The Gospel of Hellas - Research Institute for Waldorf Education

the lyre of orpheus
reasoning, just as Gautama, the Buddha of India, introduced the teaching of
compassion. 108
Orpheus’ loss of Eurydice was the expression of the Age of Darkness, of
the curse of the soul’s loneliness and separation from its higher self. On the
other hand, Orpheus regained Eurydice, invoked union with her through the
songs of his lyre. This imagination of the Hellenic mind expresses vividly the
change of consciousness which occurs with the production and the hearing of
music. By listening to the world of tone, we become aware that our spirit dives
down into the depths of our soul. The spirit of our head descends part way
into the realm of the rhythms of heartbeat and breath and our consciousness
becomes dreamy. In mythological terms the human spirit was always imagined
as the paternal or male quality, the soul as the maternal or female quality. The
spirit and soul of man, listening to music, are eternally acting as Orpheus and
Eurydice. From the early days of Greece, the whole purpose of music was to
achieve an inner union, a mystical marriage, between spirit and soul. This has
always been understood as one of the ways to initiation into the mysteries.
In those early times the soul had inner experiences on the way of initiation
which comprised the following stages: at first, a certain stupefaction and grief
at the loss of an existence which was dear to her, then a feeling as though she
was being shattered to bits. In this state, free of the body, she learned the answer
to the riddles of death and birth or resurrection on her way to the netherworld
along the yawning abyss, the abode of the three-headed hellhound representing
the evil antithesis of her own forces. Finally, she found herself in reunion with
the spirit and felt herself becoming an instrument through which the divine
world could speak.
These were genuine soul experiences of those who were to be initiated and
were symbolized by the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Music in its highest
expression is the image of these soul processes, its true mission being to purify
the soul for a higher union with the spirit.
We have definite proof that the music of the Greeks originated from
this cultic experience of initiation. The first recording took place about 586
bc when Sakadas, the aulete, the fluteplayer, composed the Pythic Nome to
which the grammarian, Pollux, referred in the second century ad. 109 He called