, also praise his father? Will your fame still be remembered by the blue waters of Smirnio? And will it be enough for your immortality to be raised to the heavenly world by the harp of the Son of the Muse? Whence thy immortality, mortal? Worry about it, and seek to find the pleasure of the Most High on the path he has marked out for you. See, for by your immortal wife Zeus will lead you to the way!“ And Peleus bowed to the dark words of the bright tablet and kissed the sacred wood.
„Behold, I will tell you about the hero and his difficult fate! Telamon, brother of Peleus and friend of Heracles! Son of Endeis of Aegina, be ever faithful to your wife Glauce. Know, Telamon, that if Glauce continues childless, then your friend, the son of Zeus, will intercede before his father for you and for the womb of Glauce, that she may conceive a child. And so it is done, for that which is to come is already done in the Aeon of Destiny. And Ajax is born to thee, the terrible one, who shall woe, Telamon, who shall find a terrible death. Not will your love for your son save him, not will Glaucke's motherly love save him, but willingly-unwillingly he will plunge to his own death, hoping for the mercy of the living gods to deliver him from Orcus and send him to the hero Achilles and the lovely Helen in the Elysian gardens.“ Telamon was frightened, but bowed to the talking oak board from the Dodonian grove and kissed the prophesying wood.
„Behold, I will give tidings of the hero and his hard lot! You, twins, Castor and Pollux, listen to me! You are the godly youths, you are the Tyndarids, the Dioscuri, sons of Zeus and the swan-like maiden, brothers of the beautiful Helen. But Castor, you are mortal! Why did you rob your lovers? Why did you rob Phoebe and Hilaria, so that war broke out, as war broke out over Ilion because of the robbery of Helen? For because of this war over the beloved, that is why Castor had to die! Yes, you will die, and your immortal brother, the god-loved Pollux will mourn, will grieve inconsolably! But Zeus, your father, will approach with a consolation for Pollux: Behold, Pollux, he says, you will be transferred to Olympos and to the seat of the celestials as a consolation for your grief. But, Castor, such was the love of thy immortal brother, that he was willing to sacrifice his salvation for thy blessedness, for thy love's sake! And so he exchanged your abode, the place of the grave, with you, and you, you came into the Hall of the Celestials! Blessed exchange, divine commerce! But there in thy bliss thou shalt so love Pollux, that thou shalt not hold thy glory as a robber holds his robbery, but shalt descend and lie down in thy brother's grave, that he may go up into the castle of Zeus! Blessed exchange, divine commerce! Therefore your love will be immortal! Therefore you, Gemini, will shine in the firmament as patron saint to all the seafarers, sending on the tides of life your sacred love-light!“ Thereupon Castor and Pollux bowed before the oracle wood and kissed the speaking tablet of Zeus.
„Behold, I will give tidings of the hero and his heavy lot! Salmoneus, thou fair Salmoneus, wilt love the dear maiden Tyro. Tyro wilt thou sing, the deer, the violet blossom among barren thistles! Salmoneus will she sing, thou peach-tree in the midst of the forest! From your sweet love, worthy of a poem by Sappho, will spring the boy Neleus. For you, Neleus, are the twin of Pelias and abandoned in your childhood, raised by shepherds. With thy brother thou shalt contend for dominion, but thou, O Neleus, shalt be driven out of Thessaly. Go and marry, O handsome Neleus, the fair Chloris, for the fruit of your love will not only be the voluptuary Evagoras, the frenzied one in the swarm of bacchantes, the wine-drinker and mushroom-chewer, but it will also be the wise Nestor. He will be wise, your son, O Neleus; indeed Nestor will be wise, because he put the fear of the gods at the beginning of all his thoughts and aspirations. And as the gods put toil before accomplishment, so they put the fear of God before wisdom. Thy son, O Neleus, shall become an everlasting symbol of wisdom, the son of Salmoneus!“ And Neleus bowed before the speaking table and kissed the prophetic wood from the grove of Zeus.
„Behold, I will tell the tale of the hero and his hard lot! Meleager, thou excellent hunter, I will tell of thee how thou bravely huntedst the beast, the Calydonian boar, the calamity of the land. Your brothers in spirit with you, Jason, Mopsus, Echion and the others. Peleus hid himself from the fury of the terrible beast in the top of the spruce tree, but the Calydonian boar attacked and hacked at the trunk of the spruce tree with its tusks. The magnificent Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux, the youths of the gods, fearfully approached the boar, and the boar was terrified deep in his beastly soul and hid himself in the deep forest. Behold, there she came, the maiden, the heroic Atalante. She put on the arrow, she stretched the ground, and swift as the thunderer's lightning the arrow flew, and verily she was the first to wound the beast, her arrow the first to strike. Therefore, O Meleager, you were able to slay the Calydonian boar, because the wonderful maiden Atalante wounded the boar first. Therefore also, Meleager, you awarded her the prize of victory, which the maiden took, not without being envied. Let me praise Atalante, O man Meleager: Behold, she was abandoned as a girl in the forest mountain Parthenion and brought up by the heavenly virgin. But you loved her, for in her being the heavenly virgin herself appeared to you. That is why you called the fruit of your love Parthenopaeus, the well-born pure boy. But thine is death, and he that languisheth, Milanion, shall come. Behold, the pining ones of later times, poets of heavenly Eros, will take him as their name, for he glorified the mother of Parthenopaeus in his rapturous soul. O Mother of Parthenopaeus, you pure virgin, coming from the Parthenion, brought up by the heavenly virgin herself! you no longer seem earthly to me, heavenly removed from the sensual you appear as a constellation, as a heavenly, as a blessed one from Elysium: but I only a slave of your glory, I only a humbly praising and glorifying your pure beauty, lying in the dust before you, who worships the ideal of beauty in you! Thus, Meleager, the mother of thy son is immortalised by the poets as the constellation of the Mother of Parthenopaeus, and in the constellation of the Virgin she will be called Cynthia, like the heavenly Virgin herself!“ Then Meleager bowed low to the ground and humbly kissed the prophetic wood.
„Behold, I will give tidings of the hero and his heavy lot! Behold, Menetius, the Greeks praise your name, the son of Japhetus and the nymph Asia, for Japhet came from the Orient and begat offspring with Asia, which spread throughout the Peleponnes to the glory of the Most High. But you, you will be called the father of Patroclus. But above all you will be praised because you are called the trusted friend of Heracles. Behold, in the shadow of the son of Zeus and yet at his side, standing under his protection and yet also resting at his heart, looking up to him in veneration and yet confiding in him all the affairs of your soul, following him and yet fighting with him in the same battle, taking him as the model for all the steps of your life and still emulating him in death: for you wanted to die after him and also lay yourself on the funeral pyre. Yes, on the funeral pyre you wanted to be a worthy witness of the friendship of the son of Zeus with which he honoured you. And only by dying like him did you hope to become like him, and only by becoming like him did you believe yourself worthy of his high, semi-divine friendship. Honourable death, to die like Zeus' son!“ Then Menoetios bowed trembling before the talking board and kissed the prophesying tablet from the grove of Zeus.
„Behold, I will tell you of the hero and his hard lot! Euphemos, you beautiful one, you beautifier of all earthly things, you are a son of the sea, your mother Mecionice, the daughter of the king of Eurotas, is also a daughter of the sea. Therefore you are acquainted with the sea and became, at the side of the helmsman of Argo, helmsman of Argo. Behold, one day in lovely Lybia Triton will speak to you through the murmur of a sea shell and let your lot fall on a lovely land. But not in your earthly days will your foot tread on this land, Euphemos, however beautiful the earth appears to you, sprung from the hand of the Creator, the girded sea, but only in the future will it become yours! Behold, in the seventeenth generation the blessing will be fulfilled. But you will not have to do without the pleasures of love, for your heart will be the house of love for Malache, the lovely girl of Lemnos, and the Lemnian, the daughter of the sea, will become the mother of the king of Cyrene. And out of Cyrene shall arise Simonis, who shall bear the heavy burden of the hero. And therefore, behold, I will tell you of the hero and his heavy lot!“ Then Euphemos, the glorifier, marvelling at the dark and obscure prophecy, not understanding, yet worshipping, he bowed to the prophetic wood and kissed the prophecy of Zeus by the mouth of the virgin Minerva.
HYLAS
The Argonauts sailed across the Aegean Sea and came to Lemnos. There they were entertained by the most beautiful Lemnian women, all of whom looked lovely and wore their skirts high. Their outer garments were light and blew in the breeze of the Zephyr around their beautiful breasts. They were all masters of sensual love, and the two servants of Aphrodite, the maidens of allurement and persuasion, were at their side with all dangerously sweet means. Then they lulled the Argonauts into the deep sleep of lust, and some moons passed, as the Argonauts drank nothing but honey-sweet wine of love. The blind god hit some with his arrow, some he only scratched, yet the god-boy's rage raged among the Argonauts. Many would have been ready to give up the journey forever, yes, all of them enjoyed themselves in the bosom of the lustful women. Heracles, the demigod, sternly admonished the Argonauts, who had become sissies in lust, to continue their journey. Then the Argonauts remembered their heroic task of bringing the Golden Fleece to Greece. They set sail and sailed on across the Aegean.
Finally they came to Bithynia, where the city of Cios lay in the bosom of the sea. The Mysians living there received the Argonauts very kindly and invited them to set up a tent village on the beach, for which the Mysians brought food and drink. The Argonauts, not thoroughly cured of their penchant for comfortable lust, did not surrender to erotic lust this time, but to lust of the stomach and laziness, which they considered a goddess.
Then before the tents burned the high bonfires of the feast, that they might celebrate the goddess of leisure. Buckskin vessels filled with mysical wine circled among the men, who became drunk because they were not guided by wisdom in drinking wine. They began to dance with the mystic maidens of pleasure whom the elders of the city of Cios had sent out to the Greeks. They embraced each other and danced great looping dances around the crackling fires. Some sank down into the sand and gave themselves up to courtship.
But all celebrated the goddess of leisure with an opulent sacrificial meal, which they ate themselves: The god of a fool is his stomach! They gobbled down the most frugal sacrificial meals, goats, rabbits, thighs, plus herbs and olives, all washed down with the sweet, heavy mystic red wine, enriched with honey and spices (the Argonauts disdained to add water).
Some lay on the sand in front of the tents snoring like grunting wild sows, others had retreated into the tents and were fighting games of Aphrodite Bellona with mysical maidens of pleasure, others were trying to cool off in the sea in order to set out again for new pleasures of the feast; one even threw up in the oleander bushes in order to give himself up once more to drink.
But Orpheus wept, for he thought he had lost his beloved. He looked out into the deep, thick night and searched for her, for even if she was lost, she could not be completely lost, and even if it was thick night, the diamond gaze of the beautiful Callisto shone in the sky. Her stars dripped sparkle on the pine hill, which lay like a strange sheen on the treetops. Out of the darkness of the grove, Orpheus thought he saw an image detach itself: a white shadow that wafted closer like a silver-silk veil, like an illuminated mist, in flowing light, the saint came close to him.
She was completely wrapped in a long white robe of fine but chastely dense fabric, a thick white veil was laid over her head, which also covered her face. Nevertheless, Orpheus thought he recognised Eurydice from her. „It is she!“ he breathed softly into the night air.
The saint approached him, her feet hovering lightly above the forest. She lifted her veil and he saw a luminous face, as if the moonlight were shining on it, from which two stars gazed out, far surpassing in brilliance the stars of the beautiful Callisto. The luminous woman raised her right hand and brought her index finger close to Orpheus and placed it on Orpheus' mouth, „By the Queen of the Silent!“ thought Orpheus and tasted a drop of wonderful sweetness on his lips.
The white woman raised her left arm and he saw a string of pink pearls hanging from her wrist, each pearl pierced so that he could see through it, and he saw the white light of the saint's robe and thought he heard melodies and the sound of the sea. He felt so strange and wondrous. Then a light, sweet fragrance wafted over him, like Sabaean incense, and the white lady disappeared into the depths of the night, disappearing over the horizon. Orpheus had dreamed he had loved the image of Eurydice with the help of the god Phantasus.
While his friends slept drunkenly, Zeus' son had gone away from the sea and wandered through the night. He came to a grove of olive trees whose silvery leaves glistened like tears under the moon of the dense night. Then he too was overcome by a leaden tiredness and sat down in the grass under the trees.
Then he became terribly aware of what the oracle from the grove of Dodona, the word of Zeus, had said to him: he would put on the nettle shirt of the curse and lay himself on the funeral pyre. Then the human part of the demigod was terrified of death, but the divine part, which had sprung from the spirit of Zeus, was consented to the divine providence. And the divine part of him was the more powerful, and so he became free from the fear of death.
At the same moment, however, three furies invaded Heracles. Instead of curls they wore snakes, instead of ivory teeth of women they wore yellow pointed teeth of dogs, their eyes resembled plague fires, their breath stank of rotten eggs or sulphur. They assailed Heracles with all the force of the terrible Orcus and tried to drag him down into the Orcus before the time that fate and Zeus' will had set for him, so that he might fall forever to the floods of Phlegeton.
Heracles wrestled with the three Furies, who, every time they touched the earth, gained new strength. And like the Hydra they were, and their serpent heads grew back multiplied when he had cut one off. They seemed insurmountable. Then Heracles cried out to Zeus, the almighty father of men, „Father, deliver me from this hour, when the cruel death wants to rob me before the time appointed by thee! Let Thanatos pass me by with his cup of poisonous milk, that I may not die, for it is my lot to raise my immortal part on the funeral pyre to your castle, mighty ruler!“
Then the Furies rushed upon him again and threw him to the ground. He fell into the grass, tasted the dust, burrowed into the foliage and grew weak, so that he had almost no hope of overcoming this onslaught of Acheron. Tears spurted from his eyes in the fury of impotence, black drops of blood spurted from his swollen temple veins. As he lay at the bottom of his weakness, at the bottom of his succumbed strength, a vision came over his mind: Yes, he would die, but he would die a death, that from the green meandering stream of life Himeros would rise, the morning star, and with victorious glow, like an orange in the tree of life, fill the whole gilded earth. In his vision he reached for this orange, sucked it dry, then he got new strength, rose up, cried out with a mighty voice, „Zeus, Zeus, help me!“ And this time Zeus heard his plea and commanded the Furies to return to the dark house of the Acherusian Orcus, to burning Hades. Heracles breathed a sigh of relief, he inhaled deeply the liberated, pure night air, he plucked twigs from the olive tree and wove a wreath which he placed in his hair. He was ready to meet his destiny, the God in him would redeem humanity in him from this dungeon and ascend in the best part to the heavenly hall, to be married there by the throne chair of Zeus to the beautiful bride Hebe in eternal youth.
At the edge of the tent camp of the Argonauts, Hylas also sat in sad and beautiful solitude. He was a youth who was called a beautiful soul by many. Women, younger and older, called him a beautiful youth. Alkmene's son was also taken with his beauty and had chosen him as a friend because of his beauty. However, Alcmene's son was more interested in the beauty of his soul than in the beauty of his body; nevertheless, he also took constant pleasure in the perfect likeness of his body.
Hylas looked out into the night from his large brown eyes, which bore a golden spark and seemed to swim in white milk. He thought of Zeus' son and smiled softly, showing perfectly even and pure white teeth. A light breeze played in his straight black hair, which he wore cut short. He wore no beard on his round chin or above his narrow lip. The skin of his face was soft like a child's and of a tawny colour. He was beautiful like the glorious Alkinous, the ruler of rulers.
„Your beauty“, Alcmene's son had said to him, „is more than the pale shadow on the cave wall, but your beauty is like an idea that has become nature, like the idea of beauty itself. This lies as a glorious reflection on your face, above all in the golden sparkle of your soul. Thus the beauty of this sparkle of the soul pours out upon your whole form. Your whole body is dominated by your soul. And your soul has such high wisdom, poured into the naivety of a child, and all your wisdom consists of love. Thus you are also in most intimate contact with the heavenly Urania, who seems to me to be your mother. Is your body a prison to you? It is a beautiful dungeon, painted on the inside with the golden lustre of your soul, painted and decorated on the outside with all the richness of colour and ornamentation of overflowing life. In you I meet the flowering life itself, the flowering life as it blooms in Elysian gardens, you walking blessed one who wonders enough through Greece. Purity is thy spirit, virtue thy soul, symmetry thy body. If I love you, if I may tell you that I love you, then I love in you the beauty of the soul. In the beauty of thy soul I love beauty itself, and in beauty, in its perfected idea, the glory of the Father.“
Hylas pondered these words. He was still like a simple-minded child. He had not yet been tainted by the storms of passions, which often begin to arise heatedly in youth; he still had all the paradisiacal innocence of a child. And in his childlike soul he cherished a deep, holy friendship with Zeus' son. In him was the power, in him was the victory, in him was gathered all that was glorious, he was the great purifier who knew how to cleanse the world of fiends and all dung and possessed the power to do so in abundance.
But where was Zeus' son? He had gone out, away from the intoxicated, away from the dogs, out into the solitude of the endless night, crowned with the twelve zodiacal images and clothed in a garment of moonlight, Zeus' son had gone ahead, and on this path Hylas wanted to follow. Yes, away from the fools, the wild cynics with their animal desires, the foolish fortune hunters, out into the lonely night. And be it loneliness, be it Saturnian melancholy, Saturn was not only the god of melancholy, he had also been the god of the Golden Age, and in this there must have been a secret relationship to the lonely melancholy. The latter had surrendered himself to Heracles, to deep contemplation, to reflection, before he would rise again to glorious deeds; he was probably talking to Zeus at this very moment on a lonely hill in the night? And the god spoke to him in silent thunder?
Hylas wanted to follow Heracles, he wanted to be like Zeus' son. That is why he separated himself from the prassians and the harlots, that is why he went out to find the figure that, crowned with twelve constellations and dressed in the clothing of the moon, brought Zeus, the ruler with the iron sceptre, close to him.
And Hylas wandered out into the night, without a goal and yet with the goal of finding Zeus' son. But he did not find him. He walked slowly along a winding path into the night, away from the burning fires of orgiastic pleasures, out into solitude, deep in thought. Then he saw a small, silent silver stream murmuring by the side of the path, the soft melodious sound of the water lulling him even deeper into solitary contemplation. He sank into his soul to gaze upon the spark that was immortal, a pure casting of the eternal primordial being, the pure ideal of life. Where then should he look for Zeus' son? in the night and solitude? or in the contemplation of his soul? for the friend and beloved lived in his soul, his image worked actively in his contemplation. Yes, it almost seemed to him as if the beloved lived more truly in the ideal projection of his soul, it was almost as if the soul of the lover was a seer who saw the ideal being of the friend walking in the shadows.
Thus lost in himself and wandering dreamily through his inner cosmos, he came to a grove of willows, all shining silvery green around a quiet pond. The night wove its black-silk melancholy around all the weeping willows, which looked like pure virgins or lamentations at the still water, which had a reflection of the pure moonlight. Green moss of the past had grown on the ancient maternal beeches around. This seemed to Hylas the realm of Saturn, the realm of the ancient-eternal god of contemplation, melancholy and the lost Golden Age. Here, prehistory wove its way through the sad grove.
But he was not astonished when he saw the naiad of the pond, slowly rising from the water. Her figure flowed like music, like a harp note. She wore a long orange skirt, held together by a golden magic belt. Her upper dress was a fine gold embroidered one, through which her brown skin shone. Her hair was long and flowed down her back, it was black like the hair of Mother Night, the reconciler of the gods. Deep black eyes peered out of her light brown face, great goblets of black roses, looking deeply melancholy with a moist glow.
Was this an image of the Golden Age? a nymph from the times before, when sensuality was still a sublime virtue of the spirit? or was this naiad the sweet draught of death? Was it not in the melancholy of the former joy of finding in the deep realm of death the true happiness of love, a love that ordered the cosmos with the power of harmony and created out of strife and sympathy at last the Sphairos, the great harmony of all living beings?
„I am Malis“, she breathed, the naiad. Malis was Maa, the mother of Dionysus, or Maja, the mother of Hermes, or Magna Mater, the mother of the gods. She was that figure of the Mother into whose womb Hylas longed to return. „I am from the other world, which beyond the mirror of the pool offers you its crystal grottoes, with the shell gates and the pearl of true delight...“ With that she disappeared into the dark night of the depths of the pond.
O down! was all the desire and longing of Hylas. With a terrible cry (expressing last agony like a great lust) he threw himself down into the depths. His soul, which was suffocating, escaped from the beautiful body. The corpse floated on top of the water.
Heracles, who was not far away, heard the cry, knew that it was the cry of Hylas and hurried to the pond, where he saw the beautiful, inanimate corpse floating amidst water lilies. The black hairs were coming off like algae in the night water.
„Aiaiaiai!“ cried Heracles and threw himself on the ground crying. „My beloved! My beloved! Hylas is dead! Hylas, Hylas, Hylas is dead! Woe is me, woe is me! Hylas, my beloved is dead!“ he cried in frenzied despair.
Orpheus heard him and hurried over. On the eastern horizon the morning star was just rising, the lonely beautiful one. Heracles wept, he was nothing but tears, and he said, „I am the tear of Zeus, which the almighty father weeps over the death of the beautiful Hylas, yes, I am the tear of Zeus! Here I shall stay three moons, three years, three aeons, and be nothing but longing, sad-desperate longing into the past, hopeless hope that Hylas, my beloved Hylas, will return to me from the realm of the dead. Let me weep here for my misfortune, Orpheus, I will leave the Argonauts at this point and walk my ways lonely, for another fate the Most High has destined for me.“ Orpheus, however, went back to the Argonauts, who had just awakened, and informed them of Hylas' fate and Heracles' plans; with that the Argonauts set sail again on the Argo, and with a favourable wind they sailed on to fetch the Golden Fleece to Greece.
MEDEA
The Argonauts saw the peaks of the Caucasus towering above the sea, from which the tortured cry of Prometheus still echoed. They came to the mouth of the Phasis River, where on the left lay the capital of Colchia, white Kytäa, and on the right the grove of dragon seeds with the cursed Ares tree, the sacred oak with the golden fleece. Below, the dragon lay with watchful eyes, seeking whom he might devour. The Argo docked in a shady bay of the river, anchored there, the Argonauts disembarked and set up camp on the shore.
Jason, the first of the group, went to the king of the Colchians. But the king's daughter, the beautiful Medea, looked down from the tower of the castle. She saw Jason and cried out, „Glorious one!“
According to the ancients, Eros, the god of love, was the eldest of all gods and creator of all the heavenly ones. Out of love, in love and towards love, all the world had been created, the glorious ornament of the cosmos, the enchanting belt of the sea, the motherly earth, the virgin birches, the blue-eyed violets and the maiden star veiled by clouds with the Pleiades.
Eros, however, was regarded as the child of Aphrodite, armed with a bow on which he drew the string of desire, on which he drew the arrow of desire. This he shot into Medea's heart. He had first dipped it in honey, which he had gathered from a rose blossom with his sisters, the queen bees. Medea's heart was wounded, and this wound tasted sweet, indeed there was a sweetness in her heart that it blossomed like a rose in whose cup the nectar of the gods lay gathered. In her heart was a sacred grove of Aphrodite's joy, where Eros played caressing games with the Charites, swarmed by mild bees and delicate butterflies. The violets drifted clouds of beguiling scents and the lime trees spread their motherly-virginal vault over them.
But not enough that Eros was a god of sweetness of heart, he was also a formidable terrible ruler whom Diotima called a demon before Socrates. Therefore, and the gods alone knew to what end, he again drew his bow, again put on an arrow. But he had dipped it in a cup of hemlock. He now shot it and hit Medea directly in the heart. Then she cried out, „Glorious!“ For in her pain of love she had recognised the supreme glory of the Beloved!
Then she was weak, her soul was saddened to the point of death, but Eros would not let her die, so he lit his pine torch on the Olympian fire, the life spirit of Zeus, and threw the smoking torch into the grove of Medea's heart. There now burned a blazing forest fire: pure life force spreading out in wild frenzies, divine fire roaring in boundless storms. Then Medea lost her senses, and in a frenzy of passions she rushed down from the tower of the castle to the forecourt, there to be able to embrace the glorious one, to be allowed to kiss him, even to be allowed to devour her beloved with skin and hair, to take his flesh into her mouth as in the mystical communion of Jacchus!
Jason desired the Golden Fleece from the king, but the king knew that his life depended on the possession of the Golden Fleece. Jason went back to the camp of the Argonauts without having achieved anything.
But Medea sat in her chamber and spoke to herself, and poured out her heart to herself, saying, „O Triformis, thou dark deity of my life! You hold the keys to Hades, to a happy life on earth and in heaven in your hands! Lock me the door to a happy life on earth! This must be at the side of Jason the glorious, for no one and nothing else do I desire from your goodness. What Fate has decreed for him I know not; who can read the tables of Fate? But whatever his fate, even if it is a curse, I want to share it with him. He seems to me like a demigod, and yet in need of my help. Do I love him as a woman loves a glorious hero? or do I not also love him as a nurse or a mother loves a child in need of help? We are created by Eros, towards Eros, for in your heart, O Triformis, Eros rules! So let me do all I can to save him!“
That night Medea dreamed in her bed: Jason had come with a flying ship, he settled down with the swan of a ship on the Phasis stream and swam away to the mouth. There, in her dream, the river flowed into the temple of the deity Triformis, which stood white and with a round dome in the middle of Kytäa. The high priest of the deity Triformis spoke in her dream, „You were created for Eros, for Eros is the oldest of the gods, and Triformis is in truth Eros! O dark deity, unlock with thy key the heaven of love!“ said the priest in her dream: for where the Golden Fleece hangs, there in truth is Medea, and if Jason seeks the Golden Fleece, the maiden Medea will lead him to the Golden Fleece. Behold, he will awake from his dream, in which he dreams of the legends of the gods, and will have but one thought in his heart: Medea, Medea! For at the beginning of his quest for the Golden Fleece was his abysmal love for Medea! Thus dreamed the Kolchian Maid.
But in the morning she awoke with the most gloomy thoughts: No, he is too glorious! she thought, I will never reach his love! His soul aspires only to the holy Golden Fleece, never to my wifely love! What shall I lull myself further in vain dreams? Shall I love a dream-image alone? Only for a moment I saw him, and loved him, and am consumed by the poisonous fire of this love. Love is as terrible as death, and passion as insurmountable as Hades! Away with my wretched existence! Bring on the deadly hemlock potion, bring on the cursed hemp rope, that I may hang myself from the nearest lightning-splintered tree! Disgusting life, that you emerge from the poisonous sea of despair and wear the foam of nothingness on your scrawny limbs: you shall be loved? Thy kiss is sweet as the poppy milk of Thanatos, thy womb is the dark room of Hades, from thy breasts I will drink the suicide of my despair! Ah woe is me!
But the loving Mother of the Gods floated around her like a blossoming rose and let pearls of mildest consolation drip on the lips of her soul. She appeared to her with the mild kind face of the mother, then the Queen of Heaven laid her motherly finger on Medea's mouth and nursed her with the sweet breath of heavenly consolation. Surrounded by peacocks and walking gloriously in golden sandals, the Queen of Heaven returned to her abode before the throne of Zeus, there to implore the King of the Gods for Medea's soul.
Medea was comforted and found herself in all the destinies of the triune Fate. She washed herself in pure water, put on fresh white linen and anointed herself with the best myrrh oil. Then she left the castle of Kytäa.
She went to the temple of the dark deity Triformis with the keys. She went through the high white gate into the portico of the temple, and there stood her sister Chalkiope. She had long brown hair, thick dark eyebrows, a nose like Zeus's aar, yet a soft innocent childlike face. She liked to laugh, she laughed like a happy child. Now, too, she sang to the zither the sweetest songs of the deity, „Behold the mountains, Parnassus and Helikon, behold Athos and Rhodope and snow-covered Olympus and Phrygian Ida, all have been raised by the ancient Mother Earth in your praise, Triformis! Behold the rivers, Pedhieos of Cypros, the Asiatic Skamander, the Hebrus, they all rush in thy praise, for Poseidon makes their song resound to thy glory, Triformis! Behold the birds, the sweet-sobbing Philomele and the prophetic swan, the hoopoe and the cuckoo, the owl of Athena and the doves and sparrows of Aphrodite, they all shout to thy praise, O Triformis!“ So sang Chalkiope to the sweet playing of the strings.
Medea, like her sister, had long brown hair, but falling in curls, and grey-blue eyes which shone like lightning. Her lips were upturned and of seductive sweetness, yet they looked melancholy, as her whole countenance lay shadowed by a cloud of melancholy. She softly joined in the praise of the deity, her voice more like a whispering breath, whispered like Aura, when Dionysus approached her in the pleasure garden on the holiday of springtime.
But Medea was not intimately involved in the praise of the deity, for a mortal had stolen her heart from the gods, the glorious Jason. She thought of him alone, and her thoughts were carried on the glowing wings of longing. All the clouds of the evening longed for Hesperia and the western shores of the Atlantic Sea, where the gardens blossomed like India, there was the garden of love, where she wanted to caress and coo with Jason, who seemed to her like a demigod, a sprout of the gods. But where was he, the glorious one? Everything breathed his beauty, everything lived in the likeness of her love, which was created solely for him, he was the goal of her longing, without him Hesperia was not Hesperia and Elysium was not Elysium. He was the messenger of the Godhead, he was Eros incarnate. „Oh come!“ sighed her soul uniquely, „Oh come near, Lord of my soul, and overwhelm me with thy love, that I may exult in thy arms in eternal raptures! Kiss me with the kiss of thy mouth, with the holy kiss of love kiss me, that I may awake into fairer life by the kiss of thy beautiful soul!“
She was always looking out of the white temple gate into the green grove outside the temple gates. Every breath of air that moved a leaf, every joyful hopping of a sparrow, every ray of sunshine seemed to announce her beloved. For him alone she would forget her people and her father's house and go to his Thessalian ivory palace in the distant homeland, there to celebrate her wedding at his side. Oh they would sacrifice a lamb to the mighty deity if she had united them! Would that she could see him at last! In her soul his image lived as it had been formed from her memory, but she longed at last to behold every feature of his face, every angle, every cut, every hair of his eyelashes, the whole line of his lips, and above all, deep and abysmal, the most beautiful eyes! To perish in them, in these mirrors of his soul, to perish in them and dissolve into his soul, was all her desire.
Then Jason approached. Charis had made him beautiful. He wore the black panther skin around his strong shoulders. His long glorious curls fell to his shoulders. His manly beard proclaimed manliness of heart, stoutness also in love. Oh, this gentle wildness, this gentle strength, this indomitability submissive to God! He was free, free like Athens, he was witty, wise like Nestor, he was beautiful, beautiful like the island of Cypris, he was strong, powerful like Heracles or Achilles, he was full of grace, like the Queen of Heaven or Adonis.
Medea consulted with Jason and told him of her plan. Jason shuddered before the young priestess of the dark deity, for the path she proposed to him was one of bitterness and sacrifice. She herself was ready to leave her home and find true happiness in a foreign land, far away, in the royal palace of her beloved (if her happiness was granted, for almighty Fate distributes happiness and misery according to unfathomable laws).
Jason and Medea left the royal castle and went into the night. The Argonauts, Jason's brothers, slept on the bank of the river; they could not help him. He alone had been given the task of bringing the Golden Fleece to his homeland. They came to a myrtle grove, where Medea showed Jason a grassy spot where he should sit down. She picked some poisonous herbs, belladonna and hemlock and wormwood and mandrake, and prepared a bitter decoction from the juice of these plants, which she mixed with heavy wine in an earthen jar.
„Triformis!“ pleaded Jason, „thou ruling deity above the silent mystery of the night, in whose vastness thou hast sown the immeasurable host of stars! hear me! for here, according to the counsel of thy priestess, I sit and shudder before thy inscrutability and thy unfathomable mystery. But if it be so, and if it be written on the tablet of Destiny, and if Moira has intended it for me, this lap-child of Jovis, then, O Triformis, I am ready to empty this poisonous jar. She who knows thee declared to me that under thy blessing the pious can touch even serpents and drink poisonous things, for thou turnest bitter into sweet wine and poison into nectar and ambrosia! Behold, then, I will entrust myself to thee, and I am ready to die myself, if it be thy will, mighty Deity, but only grant that the Golden Fleece may spread its light in my homeland. To this calling I will devote all, even my life.“ With these words he emptied the poisonous brew.
He staggered a little and sank to the ground, but as he lay weakly in the grass, he had a vision of a golden key descending from the heights of heaven and unlocking his soul, then, through a portal of tall Attic columns and splendid marble architraves, he saw for a moment Elysium - endless meadows of white lilies, snow-clad genii with golden wings, rejoicing trees like lightning - but then everything was overshadowed by the shadowed face of Triformis, and Jason awoke.
Medea held out another jar of refined gold to him and handed Jason a knife. With it he cut his left forearm and let a few drops of his blood fall into the cup. Medea held up this cup and consecrated the precious life-blood to the dark deity Triformis and said, „Behold, O Triformis, here is the sacrifice of our lives, for in Jason's life also my life is decided, and so we hold it out to you. And herewith we beseech thee to consecrate this blood in the presence of the Golden Fleece with thy genius, that it may be a death to the dragon. So, O Triformis, we will go home under thy mantle with the Golden Fleece, in love.“
They went to the field of the dragon's seed, to the accursed Ares tree, which the Golden Fleece had made a sacred oak. Medea sprinkled Jason's consecrated blood on the dragon's maw, which died at the same moment, in final convulsions. Jason lifted the Golden Fleece from the tree and, with Medea's help, carried it to his tent, where he placed it in a chest. The Argonauts carried this sacred chest onto their ship, and early in the morning the Argo sailed stealthily away from the land of Colchis, and Medea followed Jason to the home of the king's son.
On their journey the Argonauts came to the land of the gentle Phaeacians, whose king Alkinoos gave them a friendly welcome. He entertained the Argonauts with the most delicious food and the best wines and said, „Many a wandering journey you have had and many a wandering journey before you, and your life is like a breath of wind that blows, that blows, that turns, that turns, and you know nothing but that it blows you down into the maw of the realm of the dead. Your life, ye Argonauts on the sea voyage, is like a small flower which blossoms in the morning, proudly raises its head at noon, but in the evening lets its little head droop, then it withers and is cut by the reaper. And even if you are wheat and not weeds, ye friends of the Golden Fleece, ye will be cut down like weeds by the god of the scythe. But what remains, ye heroes of Greece, of your life? Is it that your exploits will be recounted at the campfires of future generations? What touches the shadows in the shadowy realm the glory in generations to come? No, the realm of the dead will inherit your souls. Only this remains in my opinion: That you roast rabbits and enjoy wine from Smyrnos and rejoice in the breasts of women!“
Jason looked at Medea. The tips of her breasts peeked through her purple dress. Her brown curls fell along her blushing brown cheeks and sank to the tips of her breasts. Her eyes flashed at him like fiery Hesperus above the floods of Kytherea. Her form was a beautifully curved lesbian lyre. Her voice was like the lisp of the airy Aura as she confessed her love to Jacchus, so devoted, so full of humble love and complete surrender. And the fire of her love fell into his soul and awakened fires of love in his heart. Then he desired her to be the wife of his old age and the bedfellow of his youth. He confessed this to Medea, and she breathed with her breathy voice, „Oh Jason, it is so beautiful that you, you of all people, should say such things to me! Yes, I will be your wife and the companion of your nights and the friend of all your days!“
Then all the Argonauts rejoiced with Jason and Medea, the King Alcinoos and the Queen Arete, and (as it seemed to Medea) the sun and the flowers. On a Friday - dedicated to love - they all went to a rocky grotto in the evening. The Phaeacian girls had set up beeswax candles in the grotto and had twined wreaths of flowers around the pillars. Jason wore his black panther skin wrapped around him, but a wreath of myrtles in his long curls. Medea wore a fine robe that Queen Arete had given her as a wedding present, a white robe in which silver threads of the moon were intertwined, and in her long brown curls she wore wreaths of Cyprus flowers. Little Phaeacian children carried pine torches in front of them and led them into the grotto. There, King Alkinoos stood in his royal robes and married the two lovers in a solemn ceremony: Happiness and fidelity! he blessed them.
Then Jason kissed the lovely Medea and led her into the hall, where they both sat before the table, on which were the choicest dishes from the Phaeacian land. All the Argonauts laughed and generously enjoyed the delicious wine. That night Jason took Medea to his chamber and attended her. Orpheus, however, sat the night, melancholy from the wine, under the firmament and watched for the Star of the Virgin.
HOMELAND
The Argo sailed on across the wide sea, the roaring sea, on its way home. Flashing flames flickered around the masts, the stars showed the skilful helmsman the way, but Fate wanted the stars to show thema wrong way, and so the Argo wandered through the tides, days and nights, storms and waves, until they came to the western sea, without knowing that they were on the sea of Atlantis. Then the Argo danced her stormy wave dance on the peaks and in the valleys of the floods and approached the Sirenusian islands.
There, on the shores of the islands, lived the Sirens, alluring women. Aglaopheme, that is to say, a brilliant voice, was the name of one of them, Thelxiepea, that is to say, a magic song, was the name of another, and the others were Pisionoe, Ligea and Leucosia. These sirens danced on the waves and bathed their naked bodies in the tides, beating the waters tumultuously with their iridescent wings. Then the Argonauts heard them singing their beguiling songs.
And Aglaopheme sang, „Listen, you man, you whom I mean, listen and see, for here is beauty, here is beautiful magic of love, of bright lust and of joyful life! Come and see how full of heavenly lust life can be on the blissful shores in the arms of winged sirens! Here are kisses such as Venus exchanged with Mars, here are kisses such as Venus exchanged with Anchises, here are kisses such as Venus exchanged with Adonis. Here is life at the springs of life, at the breasts of intoxicating women of freshest youth. Here is the womb from which Eros came to life, the aphrodisiac womb of love, a mother-of-pearl gate, a shell grotto in which the fish of the Mediterranean wears a pearl on its tongue! Come and enjoy, you only man whom I want to initiate into the bridal secret of nectar-sweet lust! Let us guide the blind Eros boy to dip the arrow in the honey goblet of the rose. Come and drink from my lips the dew of enchanting beauty! Let yourself be caught in my fishing net of a sorceress and let yourself be enchanted by the spell of a Circe, that you may become to me an Adonis on the pillow, a Paris on the blissful islands in the arms of the most beautiful Helen! Come, O come, for I await thee with open arms, open heart, thirsty lips, so come!“
Then the men of Argo became mad and foolish. Their impulses flared up in them, their lust for unbridled lust was stirred up in them, they forgot their wives who were waiting for them at home, they forgot their children who were longing for their fathers, they forgot their father's house and their father's city and their father's country and wanted to live forever on the sweet shores of the Sirenusian islands under the nectar light of the sun of love, in the gardens of lust.
Then Thelxiepea began to sing, „Come hither, fair man, for thou art the fairest and shalt die in the arms of an Ambrosian beauty. For behold, here on the shores lie the pale bones of many men, all of whom emptied the magic cup of lust and died blissful deaths, bound to the arms of a siren. Let yourself be lured into the lust of death, into the intoxicating dance of doom, for I want to be your death, which is a wedding for you, I want to be your deathbed, where Eros and Hymen stroke your head and feet and I, as your Thanatos, suck the life out of your limbs. Do you desire to sink into the bosom of night? Do you desire the funeral pyre of love? Do you desire to be strangled by my covetous arms? Do you desire that I kiss your carotid artery with my pearly teeth? Then come and kiss thy death, thy death, thy beloved murderess, who drags thee to the bed of fire of Hades, to the pillow of flaming Phlegeton, to the hell of reeling lust, down, down, into my bosom, thou death-drunk one, for I am thy whore she-death!“
The men did not understand the meaning of this hymn, but were beguiled by the music alone, by the beguiling melodiousness of this song, and all fell in love with the honeyed voice of the dangerous siren. The Argonauts stood on the side of the Argo and were about to throw themselves into the floods to swim to the Sirens, drunk as suicides. Then Orpheus saw the danger for the Argo, for the leader of the Argonauts and for the fate of the Golden Fleece, and so he struck his lyre and sang an ode with his voice, which he had inherited from the Muse Calliope, the daughter of Mnemosyne (and although the Sirens knew how to sing beautifully, the Muses were from time immemorial the masters of all song, and to whom they lent it).
The Argonauts had listened to the violence of the lyre of the Son of the Muses and had become deaf to the earthly or even hellish lust of the Sirens, and their hearts were now filled with the high ideals of pure love for a heavenly Virgin. Thus Aphrodite Pandemos and the daughter of Zeus, Cynthia, Cynthus' sister, had been in competition with each other, but in the noble Greek souls of the Argonauts, through the mediation of the son of the Muses, the higher love had triumphed over the lower.
Only the son of Teleon was deaf to the triumphant song of uplifting love. While Orpheus' song rushed meaninglessly past him, he had looked to the Sirenusian islands. There the queen of the Sirens, Parthenope, had appeared. She was a virgin, for when she gave birth to a son, she bathed in her magic pool in the middle of her island and renewed her virginity through this bath. While her Sirenusian maidens had sung lust, pleasure and downfall in lust, she had beckoned with the mystery of her eyes beneath the transparent veil, with the green full moons of her eyes. The wind blew into her brown curls that spilled out from under her white veil. And the son of Teleon had only one desire: to lie caught in those curls and to gaze eternally into those green eyes. So he tore himself from his friends‘ arms and plunged into the sea. He would have crashed on the shores of the Sirenusian island kingdom, his bones would have bleached in the sand, his soul would have strayed into Hades, if the heavenly love of the goddess Urania from the third heaven had not come to his aid and carried him away in a storm of fire, in her celestial arms of fire, torn through the air, up, up, the eternal woman drew him up to her celestial bosom, where he enjoyed the immortal delights of Elysium!
But the Argonauts, freed by the son of the Muses, continued their sea voyage. The stars guided them eastwards until an adverse storm arose and seized them in the Libyan Sea, and the Argo was lost on the sandy desert shore of the African Syrten. There the Argonauts were stranded. Helpless and like shadows of the dead, they wandered about in the sandy desert land, thirsty. They took the chest with the Golden Fleece and wandered through the desert in search of a spring or oasis, for they were almost dying of hunger and thirst.
Orpheus went ahead of the wanderers through the desert. Then he saw in the distance, whether it was a desert phantom or a real being, a beautiful female figure. But when he came closer, it was one of the Hesperides, the noblest of the seven daughters of hope: Mela, who resembled a golden apple from the tree of Hesperia in beauty. In times immemorial, men had lived under this gift of Mother Earth to the Father of the gods and had subsisted on the apples of the tree (in those days men did not eat living things). But when men had become arrogant, the father of the gods had placed the tree with the golden apples on the distant and almost inaccessible island of the Hesperides and the seven daughters of Hope as their guardians. Only Zeus' son Heracles had reached the tree with the apples of the Hesperides.
But now one of the seven daughters of hope, the beautiful Mela, came to meet Orpheus. „Tell me, O glorious nymph, where is there water here to quench our thirst?“ asked Orpheus of the nymph, whom he took for a nymph of the Tritonian Sea, not recognising her as a Hesperid. Mela took Orpheus by the hand and led him to a rock. She struck the rock with a small piece of wood and a spring of bitter water sprang from the rock. Again she touched the rock and the water with the piece of wood, and the bitter water became sweet water, and Orpheus quenched his thirst with this water of hope. He called his brothers who followed him from afar, and they all quenched their burning thirst at this water.
Finally, however, after further adventures, the Argonauts were happily landed in the harbour of Jolkos. Jason moved with Medea to the palace of Jolkos. But after some time he looked at her differently. He saw her dark melancholy on the flushed face, the black silky eyebrows were withered autumn leaves to him, the fire on her cheeks seemed to him demonic magic of Hecate, her brown curls seemed to him fetters and nets in whose voluptuous curls and snares he lay caught. Her lips, beautifully curved to his senses once, seemed to him voluptuous and proudly thrown open. The honey of Eros had become gall to him.
In those days he saw the Corinthian princess Glauke. Younger than Medea, she seemed to him to possess all the fresh charms of youth. Not was her countenance such a dark fire of autumn, not were her eyes deeply shadowed with demoniac melancholy, but light was all her being, her hair golden (nor curled to allure), her countenance white and bright-looking from blue royal eyes. As Medea was to him the evening fire on the way to night, so Glauke was to him the young fresh morning when Phoebus in his youth sportingly climbs the summit of the firmament with his golden curls. Then Eros, the lawless wild one, stirred up again and kindled in Jason's heart a love for Glauke, the daughter of the Corinthian king Creon.
He courted her, and since he himself was a king, his daughter seemed worthy for Jason. Creon therefore consented and the marriage was agreed upon. After this secret alliance, Jason came to Medea, who lay melancholy on her many velvet blankets and in the darkened room despised the day and cheerfulness and her own life.
„Medea“, said Jason in a harsh voice, „you eat away my life with your dark disposition. All the courage and joy of life you suck out of my life. Set me free. Grant me my happiness. If you really love me, grant me my happiness and set me free, for all the hopes of my life are gathered before the day-bright face of the young princess Glauke. I want to make her my companion in the days of my life, for with her the sun of life shines again. I beseech thee, then, and urge thee to consent to divorce, to renounce marriage with me, and to stand no longer in the way of my happiness.“
Medea was mute with anger and shame. She hated her life even more than before, but she could bear this amount of self-loathing no longer, so all her aggression turned to anger, and angrily she cried, „By all the good gods! Do you no longer remember the oath of allegiance? Are you a perjurer? Such a one the gods despise! Come to reason and forsake thy passing passion, and abide with me, whom thou hast sworn a covenant for life!“
But Jason had been blinded by the blind god and married the young white Glauke. Medea saw the wedding procession pass through Jolkos as she looked out of the window of her chamber onto the lower street. Weeping, she buried her face in the many velvet cushions, drew the curtains again and turned them to the night and its spirits. „Woe is me! What misfortune the celestials have conjured upon my head! I am cursed and wretched! The god of day, the god of life, the god of heaven, no god stands by me, but only the vengeful goddesses from the dark orcs rise up to incite my wrath. Where to put my wrath? Against myself I, the wretched, must turn all my wrath and wish for the dagger! Come Thanatos with his poisonous cup and unseal me! May Hades receive my god-cursed soul, that I may eternally weep and lament my calamity as an insubstantial shadow in the dark halls by the stream of fire! I curse the hour when my mother cried: A girl, a girl! Better than to be born is to plunge willingly into the abyss! Have I sinned against the heavenly laws? No! I was faithful! Jason is unfaithful, against him turn the goddess of retribution, the stern Nemesis, and may all the Furies rise from the abyss to execute my vengeance! It is better to take revenge on the wrongdoer, on the transgressor of the heavenly laws, than to plunge oneself into death! In his blood I will bathe myself, and from his blood I will drink new life force! May terrible justice destroy Jason and his whore!“
She stepped before Jason again, her spirit mad with pain. A plan had ripened in her shadowed mind, becoming clearer as she took her steps. Her revenge dawned like a terrible day of judgement. She begged Jason at least to keep her child, the little baby, with him so that it might be raised royally. But she would leave of her own free will so that she would no longer stand in the way of his welfare. „So that your new bride will also take in our child and care for the little one as if it were her own, I leave her these gifts from my jewellery and clothing store. May her young heart rejoice in them as I once rejoiced in them. I will not speak bitterly, Jason, but wish you and your bride the great happiness of living on earth and dying in faithful love!“
With that, she presented Jason with a magnificent gold robe, precious jewellery and a laurel wreath made of gold-worked laurel leaves. With this she went out of the castle. A few hours later, a faithful servant ran after her and called out, „Medea, Medea, hurry away from here, for Jason's new wife has died! She came into the king's palace and the servants gave her your gifts. When she saw the gifts, she laughed with joy, took the baby to her heart and was as sweet and golden as a child blessed by the gods. But when she put on the gold robe, the jewellery and the gold wreath - she was a beauty of the glory of Aphrodite Urania, descended directly from heaven to earth - her lips turned blue, they had been so rosy before, then her eyes became dull and dark, they had been so bright and sky-blue before, then she tore out her hair in pain, the fine golden hair, then she struck her breasts, screaming in pain and misery, against those glorious apples of breasts, and sank to the ground. Gasping, she died, and black blood gushed from her mouth. The wedding gifts had become magic gifts, had become death gifts. The father Creon, King of Corinth, came in and saw the daughter dying and already dead on the floor, lying in her black blood, so he threw himself on her as if he could still revive her with the warmth of his body, but he touched the inside of the cloak with it, was infected by the poison and died right next to his daughter, the glorious man a disfigured corpse. Such is the end of all things and the outcome of adultery.“
Medea triumphed. The furies of hell raced in her senses and inflamed her to the consummation of their fury. She hastened, with black spirit, to the royal castle of Jason, to the chambers of the child, and stood before him, who gazed at her with loving gaze and at the same time terrified. „The accursed one shall complete her curse“, cried Medea to herself, „the wretched one shall deprive the hated one of all bliss! The fruit of our love shall now become the victim of my hatred. No, no more may I see thee, thou bastard of a spawn of the darkest orc!“ With that she plunged her dagger into the heart of the baby, who died innocently and was taken up by holy Love into Elysium.
At that moment Jason entered the chamber. He saw Medea standing over the disembodied corpse of her child with the dagger dripping with blood and laughing maniacally. He was terrified and horrified by this fury, the possessed and frenzied one. Deadly hatred seized him, but greater than hatred was despair. This baby had been everything to him, his successor to the throne, his sun, his immortality, and now it lay murdered by the murderess. There was no one else to blame but himself, and in deep consciousness of his own guilt and sin, he could bear life no longer, and fled from the terrible god of life into the edge of the sword, and collapsed bleeding. His soul left his corpse with trembling expectation of judgment.
But Medea cried out, whether from misfortune or from happiness, whether laughing or from pain, was not to be decided. And the servants in the royal palace, a superstitious race, later claimed that they had seen Medea riding towards heaven in a chariot drawn by two red dragons.
CHAPTER IV
„And on the feast day, at night, glowing with the Bacchic frenzy,
Threw the youth to shreds the women through the field.“
(Virgil)
POETS COMPETITION
Mnemosyne, the queen, stood exalted on the Parnassus. She was wrapped in a long flowing white robe, woven from the pure light of the ether, as if she were wrapped in the aura of the moon. Her long locks were brown like the poppy-colored night, they flowed in a melodic fall on her narrow, feminine shoulders. Her face was tanned like that of a shepherdess from the south, and at the same time from the pure snow and milky melt of the moon. It was slim, it was soft and not voluptuous, it was like a perfect lyre. Like the Archipelagus, her eyes were blue and green in the light of the white milk of the moon, but without aphrodisiac foam, but with a maternal, virginal purity. She looked so deep, as deep as Melancholy, down into the wells of memory and the abysses of the soul. Her being was poured out of love, the mild fire of pure, heavenly love burned in her heart. She was virgin and mother of the Muses.
The evening had gone down with its purple glowing clouds and the kind Mother Night had spread out her star-embroidered, velvet-blue cloak over the Parnassus. The winged steed of inspiration came flying from the north. And Pegasus looked and saw, and the one he saw was Mnemosyne. And then Pegasus put his hoof on the summit of Parnassus, where Mnemoyne always sat and dreamed, and a fountain sprang up, that was the fountain of the living deity who sees me. And Mnemosyne, the memory of everything divine, everything beautiful and everything bitter, was the source of inspiration. And since the silver-crystal water ran softly and since the virgin Mnemosyne looked, there was silence all around in the groves of Parnassus, and in the silence there was the deepest hymn of heavenly praise.
And Mnemosyne, in her moon-white veil, sat down in a silver chariot drawn by black swans with ruby-colored mouths and eyes, and drove up to the heavenly regions.
And as the beautiful Aurora with her lily arms and rose fingers scattered the dawn over the Parnassus with its groves and its Castalian spring, the nine daughters of Mnemosyne floated on the summit. And they were the muses, and all Greece was filled with their glory.
And Clio sat on a stone and read in an open scroll the works and days of history from the first brooding of chaos to the coming of the sprout of the gods, and everything was under the sign of suffering and longing, the longing back to Arcadia and the longing ahead for the heavenly castles of Elysium. And Melpomene held the mask of a suffering woman in front of her beautiful face, whose deity was her tears, and she saw her triumph resolved in the downfall, and she carried the dagger in her heart. And her younger sister was Thalia, and she laughed and her hands played with a mask, which was the serene sky of Ionia, and around her the childlike birds laughed and chatted, as sweet as Thalia, so full of sweet enjoyment of lovely love and pure heart's content. And around the sisters in the circle, Terpsichore, the graceful one with the melodic movements, danced and accompanied herself in her dance with the seven-stringed lyre. Exalted and heroic, almost like a man, the tall Calliope looked ready to sing of the fire of Ilion and the return of the sufferer on an epic string. She rolled up a piece of parchment because it was all already in her mind. Younger and more playful was Euterpe with the flute, who knew how to sing and write poetry for the joys and sorrows of the day. Euterpe could not be missed by a soul that wanted to say what was stirring up its depths on this day that God had made come to be. But the prettiest of all with her magical looks was Erato, the muse of love poetry. Nobody can say what color her eyes or her hair were, for she appeared to everyone in a different shape. Standing next to her, high-minded, concerned with lofty and serious things, was Polyhymnia, who loved the singing of the god-praising hymns. Whom she inspired, he sang praise to the high heavenly ones and their Father, and no dust and no base lust could dissuade him from this path of glory. But at this moment Urania seemed to be the most miraculous of all, for the morning sun formed her robe, the setting moon lay at her feet, and on her head, in her hair, the diadem of the morning star flashed. She was the one who knew how to tell the deepest secrets of the heavenly and knew most thoroughly the unfathomable heart of the Father of the Stars. She was Urania because she was the bride of Uranus, Heaven, for by him she had been blessed with the love of heaven.
Oh how glorious and lovely and beautiful was the chorus of the nine muses, who comprised all art and were the life and the protection of the sons of the muses. No singing that wasn't builded after their singing. No dance of beautifully coiled words, no melodic sobbing, no heroic victory or tragic downfall, since they did not stand by the Zeus-loving sons of the Muses with praise to the heavenly ones. For they had access to nectar and ragweed, and whom they loved they nourished with nectar and ragweed, and whom they had chosen they let drink from the Castalia spring, the sacred source of inspiration.
But as the muses sang so pure about eternal love (they had learned the song from Mnemosyne), the daughters of Pierus, the mortal girls, came and desired to sing as beautifully as the muses and even more beautifully. „Ha, we ought to sing like the muses, for we held many lovers hot in our women's arms! Who knows how to sing of love, if not we, which fishermen and shepherds and reapers called the most beautiful girls in the kingdom of Pierus? They praised the glow on our cheeks and the fiery flashes in our oblique eyes. Our lips were figs to them, and our breasts were pomegranates. But we coveted the black curly youths with the blue shadow on their cheeks, who wrapped their male arms around us. And then our passion became a song, a song of love, because love is a pleasure and a lust. But what do these floating immortals know about love? Have they ever arrived on earth? Didn't their feet always float a little above the ground in their golden sandals? Have they ever come down from their proud summit of Mount Parnassus into the simple reality of the reapers and fishermen? What should the muses know about love, who always only look into sacred parchments or even only into the sun of the sky as if they were female eagles? But we are the lovingly singing spaetzle and are darlings of lovers who are sweet like wine matured under the sun of Greece. No, ye muses, glory should not be due to you in Greece, but to us, the daughters of Pierus. We are human beings, mortal human beings, but that's why we know how to sing love better than you angelic figures floating in the air!“
So the Pierus daughters challenged the holy muses. They did not disdain to measure their singing skills with mortal girls. They communicated with a brief, loving look and chose Urania, Mnemosyne's favorite daughter, to sing the song in competition with the Pierus daughters, and Urania sang.
„My immortal love praises heaven, and my heart is full of exultation by the love that the sun shows us every day like a bridegroom. Heaven looked at his daughter with the loveliest looks, full of gentle disposition and heartfelt tenderness of the soul, and there I nestle like a tender lamb that grazes on the summit of the Helicon, in the hand of my God. Lo, the Son of God is among us, the beautiful Musagetes, and from him I learned to love. He is light as the sun, pure as the sky, pure and chaste and loyal like a white swan queen who does not disdain to be at his will and service and to pull his triumphal chariot. He did not scorn the earth, but entered it with his pure feet and dwelt among us holy muses, we who call holy poets of the heavenly ones, because the Musagetes choose us. He is the true bridegroom of the soul of Urania, and soon, yes, soon, I will sing in his submarine palace the praise of the light, which never goes out, because Musagetes has come up from the night gates of the Hyperboreans in the north and has taken his throne to the right of Zeus on the summit of Olympus. From there he breathes his spirit into me, and that is the true inspiration that goes into my mother's legacy, the deep, deep memory of the day I met love.“
The nymphs, who had emerged from the Castalian spring in shimmering clothes, awarded the muses the prize of victory. Since those days the muses have been wreathed with the evergreen laurel wreaths, and they distribute these wreaths to their chosen ones and loved ones. The Pierus daughters, however, were turned into magpies and condemned to forever be a burden on human ears with their shrill croaking. In memory of their victory, the Muses in the Castalian spring were baptized with the name Pierides.
And a Greek man climbed Mount Parnassus; he came up from the valley. He was a short, slim man with not very thin hair and a peasant, sharp, pointed face. He looked ahead of him out of his gray eyes. There was nothing about him that Erato, the muse of love poetry, would have liked. It was Marsyas, the Phrygian. Then, to her horror, Erato saw that he was limping, because there was a goat foot on his shorter right leg. He was a satyr.
When he reached the summit of Mount Parnassus, he introduced himself to the muses: „I am Marsyas! What's up? Ah, a poetry contest? I am ready! In a nutshell, making words is not my thing! Beautiful Erato? Well, let lovers care for you, chaste muse, mine is to practice the abstract philosophy of music, for I play the flute. But who should I compete with? In any case, I am the gifted one!“
But the muses looked around to see who would compete with Marsyas. A team of black swans rushed up and pulled a car made of pure gold. They came flown from Thule, and in the car stood the peeper, the dark speaker, the leader of the muses and God of the poets himself, the divine seer! We shall call him Musagetes. But Musagetes held a seven-stringed lyre in his arm, which echoed the harmony of the cosmos. Marsyas was startled, but then began to speak defiantly and proudly.
„The holy virgin Minerva with the oil leaf wreath of wisdom once walked past my little valley. I was standing by a pond where tame geese were lying down when she was hovering at the edge of the water and putting a flute to her lovely lips. Then she looked in the mirror of the water and found that the flute distorted her lovely lips. So she threw the flute away. But I picked it up and practiced on it. Although I was not gifted with the fire of inspiration, but with a lot of diligence and talent I managed to achieve a considerable mastery. So now, well on and on, you muses and listen to my flute playing.“
And Marsyas played a melody that he had listened to a lonely shepherd, a mild and lovely melody, of a graceful charm. The muses were delighted with the melody. When he finished his game, Musagetes reached into the strings of his lyre. And lo and behold, to everyone's astonishment, the divine Musagetes played a terrible song that made the muses' hair stand on end, that only the muse of tragedy, Melpomene, enjoyed it, and only the muse of heavenly poetry, Urania, wise and knowing smiled with sad eyes. Musagetes beat the lyre, and before the muses the image of a lonely, flying and terribly croaking wild goose appeared, which flew into the evening and the night.
The majority of the muses were enchanted by Marsyas’ playing the flute, but they were too shocked by the horrific song of Musagetes, so the lovely Erato raised her sweet voice and said, „We thank you, Marsyas, for your song of a quiet, simple shepherd's love. All the grace of a dear love between shepherd and shepherdess is expressed in the sweet melt of your song. But with all due respect, Musagetes, I must say to you, I do not understand your song, even if it touches me in the depths of my soul. As for me, the loveliest of the muses, I want to grant the sweet piece of music by lovely shepherd peace and with it Marsyas the prize, the laurel wreath.“
But at that moment Musagetes raised his voice and sang to Lydian melodies in a widely echoing, echo-like hollow and ghostly soft and thinly floating voice of silence.
„Woe, woe! I am in love! Woe to me and yet hail to me! Woe to me and yet Elysium's bliss for my soul that I love! From the Olympic joys of nectar and ambrosia, I turn to the dark valley, since golden-haired Daphne was wrong! Oh how chaste she was, how gracious, how pure! The gentle west wind was afraid to play in her golden hair because she was too pure for him! The bright green moss hurried to make the path nice and gentle for her white feet. The grass bowed humbly before the humble shepherdess. The adonis blushed before the maid's sweetness. And I, the poet among the gods, loved her because of her pure heavenly gaze, which was surrounded by such gentle melancholy. I loved her immortalized and wanted nothing but to advertise her friendship, only her friendship, because I did not consider myself worthy of her love. Nevertheless Eros, the mightiest of the gods, was fiendishly in my heart and lit an immortal fire, so my friend became my lover! Daphne, Daphne, Daphne, I sigh all day, as my golden armor lit the day, and also at night in my bed in the hyperborean Thule. Daphne, Daphne, was all my song, and Daphne, Daphne, was all my wisdom, and Daphne, Daphne was all my painful happiness, and Daphne, Daphne, was all my hope of my earth-walking immortal life! Then I approached her. She fled shyly from me. Then I desire to hold her in my arms, as Zeus, my father, was once sewn as a swan to the virgin Leda. But Daphne was too pure for earthly love, even if it was earthly love of an immortal poet god! She fled with leaps and bounds like a pure dove from a hawk. And when I overtook her with my flying steps, she exclaimed,: O God of poets, have mercy on me! Do not desecrate me, because I am too delicate a soul! But show me one favor, you god of poets, and turn me into a laurel bush so that I may wreath the curls of the sons of the Muses forever, and you, O Musagetes, remember me forever in your servants and how you loved me! At that moment a fragrant, unfading, evergreen laurel bush bloomed in my arms. I let my tears fall on its leaves. I would give my immortality for an embrace of her virgin arms, and since I have to do without, my seven-stringed lyre, which otherwise sounds the harmonies of the worlds, sounds nothing and again nothing but terrible discord that Melpomene alone can please. Woe to me, and yet hail to me that I saw Daphne!“
The holy muses were deeply moved. They gave the wreath to Musagetes, the god of poets. The latter, however, smiled wisely and said, „Keep this wreath for my servant, who will come and sing, no better than I, but if he knows how to sing well and beautifully, then he will sing like me. He presses the laurel wreath into the hair of his head!” With that Musagetes swung himself into the golden chariot, shouted a blissful tone, then his two black swans (male swan and female swan) rose and flew with the golden chariot and Musagetes, the angel of poetry, to the land of the east.
The Muses looked at Marsyas, who was writhing on the floor in pain. Because he challenged the holy son of Zeus, the god of poets, and wanted to be superior to him, he had pulled the skin off his body. Without his skin, Marsyas crawled down from the heights, bleeding, stumbled and rolled down the slope into the abyss.
From the side, however, two poets came walking, one more splendid than the other. The one tall and slender, with long brown hair and a full beard in the fashion of a goatherd, the other smaller and broader, but with deep-looking eyes in a beardless face, from which the wisdom of melancholy spoke. It was Linus and Amphion.
And Linus was the son of the poet god and the princess Psamathe. He was abandoned as a child but found and raised by a shepherd. He was the teacher of the twelve-year-old Hercules in playing strings. And now he stood on the mountain of the muses and began to paint his lyre and raise his voice to sing.
„I will sing of Myrrha, the lovely Myrrha of Smyrna, and of her sad lot! You bless me, o muse of love, and you, o muse of lament, for I begin your work and I undertake my singing! Come on, let us praise Myrrha's beauty! Her eyes were blue like the sky when the sun god smiles cheerfully through him, and her eyes were blue like the eyes of Athenes, the blue-eyed daughter of Zeus! Her hair was golden like the hair of Venus or like the rolling wheat fields of Ceres! Her skin was white like the milk of Luna or the swan plumage of mother Latona, who gave birth to the poet god! She was so beautiful that Beauty herself, the goddess of beauty Aphrodite, became jealous of the glorious Myrrha. Then Aphrodite jumped up from the Olympic throne, her cheeks flushed with anger, her curls flying, her eyes flashing, and cried out in anger and rage: Ha! I will destroy Myrrha of Smyrna! No one should boast of surpassing the goddess of love and mistress of all lusts in beauty! I plunge Myrrha of Smyrna into misery, so that her sky-blue eyes weep, that she pulls out her golden hair and that her milk-white skin turns pale as death! And with these words the horrible Aphrodite hurried to the father of the envied, the king of Assyria, King Thias. In his heart and flesh the lustful goddess threw a wicked fire and a demonic desire for the glorious body of his tender daughter. Thias was overwhelmed by the demon of the jealousy of Aphrodite and in one night approached his pure innocent daughter, approached her too close and overpowered her with violence! Myrrha was rigid with horror! She turned pale, she pulled her hair, her eyes filled with tears, her voice failed, but her spirit, despairing of all good gods, cried, O Heaven! save your most wretched creature of all! Then the King and Father had mercy on the heavenly lights and turned Myrrha into a tree: her body turned into a trunk, her legs were covered with bark, her arms spread out into branches, her hair became sweet-smelling leaves, but her eyes kept overflowing with tears, and their tears welled up from the tree like the holy myrrh resin with which Adonis was anointed in death. This namely emerged from the myrrh bush in divine beauty, and his end, the end of a god and a hero, weeping for Myrrha with the holy resin and repentant Aphrodite, is another song that other poets may undertake to sing!“ With that ended Linus, who was a singer in the holy spring festivals of the resurrected Adonis.
Amphion stepped forward. He was one of the sons of Zeus, born of Antiope. He was abandoned with his twin brother Zethus right after his birth, but found and raised by a shepherd, like Linus. He had received his lyre himself from Musagete's hands. He remained a shepherd throughout his life and yet delighted everyone as a poet. His song was so delightful that when his melodies moved, the stones moved and built into walls and gates and towers of Thebes. The latter then raised his voice, struck the strings and began like this:
„Sing to me, Mnemosyne, the ancient myth of the wonderful Aura and its miserable end! See, Aura was a loyal companion among the pure virgins who accompanied the heavenly virgin Parthenion on her forays into ecumenism. She was a princess of Arcadia, daughter of the nymph Periboea, but she had left her father and mother to walk in the chaste dance of Diana's maidens. But now the god of madness, Bromios, had fallen in love with the mortal and wanted her to be a bride. That is why Bromios approached the chaste Aura, which shyly embraced and said, No, but with the holy virgins of the goddess Parthenion I want to walk every day and recognize no man and no demigod but the Most High! Bromios was offended in his honor and turned to Aphrodite to help him. Aphrodite descended into the underworld and called the gods of sleep and dreams and fantasy, Morpheus and Hypnos and Phantasus, so that they gurgled the sleeping Aura with a beguiling trickery game on the bed for the night. It happened, and so it happened, that Aura dreamed a dream, that the goddess Parthenion herself laid her little disciple in the arms of the raging god of madness. When she awoke she was full of the burning passion that was a daughter of Aphrodite and the mother of all follies. That is why Aura only sighed for Bromios, who approached her, he stayed with her and fathered a pair of twins in her immaculate lap. This gave birth to her in pain. But the love of the mad god had left deep marks in her spirit and in her soul: she had become sick and mad, and her madness got worse and worse, until she finally ate up her two newborns with skin and hair and cried wildly, saturated with the fruit of her own womb, fell into the sea and drowned. But Bromios, the unfaithful, had already turned to Ariadne, whom he took to Mount Olympus to enjoy lust with her there. That, however, is a subject for another poet's song.” With that, Amphion ended his song.
The muses discussed which of the two poets should be awarded the prize. But while they were still discussing two more poets approached, they came from the east, walking the winding path to the Castalian spring. They were Eunomus, the lyric poet with his nine-sided zither, and the great prophetic poet Orpheus. The muses decided to hear these two poets before the price was decided.
So Eunomus tuned his nine-string zither and struck the strings, first tenderly, then becoming more stormy in a Doric prelude. But when his foreplay got stormy, one of the strings broke. He looked helpless, but from the sacred groves of Parnassus came a green cricket, stretched its wings over the zither and sacrificed its beautiful body as a string for the astonished lyric poet. So he began to sing this while playing the zither.
„I want to sing love, and may all the muses join me in a dance with Cupid! See, love is a path of pain and agony to death, and at the same time a blessed power and a flight into the land of Elysium. Love is the delicious experience of the oneness of all living things and the painful endurance of all alienation. Love stretches one wing into the realm of dreams and the other wing into the drudgery of the peasants. Love is a shared sea voyage through the endless ocean deserts and now and then an island of Calypso with magnificent fairy palaces and fertile gardens. Love is the mystery and a glorious reflection of the deity of the beginning. Love is a glorious philosophy that takes its stupidity calmly. Love is the loneliness of the son of Zeus in the olive garden and is the blissful spring jubilation at the return of the son of Zeus across the seas. Love is an infinite song of the holy muses and the power of mother earth. In Love the duality is one and the unity is developed. Love is the constant struggle between sympathy and war, because contradiction is the father of all things, but Love is the reconciliation of contradiction. Love is Hesiod's hard-working, hard-working agriculture and at the same time a gift from Charis and her graces. Love is a flood of tears and at the same time the highest pleasure that Epicurus advised to strive for. Love is a communal search for the truth and the good and the glorious beauty of the Eternal. Love is an inspiration to longing and an unshakable hope for the garden of the Hesperides with the golden apples of life. And Love is my longing for Melione, who lingers in the south far from me, the beloved!” With that Eunomos ended his song.
Now Orpheus stepped forward. His seven-stringed lyre was played by the son of the Muses as if a god were playing it, and he sang this song in a voice that he had inherited from his mother Calliope, one of the Muses.
„Once I was angry when I was still among the living, but now, you people and saints, only a short song suffices: life is nothing to me but the lack of life. Love is nothing to me but the lack of love. O ye deathless gods, is not one of you ready to taste death that is so bitter? It is omnipresent to me, because my love is death! O death, you all-reconciler, who reconciles my quarreling soul with himself and leads me home into the blessed womb of love! Praise be to you, for you, oh death, are true life, and life is nothing but daily dying! That is why I praise him among the deathless gods, who comes down into our depths to be with me, who am a departed and walk on earth as a shadow only in sighing, to bring people the message of blessed death, which is life.” With that Orpheus ended the song. The muses, mysteriously enough, gave him the laurel wreath.
THE ATOMICTION OF DESTRUCTION
Orpheus strode through the spring meadows of Thrace, his homeland, in the brown robe of a young man. He had come to his own people, but they did not want to hear him, instead they were all in ecstasy and Bacchic frenzy. But he wore the laurel wreath of the holy muses in his hair with dignity and the seven-stringed lyre in his right hand.
In the evening he went to a myrtle forest on a hill to meditate deeply on the dialectical mystery of love and death. He was alone and a holy sadness filled his soul. His love was in the hereafter, and he expected nothing more from the earth and its Epicurean joys. He saw three young shepherds sleeping in the grass on the slope of the hill and felt much lonelier because he knew people were nearby. He threw his face to the ground to see if it could give him strength, but he felt even more sad. Then he remembered a word of the dead, "Theos..." Yes, the deity he was called to seek. “Theos”, he whispered, “my soul is permeated with melancholy. Send me the cup of consolation, let the hemlock cup of Eros and earthly love pass me by, because I am no longer of this world. Come, O Theos, and reveal yourself to me! See, I look for you from my first thought, and earlier, in the floating silence of the wind, I suspect you. But who are you? How should I call you, what trait attach to you? Everyone wants to find you in ecstatic jubilation, but I can't help but seek and long for you in the sadness of loneliness.” The spirits of nature floated around him like light breezes, like the scent of flowers, and comforted him.
At that moment he heard high-pitched screeching and shouting from women's voices coming closer, and now and then the animal scream of a fellow interfering. It was the Bacchante procession that was approaching, the wandering, torch-bearing, lust-obsessed procession of the women of Dionysus.
No, Orpheus was not looking for this Dionysus. In the mystery of Jacchos he had suspected a different, dark, mystical Wisdom. But in this triumphant cry of the earth-born, in this din of lust of the children of the world, he did not seek to find the God who was the Truth.
The maenads and their followers came closer. Young, gorgeous women led the procession. Their lips were made up with Egyptian lip make-up, their hair colored with the red of the Cypriot henna flower. Their clothes hung thin and loosely around their surging, surging bodies. They looked eagerly out into the night, where there would be an orgy, a frenzied feast of enjoyment. In their entourage was Silenus, the old wine drinker, who was considered the teacher of Dionysus, and the satyrs, the forest spirits, and the goat-footed people, the panisks, and with brazen and obscene gestures, the garden god Priapus with his phallic scepter. Orpheus was horrified.
The leader of the maenads, Ctesylla, went to Orpheus, the silent one. "Come on, let me kiss you, and kiss me, because we don't want to see any young boy or man in Thrace today, at the Bacchic feast of Dionysus, who is not part of the celebrations! What do you look so miserable? You overflow with self-pity and perish, or come to our festival and jubilee dance, because with jubilation and cheerfulness and frenzied dance, we want to celebrate the God of life and joy of life! So, do you want to sneak through the nocturnal groves like a dead man, like a separated and ghostly shadow? or do you want to dance the dance in the midst of mad women and feel that you are human in juice and strength, in flesh and blood?” With that she wrapped around his neck and kissed him.
The maenads cheered, brandished the pine torches and shook their loose hair with the ivy wreaths. Their panther skins or goatskins hung half-torn around their bare bodies. They were not one-breasted like Amazons. Everything steamed the sweaty sultriness of lust. But Orpheus did not see them, he was blind to their flesh and deaf to their wild triumphant songs. It was night before his eyes. In the night there was a grove. In the grove walked a white figure, a sighing shadow, with a bloody heel - Eurydice - or - the Queen of Love?
Without offering any resistance, Orpheus allowed himself to be pulled away by the swarm of maenads. They took him in their midst, surrounded him with their fiery bodies, the satyrs wanted to fraternize with him and laughed at him, “Do you see nothing but the demons of Hades? Or are you one of the philosophers? Or do you naively believe in the good and the true and the beautiful? Or do you want to become a holy man in Athena's castle? Let it all go! The truth lies in the wine, and that is why Dionysus also created the vines so that we can celebrate his triumph in a frenzy of drunkenness and lust for joie de vivre, because he has ascended to Olympus! Evier! Celebrate Dionysus, celebrate Dionysus, because he has ascended to Olympus, he really has ascended to Olympus, so celebrate Dionysus, celebrate Dioynsos!” And so on, and it does not want to end.
An old woman with wild gray hair, a pointy nose and a wrinkled chin stepped into the midst of the crowd and raised her hands and shook herself and kept shouting: “Evier, Evier! Let me tell you about Pentheus and the tremendous horror of the great disruptor Dionysus!"
And with that the grayish woman, who was a mother of Dionysus, began to describe, “He who was brought up in India by his mothers, of whom I am one, he crossed the world, everywhere establishing his laws of wine and divine madness. He was kind to his mad disciples, but terrible and merciless to all enemies of his mind-confusing worship. So he came on the wanderings from India through the land of the Phoenicians, where he was called Baal, and came to his hometown, the seven-gate Thebes.
There was Pentheus, son of Echion and Agave, king. Agave, however, was a sister of Dionysus' mother, the lightning-burned Semele. But Pentheus found the divine service of Dionysus an abomination. All the women of Thebes tore themselves away from their husbands and flocked to the multitudes of mad maenads in the awakening of Dionysus, there was a great awakening among the women, and they all shouted the terrible hymns of God in incomprehensible tongues of madness: Evier! Evier!
But Pentheus called out to the madmen: What madness has befallen you? Thebes has never been taken by his enemies in two thousand years, neither with fire nor with sword, and now is a drunken youth with ivy in his hair and torn panther skins around his milk-washed bare limbs supposed to take holy Thebes? Now shall your exultation overthrow the holy walls? Now are our venerable worship services, offered to the high heavenly ones in the voice of still floating silence, to an exult of triumph from the victorious youth of the gods? Insane, intoxicated fools in your entourage and brightly women! All reverence for the high saints is gone and destroyed by your ecstasy and joyous songs! Woe to you! Because that's not how you please the noble Olympians! All this roaring worship is nothing but a single deception, as a single lustful lie! So Pentheus blasphemed Dionysus, the joyless Pentheus!
He sent his servants to take Dionysus prisoner. But these came back with bloody heads. Where is Dionysus? asked Pentheus. We were able to catch one of his entourage, but not the terrible one, they replied. Pentheus questioned the prisoner, but he was proud of the majesty and glory of his god and sang praise: Evier, Evier! Dionysus has risen, celebrate Dionysus, celebrate Dionysus, because he has risen! But Pentheus had the worshiper tortured.
Then he began a pursuit of the Dionysus ministry. But his mother Agave and all his sisters were in the maenad procession and danced twitching dances to the god and laughed their insane laughter in his honor.
But Pentheus again sent servants to catch Dionysus. But this one came along voluntarily, untouched, gently smiling in his foolish wisdom. Oh, he was so beautiful! so young! so glorious! Evier, Evier! O Dionysus, you are wonderful, you are wonderful, O Dionysus! But Dionysus went right through the crowd of Pentheus' servants and stepped into the group of delighted women. Victory and triumph to the god of madness! Triumph of the beautiful and the splendid!
But Dionysus stepped up again before King Pentheus and said to him, You are blinded, you are repugnant to my dancing women! Take off your royal cloak and wrap yourself in soft women's clothes, then step into the crowd of the dancing assembly of God, they won't recognize you in women's clothes, otherwise they would tear you to pieces because you blaspheme their joy and mock their laughter!
Pentheus followed Dionysus in women's clothes. The god of madness had already sent madness into the mind of the defiant king. Pentheus thought the sun was a double star, Dionysus a golden bull, and in Bacchanic frenzy and laughing twitching he hurried through the pine-covered valley, where the rejoicing women shook their ivy curls and sang praise to their mad god, Evier! He comes again! Evier! Joy breaks through, and laughter and dance and in his honor we want to celebrate a festival, because he is the splendid, Evier!
Dionysus bent down the top of a fir tree and placed Pentheus in the top of the tree and let the fir tree stand up again. There the king was hanging in the tree. The mad god called his women, they threw stones at the king, scorned and blasphemed him and began to cut down the fir tree. Pentheus fell down with the fir tree. But Agave, his mother, was the first to tear it up! She thought he was a lion, so blinded the terrible glory of our god Agave. Pentheus' sisters tore off his other limbs. Agave put his bleeding head on her ivy-wrapped thyrsos staff and carried it through the woods of the Kithairon.
So it happens to all blasphemers! Joy is with us, for our god is a glorious triumphant who first planted the vine of jubilation! Evier! He came up! Evier! It is wonderful!” So the mother closed her praise, fell on the floor, turned with a convulsion, slurred in an incomprehensible language, crowed like a chicken and laughed like a madman.
With an earthen jug full of the heaviest wine, crowned with silver-green ivy leaves in his black hair, his eyes rolling and gray as a sea, scratching his unshaven cheek, Silenus stepped forward, the tutor of Dionysus, a man who was always drunk. He raised his voice on the following hymn:
“You know, you foul multitudes, that our dreadful holy Dionysus was brought up in India. So let me tell you how he behaved in fertile and terrible India: He was called Shiva in India. In the beginning of spring, the Schiwararti festivities were celebrated in Schiva's honor. The freest songs were sung, rampant and vulgar, because Shiva was a god of the most primitive enjoyment of life. While some sang, We desire you, Sister Life, others sang, we are in love with you, Sister Life, and the same thing was meant. For Shiva came to Sister Life and begat life in her womb with his lust. And Sister Life was Parvati, was the goddess who was also called the great Ganga, because she was flowing, dark, mysterious, receiving the generating, creative fire in her grottos. Shiva was the splitting lightning, torn between fire and spirit, but from his lingam the splitting lightning streamed, the conceiving fire, because it opened when it revealed itself as a column, split, split the column and stepped into it fire, then he poured out the fire in the frenzy of lust, and burned up the dark night of the Ganga. She threw her flood-muddy-brown locks, shimmered by the Bengal red fiery red, wildly around her unleashed body and streamed towards the fire god of generating passion that was revealed in the lingam. There was a lustful union of two principles, night and lightning in one, lingam flame and ganga lap in one, and so it drifted wildly in a primeval pagan mystery play of begetting and receiving, rolling wildly and rolling wildly on and on, creating, sustaining and destroying life in an instant. And Shiva was so violently convincing, so unrestrained possessing, so unrestrainedly overwhelming the water soul of Ganga that he was also called the destroyer, because he was the lust of death, he was the lightning from the heart of the night, he was that fire of anger in which the Maya-veil burns and what remains is the bare existence of life that is indestructible. Shiva is terrible, and in whom he rages, he is split as lightning, Shiva is terrible, and in whom he rages, he is burned on fire and burns up in the flames of carnal inspiration. He is flesh and tears himself apart, he is flesh and digs into the watery soul of Ganga, which cannot defend him. He is the center of all that is terrible, of all violence, of all overpowering, of all turmoil in human beings, because he is the flesh in his triumphant journey to court, fighting against the divine breath. That is why all high ascetics fear the dreadful violence of the angry Shiva, for he tears up her flesh and burns her spirit into a shameful heap of void ashes. Woe to him who falls into Shiva's hands!"
But one of the panisks stepped forward and barked like a dog, “Great Silenus, you yourself lightning-split master of the Dionysian mystery, teach us who is the bride of Shiva-Dionysus, for who is the one who can endure the mysterious power of the lightning-born delusional god, in him rage his frenzy?"
Then Silenus shook himself, shook all his limbs with convulsions, and cried with a foaming mouth, “I called her Ganga because she is dark water, but I will call her Parvati, as the one who witnessed the terrible on the top of the mountain: See, if Dionysus loves, then he does not love Parvati, but when he desires and rages, then he desires Parvati and rages for her. Because it is the enticing flood of the deep and the provocative summit of the mountain, the double mountain range that kisses the sky. She is the one who is silently devoted to speak of his lust, because she is a mountain, but he is talking of lust, but she is the silence of matter, because she does not answer him in the spirit, but by pushing the earth towards him. Her curls are curled like fiery snakes, her lips are scarlet like the fire of the nine lower regions, her breasts are the mountains of the Himalayas, the dripping gaze of the rain-laden clouds evidently with their summit peaks. She is the earth's surrendered lust, and it is the conversation with Shiva, in which she asks him to speak, Tell me with what lust you are devoted to the grottos of the earth, you raining bull!"
Oh, how terrible Orpheus found these senseless, senseless, steamy speeches of Silenus. He spoke in a frenzy of drunkenness, painting more with words than expressing thoughts. He himself, Silenus, could not grasp the demonic power of this dark urge in his mind, because the lust from below could not be grasped by any human mind. Spirit grasped spirit, the flesh alone lived the urge of the flesh. And while in the speeches of Silenus the flesh wanted to rise to a mystery, the soul of Orpheus vanished into spiritual air and sought peace in a conversation with holy love.
But since he was surrounded by the sultry steam of the religious flesh, he did not come to a light-blue peacefulness of the spirit, but burrowed up in him the lower, the wild and animalistic, which urged him to the mysteries of sin. So it tore him apart, and while his soul floated like a light blue eagle in the air, gazing openly into the golden face of the bright blond sun, the black panthers fought with the black bears down in the valley floor of his soul, who hummed to each other and shaggy mutually mangled and cannibalically devoured.
The Dionysus cult was an abomination to the heart of Orpheus, which was filled with the spirit, and he longed for the Apollonian light of heaven, since the holy heavenly ones walked fatelessly in the ingenious heights of the eternal spirit, but - woe to him! - his heart was still bound by the birth of man out of the lust of nature to the tearing panthers, so in the dark grottos and mysterious thorn thickets of his soul the warring swarm of Dionysus‘ women raged, all lure to death, all splitting him with lightning flashes, all reaching for him with snake arms to drag the eagle into the seething mud, there to suffocate him in the blood vapor of the flesh.
And Orpheus saw light blue meadows on which white lilies were blooming, there genii with far-sighted wings drifted in cheerful equanimity, there Psyche walked like a summer butterfly, there the golden curly Queen of Heaven in golden sandals walked with the Son of Light, there from a sky-blue flower he walked him looked at the holy face of the golden-haired Eurydice.
And Orpheus looked at the western shores of the sea of Atlantis, as creepers ate horny humming flies, as the climbing plants choked the tall trunks, as wood fell and rotten and was eaten by flocks of teeming ants, as snakes hung lazily from the ancient trees and dreamed in the steaming darkness of the thicket, and everything brooded in the heat, and nature was like a pregnant woman's womb, fertile, and saturated with sultriness and the unconscious urge to procreate. And Orpheus gasped for air, afraid of suffocating on the tangle of snakes in the orchid-rich leaf thicket, and screamed for the sun!
Then it tore him out with the holy power of the divinity of love! And he saw the maenads romping about in senseless convulsions, and he saw how a deep black shadow lay over them, and he knew that this seething witness to life was captured by the mystical power of death! Because Parvati was devoted to Shiva, and she wore a chain on her neck, on which a hundred human skulls hung, because the flesh was determined to rot, the greed and lust was exposed to decay, and they danced dancing in the fire of the Orcus, there in twitches of woe about their mind. For Orpheus saw that the deity was spirit, and the mystery of the flesh fought like gigantic storms against the Olympic spirit of the ether, and Father Ether was untouched by the senseless goings-on of the children of the earth, for the spirit was stronger than the flesh, and Father Ether triumphed in the armor of the victorious sun over the rebellious earth mother.
The Queen of Heaven smiled like a golden lily, the Virgin Minerva smiled in her Wisdom. And Father Ether was the light of a holy flash of lightning that split and burned the rebels of earth ancestry. And in golden armor the Son of Zeus stepped up out of his tent in the east as a bridegroom and strode in majestic peace across the firmament, killing the python dragon, which poisoned the source of inspiration. For here Orpheus was woven into the sacred, into the pure, into the realm of eternal rest, far from inner strife, into Elysian lily meadows of ethereal flowers, in which genii and blessed virgins dwell, and among them the queen of his soul, the departed Eurydice with the golden hair, itself very light and devotion to the Father Ether.
And Orpheus flew unaffected in his mind like an eagle up and down, like a phoenix born from the fire of his strife, rising from the ashes of his flesh, and like a sacred bird of the Son of Zeus, flew blissfully ethereal under the lights of heaven, looking down from his free soul to the ashes of the flesh, in the last red fire eating the ashes on the ground, and was appalled at the power of the maenads, who confused the world, and looked at Dionysus like the arch demon, grinning like the brazen death whose skulls, serpentine worms, horny and eager to eat, crept out. And everything was swallowed up by the stream of fire from Acheron, but from the etheric floods of light was born the new Mother Gaea, the holy earth, pure virgin, with the wreath of twelve zodiac images, and eternally virginal-maternal, because she carries in her arms the offspring of the gods, who will sanctify the earth with his immortal feet at the time of the 194th Olympiad, for he will come and touch the meadows of Syria and clothe the lilies with king's cloaks and feed the sparrows in the bushes and with his tears sanctify the devastated dust of the earth and give birth. Orpheus did not understand what he was looking at.
He awoke from his dream raptures when Silenus, surrounded by the half-naked maenads, approached him and asked, “You are a poet? Then sing a song to celebrate the rapture of the flesh when the phallic god and his priestesses hold the unholy-holy side dish!"
Orpheus looked up at the sky, saw a blinding sun and shouted, “No! I am and stay away from you, because you are servants of death, but I am consecrated to immortality!"
DEATH OF ORPHEUS
Orpheus stood in the midst of the maenads who danced in a frenzy, sparkling eyes, sparkling looks of anger, billowing breasts, waving panther and lynx skins, raging waves of hair. One, Corydoneia, grabbed a snake skin wrapped around her waist, took it as a scourge, and hit Orpheus. The other maenads cried out madly and cheered, intoxicated by the lust of destruction. Here was a festival of tearing! Hadn't the panthers and lynxes been torn apart by the Bacchantes, hadn't the bitches been eaten alive? Here was a nobler flesh, a spirit endowed animal, to tear this noble animal apart was a worthy service for Dionysus! Ah, to drink your brainshell and to slurp your genius, that was a horror and joy of horror!
Everyone fell on him. He collapsed. He lay helpless, defenseless among the bacchantes pounding around him, who uttered piercing cheers like mad monkey mothers in India's primeval forests. Some imitated Corydoneia and tore their serpent belts from their hips - their robes fell loosely around their loins - and whipped Orpheus.
“Ah, triumph of the holy prophet!” shouted a goat-footed man from the entourage of the delusional god, “here is the lion skin of Heracles, the son of Zeus, his honorary mantle gold skin around the shoulders of the worthy son of the muse!” The maenads screeched with ecstatic laughter. The goat-footed man threw a torn lionskin cloak around the bloody shoulders of the silent Orpheus.
Corydoneia laughed brightly when she saw an olive tree, tore some branches from the tree and woven a wreath of olive branches: “Be consecrated to Wisdom, you fool! Here come over you the holy oil of the Virgin Minerva, for Wisdom will come over you at this moment, when you are dead, for you are the sacrifice - worthy and right - the sacrifice that we bring to the God of life!" With that she pressed the olive branch into his hair. Orpheus let it all happen.
The maenads tied him with leather ropes, and while they jumped and hopped they dragged him behind them through the dust of Thrace up a hill where sheep used to graze, but the vulture had knocked the flock down, and only gnawed ram's skulls, with twisted horns still lay in the red-blooming drifts.
Then the Bacchantes piled up a sacrificial altar made of stones. Old Silenus shouted, drunk with wine, “A sacrifice to the god of terror! But where is the goat that we want to sacrifice?”- “Here!“ the maenads shouted. The mothers of Dionysus wanted to gather branches to pile up the fire, but Silenus shouted, "Ye old people, don't you remember, you Thessalian witches, how the ancients sacrificed to the gods?" The ancients, all of them toothless mothers of Bacchus, giggled, “Human sacrifices, yes, they made sacrifices from boys for the terrible one!” But Silenus cried, “And should this custom be renewed for the terrible one? Should he be content with panthers if he can have a poet? Should he be satisfied with a goat when the prophet is ready here?” - “No, never!” shouted the maenads,“ the highest to the terrible one, the purest and most sacred to the god of all horrors! Give him a smell of human flesh!” But Silenus shouted into the din, “Bacchus' snorting bull's nose does not like burned meat, but instead of the burnt offering he likes the meat offering!” - “Ha! How!”- “You tore panthers with the white women's teeth and do not know how to tear a poet apart!” - “Delicious youth, fragrant meat, healthy in every fiber!” The wildest of all, Corydoneia, struck her teeth in his left side and tore out a raw piece of meat, crushed it with blood-streaked teeth and swallowed it greedily, rolling eyes, concluded with a whoop, "Evier, Evier! I will feed Dionysus’ sacrifice to him!"
But Orpheus soul was far away.
He saw the Moira, his fate, in a holy female form, in a blood-red cloak, hovering over his place of death, shimmering with a golden shimmer, fleeting like an apparition of light. Then he saw a throne in the sublime night of the ether, next to it stood a heavenly man, who had just got up, who spoke to him, words that Orpheus did not understand, but which gave his heart superhuman strength.
“Genius who you are!” said Orpheus‘ soul, “who are you, and by what name do I address you?”
"I am the one you were looking for."
"I'm looking for you? Are you the crown of man, are you the truth, are you holy love? "
"The same."
"And Eurydice?"
"Is mine as you are mine."
"But what is your name?"
"I am the deathless who dies your death."
"The death I'm dying?"
"The eternal."
"I won't die like that?"
"You die for me because I died for you."
"And your name?"
"My name is man of sorrow."
"You are the blessed one?"
"I am the blessed who is called man of sorrow for your sake."
"And do you know my suffering?"
"And made your sorrow blissfully as I made my bliss for your sake bitter sorrow."
"So do I have to suffer to know you?"
“So you must die to find life in death. So you have to suffer to find happiness in pain. So you must be torn to pieces by the children of the earth in order to know the children of heaven."
"And you are a demigod?"
"More than that!"
"A king of the gods?"
“The god of gods! But a person!"
"More wonderful, so unfathomable!"
"Call me the unfathomable, whom you will know as I know you!"
"Tell me, by all saints, your name!"
"Call me Kyrios!"
“Kyrios! In the dust of the earth my soul bends to worship you as my heaven!"
"I am heaven, I am a son of man."
"And you know whether there is meaning in my suffering, in my fateful death?"
“Your fate is my dark will. And I am the meaning of your fate, because I am: the meaning!"
"O, the Logos that the wise suspected?"
"The Wisdom that the wise loved."
"But I am not a wise man, but a poor fool!"
“It is good for you that you recognize your folly, that is the beginning of the reverence for Wisdom. You are a poet whom I created to be a seeker of God."
"And who are you to the poet?"
"The Word, the pronounced meaning of the god of gods!"
"And with you is the idea of beauty?"
"She herself, for she is the Glory of Wisdom, the dawn of eternity, you will find the holy one in my house, in my garden, at the ends of the three heavenly shores, the three..."
The divine appearance faded away. And Orpheus died, for his heart was torn by two women. The white apparition of Eurydice met his immortal soul...
It was night. The cypress trees stood like black pillars, tears dripping. The moon was sadly veiled behind a black cloud that was like fleeting smoke and yet so impenetrable. In the distance some little lambs began to bleat heartily, very quietly. The cold north wind, the wind of an unfathomable fate, passed through the lovely, sad myrtle bushes - where from? And the ripe clouds dropped the cold rain that made the earth what it was, a valley of tears. The maternal pigeons stopped their cooing, the young lovebirds let no circling be heard, for elegiac awe, tragic shudders touched their surging bosoms. The sparrows of love remained mute, how vain must their former twitter seem to them. And yet, it was a wistful joy for them in all their sadness, yet they had once sung for the heavenly love of Eurydice for Orpheus. The clouds swam blue-black and drunk with melancholy through the dark, calm sea of the ether. They cast their shadows over the tall oak trees, which stood as if they were heartbroken and yet heroically presented their canopy to the bare sky. The snakes were touched by the general sighs of the creatures and became so tame with melancholy that small children could play with them. The lions possessed so much inner majesty that they were silent before the suffering of the crown of creation, the suffering of man. The king of the beasts was silent because his master had died. The goats were reconciled with the sheep because they never wanted to quarrel and fight on the day of the death of the poet of nature. Everyone celebrated the lament for the dead, creation wore a black mourning ribbon on its arm throughout Thrace. Wailers should have been heard. But the white Eurydice called to complain about Orpheus was gone, was no longer earthly. But those who were earthly celebrated the triumph of their infatuated and foolish jubilation.
The maenads lit high bonfires because they had torn the sacrifice of the great ripper. Their passions for death culminated in an ecstatic jubilee song, ending in high-pitched screeching. Dancers threw themselves around, throwing their bare breasts in the wind. Whores of Bacchantes went to the disciples of Priapus and whored on the top of the hill, desecrating the elegiac sanctuary of the death altar of a son of the Muse.
Some took the limbs that were lying around, swarmed out, ran through Thrace the following nights, carrying the sacrificial flesh of Dionysus at every end. But Corydoneia carried Orpheus' head. His face was marked by deep furrows of pain, clouded and illuminated by dignified tragic seriousness. The hair of the head and the beard were wild and disheveled. The eyes looked lackluster, lackluster. The mouth became narrower and paler, almost bluish-purple. His cheeks and forehead were splattered with blood, Corydoneia kissed the drops of blood from the skin and shivered to drink them. She came to the river Hebrus, which had left his usual bed and jumped aside in horror. Nevertheless, the river had to absorb the head of terror of the fair Orpheus. Once the river had come to terms with its fate, it wisely consented and carried the venerable head of poetry on its gently floating waters into the lap of the Archipelagus. The mighty Archipelagus carried its head to its destination, the white and gold shore of the blessed island of Lesbos, since only the holy virgins, all of them poets, wandered solemnly.
During the night the poetic maiden Metamelia walked lonely through the oleander grove. It smelled lovely of the best anointing oil. Her friends Melissa and Melione stayed behind. Metamelia walked on lonely. What was in her opened up above her, was an immeasurably deep, dark cosmos. In the vast space of the universe, the unfathomable interior, stars were sown from white light, on which the most beautiful star sirens floated, all in robes of white floods. How they all gazed with spiritual eyes, a genius gazed out of each eye. How they all floated like saints from heaven. Yet none could be grasped, none was ever allowed to step on the lawn on the goat slopes of Lesbos with their bare feet in golden sandals of the Queen of Heaven, or even to stroll through the streets of Methymna. Everything earthly was removed from them, and only as star sirens did they live in the loving heart of Metamelia. She no longer saw the bodies, no longer the bodies of the girls in the streets of Methymna, no longer the bodies of the wild boys on the shepherds' slopes of Lesbos, but saw into the realm of ideas, where the shadows of the bodies lived and wove, or better: because the beings of the shadows lived and wove, for the shadow was the bodily mode of existence, the being was the spirit. In Metamelia the spirit lived a thousandfold represented by ideal spirits, all in perfect beauty, incomprehensibly pure. And yet it was all so fleeting, all so fleeing to the center of the abyss that lay in the dark secret. There was no ground, there was only one depth followed by a deeper depth, and this was equal to the highest height, because everything circled in the eternal calm of the inner cosmos, but Metamelia only saw the movement, not the calm. Nevertheless, it seemed to her that the past and the present lived in her, and everything carried the fate-made germ of the future in it. Everything would drift on and on, revolving like pure heavenly geniuses around the center of the cosmos of the heart. In the center of the interior, however, was the holy of holies of fate, since the heart of holy Moira lay open in the hand of the Eternal, but this hand was hidden from view, and yet in love, in love, Metamelia was able to secure in this hand of the Eternal to rest. The unfathomable inexpressible to suspect was the lot of the beautiful Virgin of Methymna, who walked on the bank of the poetic island of virgins, anointing oil her garment, when she saw how the Archipelagos carried the head of the son of the muse to the blessed bank. Silent, wistful joy and gentle thanks to the inexpressible!
And like a relic from the mystery religion of the son of the muse, she carried his holy head away from the beach into the area, as the shepherdesses Phyllis and Amaryllis were grazing with their lambs. They looked at the virgin with open-hearted, honest-hearted eyes and spoke to the poet with a loving, affectionate woman's voice, they want to dignify the mystery of the eternal memory of the death of the son of the Muse. That is why they formed a shrine out of young, slender branches of weeping willow, and in the evergreen moss on the rocky slope they embedded the skull in which the mystery of poetry continued.
And Metamelia looked up into the vast cosmos. And there she looked, and lo! what she saw was the constellation of the swan, for the holy swan was sanctified to the god of prophets and poets, for he himself was considered the prophet of eternal life in the face of death. And this soul bird in glorious white plumage was the parable for the immortal soul of Orpheus. The Almighty Father had called him to the eternal sign on the cross of the north, to sing the call of immortality with outstretched wings through all aeons. Faithful God! After all, he had lifted Orpheus' seven-part lyre into the firmament, so that the soul bird would strike the lyre with seven strings in the cosmos to the glory of immortality and from every string he sounded the harmonious harmony of the cosmos, in which one sense, one world reason personally ruled, and the harmony of the worlds of immortal genii on the islands of bliss resounded forever, swimming in the crystal waters of the light ether, praising Orpheus' death with jubilation in heavenly silence, because in death he saw the life which the choir of the Virgo came: Alas! they sang, woe we sang to the soul bird on the cross of the north, but jubilation, jubilation on the golden cloud for the family of heaven, that from the tears of the night the peace of the golden age has risen again and for ever!