In review

Yes, so I thought I'd explain why I decided to re-write the story of Eurydice and Orpheus the way it went. I was trying to work through / explore ideas about marriage and love because it seems to be like the hot topic around girls/people my age, and y'know the deep-set anxiety about not getting married and how sometimes it can make you feel like you're not good enough? And which is such a sexist idea, because why should my value as a person, as a female person, be defined by whether or not I manage to get a guy / tie the knot/ get hitched / and etc???

(Side note/RANT: Recently attended a wedding, and I hated hated what the pastor said to my friend about "honouring" her husband. He said to let the guy make the decisions for the family cuz it's only when boys make decisions and take responsibility for them that they grow to become men. Which is fair enough, making decisions and sticking with them is enough to help any PERSON grow up. And also he said that men are more logical than women, and if you asked a woman why she thinks like that, she won't know. I was SOOOO MADD but I didn't say anything cuz I wanted to be polite, but if I had my way I would have heckled him. Because:

(1) Girls also have to grow up to be women, why shouldn't they contribute to making decisions for the family? Isn't it healthier to weigh opposing points of view before reaching a decision?

(2) Men are not more logical than women. That is a stereotype and a falsehood and I AM APPALLED people are still telling lies like that!!! Logic is just different ways of thinking that we train our brain to learn and apply. Like I'm better at abstract thinking because I've spent most of my life thinking that way (i.e. making connections between ideas for literature), and I can also think linearly, but these methods of thinking are just different ways of assessing situations and applying logic, so really, he's quite inexcusable? Then if he wants to talk about the false dichotomy between being logical and emotional, doesn't he think that the way we've been brought up has something to do with that?? If a boy is always told he has to be a strong, solitary male figure and not disturb his parents, and another boy has a strong support network, and can talk through and consider the reasons for his emotions with a trusted parent— put them together and maybe their IQ is alright, but one of them would also be emotionally healthier and probably more logical as well because he has more thinking tools to help him assess his situation?? And honestly has he never met stupid emotional boys??)

The stories like to tell us that if you do X and Y and Z, then logically and consequentially someone will love you and marry you and you will live happily ever after, but that's not how life goes, at least I sincerely hope not.

Anyway, Orpheus was a real big deal in the world of Ancient Greece. He was credited with introducing a kind of cult worship, and for writing hymns for religious rites, including death rites. The part about the "daughter of earth and starry sky" is adapted from a translation of a fragment of an Orphic hymn (which I took off wikipedia). I just thought that it was really beautiful writing and I wanted to include it.

I first read about Orpheus and Eurydice in this book of myths and legends from around the world, and always felt unsettled by it, because Orpheus seemed to put in so much effort to get Eurydice back—all the way to the gates of hell— but at the last moment he turns around and then she disappears. And it seemed like so much effort, only to lose at the last moment?

But as I was looking for a story to help me work through some thoughts, none of the fairytales seemed to sit right. They just seemed so superficial, scraping the surface of some relationship, but then I thought about Orpheus, about how the whole story revolves around his desires, his actions, and barely anything about Eurydice, that I knew I wanted to write from Eurydice's point of view.

Other people have certainly done this; writers interested in how women are positioned in writing, amazing writers like Margaret Atwood and Carol Ann Duffy, who have written about the kinds of normalised sexism present in the relationships between men and women. So I took my cue from them.

The premise

Orpheus is so powerful. The story goes that after Eurydice died, when he played his lyre, all the plants and rocks and trees were moved. He played and Cerberus, the giant hell-hound guarding the gates of the underworld fell asleep, and the gods Hades and Persephone felt such deep sorrow, they agreed to let Eurydice go. (With the condition that Eurydice followed behind and Orpheus didn't look back).

And what's a girl gonna do when she's faced with that kind of power? What if she marries a man who projects emotions where there are none, whose voice overwhelms and intrudes and persists in her mind. What if she marries a jealous, possessive man, obsessed with bending people to his will, but in a subtler way, as in the way of abusive spouses? First the isolation, then the psychological manipulation —making her second guess her own thoughts and feelings, then lying, denying, and dismissing her thoughts and desires?

And what if this sinister husband goes to the underworld for her but she doesn't want to come back?

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I tried my best not to use the word "love". I did in the end, but mainly to call into question what love means. The ancient Greeks had at least 4 different words to express the concept of love — agápe, éros, philía, and storgē.

Agápe has become Christianised in its use because St. John used it in his gospel to refer to God. As in "God is love (Agápe)"; and later it was taken up to mean the kind of self-sacrificing love that Jesus showed when he gave his whole life for us and then some. For the ancient Greek writers like Plato, however, agápe was the kind of love parents had for their children, and also between spouses.

Éros is a kind of intimate, physical, even sexual attraction. But Plato argued that eros/physical attraction is not necessarily a part of love, but that it could lead to an appreciation of beauty within the person, then beauty itself, and then on to finding the Truth (ideal/divine).

(And if any of this sounds familiar it's partly because so much of the Church's doctrines were/are influenced by ancient Greek philosophy. St. Augustine, whose teachings and writings profoundly influenced the development of the western Church (i.e. Latin rite /Roman Catholic), was a Neo-platonist (i.e. followed the ideas of a "new" strand of philosophy based on Plato's ideas) before he converted to Christianity.)

Philía - General affection, brotherly love, or the kind of friendship between friends who are equals, or the loyalty one has for family, community, or when enjoying an activity etc. and etc.

Storgē - Rarely used in ancient texts. Natural affection, such as parents have for their children.

So you see how hard it is to use the word "love" and actually mean love??
If I had to use one of those terms to describe the initial attraction between Eurydice and Orpheus, it would have been plain éros.

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In some versions of the myth, Eurydice is chased to her death by Aristaeus, a creep who liked the look of her. I figured that a girl didn't need more creeps in her life, so I threw in infidelity.

I didn't find any mentions of infidelity on Orpheus's part tbh. But it was known that he definitely had a thing for Calais when they were in the mythical band of heroes called The Argonauts. And in other stories, Orpheus died by being torn to death by some Maenads cuz he didn't reciprocate the advances of other women after Eurydice's death. So I figured he preferred guys. Orpheus and Aristaeus deserved each other.

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Also took inspiration for the blood-drinking from Homer's "The Odyssey". I really love the descriptions of the blurred and breathless dead who suddenly become more corporeal and start spilling their stories once they drink the blood of the animal sacrifices. Though I added in Orpheus spilling his own blood because it sounded like it would be a stronger kind of magic, and also because what does it mean y'know to share a life? And what might you feel compelled to do knowing that your end is so tightly bound up with another person's?

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But at the end of the writing experiment, I learned as Eurydice does, that we all have powers of our own: the power to say NO, the power to forgive, and the power to sort through all the conflicting messages we are given, the lies we tell ourselves, and courage to face the truth head-on.