siren references

A classified list of references to the Sirens:

http://www.theoi.com/Pontios/Seirenes.html

online texts

Here are links to online editions of relevant texts - I'll keep up-dating it.

Septuagint

Links to many editions and one that I've looked at.

Clement's Stromata

These appear in volume 2 and volume 3 of an edition of Clement's collected works by Reinhold Koltz.

There are plenty of English translations online, including this one. (You need to scroll down a bit to get to it.)

Persephone

I found the post you did yesterday very useful. I have to admit that I hadn't really remembered (or perhaps ever understood) Persephone's role in the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. I had just been thinking of Persephone and Eurydice as equivalent figures - exiles in the underworld but within different myths. However, it's interesting that it was Persephone that Orpheus needed to persuade when he came down to rescue Eurydice: one exile adjudicating on the fate of another.

Persephone and Orpheus

Reading through your posts on Orpheus this morning, I'm getting all mushed up in Greek stories, so I'm writing this here to try to get a bit of a handle on it...

The Sirens' songs can be thought of as a call to Persephone.

Here is the relevant text from Ovid (Metamorphoses Book V):

Whence have you, daughters of Acheloüs, feathers and the feet of birds, since you have the faces of maidens? Is it because, when Proserpine was gathering the flowers of spring, you were mingled in the number of her companions? After you had sought her in vain throughout the whole world, immediately, that the waters might be sensible of your concern, you wished to be able, on the support of your wings, to hover over the waves, and you found the Gods propitious, and saw your limbs grow yellow with feathers suddenly formed. But lest the sweetness of your voice, formed for charming the ear, and so great endowments of speech, should lose the gift of a tongue, your virgin countenance and your human voice still remained.

(from http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/21765)

Orpheus' songs defeated the power of the Sirens' songs when the Argonaut passed by.

Here's the section of the Argonautica that describes the encounter with the Sirens:

(Argonautica ll. 885-921) Now when dawn the light-​bringer was touching the edge of heaven, then at the coming of the swift west wind they went to their thwarts from the land; and gladly did they draw up the anchors from the deep and made the tackling ready in due order; and above spread the sail, stretching it taut with the sheets from the yard-​arm. And a fresh breeze wafted the ship on. And soon they saw a fair island, Anthemoessa, where the clear-​voiced Sirens, daughters of Achelous, used to beguile with their sweet songs whoever cast anchor there, and then destroy him. Them lovely Terpsichore, one of the Muses, bare, united with Achelous; and once they tended Demeter's noble daughter still unwed, and sang to her in chorus; and at that time they were fashioned in part like birds and in part like maidens to behold. And ever on the watch from their place of prospect with its fair haven, often from many had they taken away their sweet return, consuming them with wasting desire; and suddenly to the heroes, too, they sent forth from their lips a lily-​like voice. And they were already about to cast from the ship the hawsers to the shore, had not Thracian Orpheus, son of Oeagrus, stringing in his hands his Bistonian lyre, rung forth the hasty snatch of a rippling melody so that their ears might be filled with the sound of his twanging; and the lyre overcame the maidens' voice. And the west wind and the sounding wave rushing astern bore the ship on; and the Sirens kept uttering their ceaseless song. But even so the goodly son of Teleon alone of the comrades leapt before them all from the polished bench into the sea, even Butes, his soul melted by the clear ringing voice of the Sirens; and he swam through the dark surge to mount the beach, poor wretch. Quickly would they have robbed him of his return then and there, but the goddess that rules Eryx, Cypris, in pity snatched him away, while yet in the eddies, and graciously meeting him saved him to dwell on the Lilybean height. And the heroes, seized by anguish, left the Sirens, but other perils still worse, destructive to ships, awaited them in the meeting-​place of the seas.

(from http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/830)

And Orpheus' song convinced Persephone to allow Orpheus to take Euridice out of the underworld. It wasn't a failure of song, but a failure of trust that caused Orpheus to fail to bring Euridice back to life.

Clement on Orpheus

I've been looking at Elizabeth Henry's book, Orpheus with his Lute: Poetry and the Renewal of Life. She covers a wide range material relating to Orpheus but I was interested to read her discussion of Clement of Alexandria:

The bringer of [...] spiritual liberation and health must, in the early Christian age, have appeared to possess either divine grace or magical powers. The perplexity of a devout Christian is seen in the writings of Clement of Alexandria, on other Greek myths and cultic heroes as well as the Orpheus story. In his Stromata (Miscellanies) of about 200 AD Clement speaks of 'Orpheus the theologian' as one who (like Plato) 'prepared the way' for the Gospel. Such Greek teachers were at this time declared by Clement to be prophets in direct line of descent from Moses. The status of Orpheus is not the equivalence with Christ which we find many centuries later in the Morte Christi celebrata, but that of 'prefiguration', as a divinely sent forerunner who was to show the nature of the Christ to come. This position was not easily maintained, as Clement's (apparently) later Protrepticon (Exhortation to the Greeks) makes clear. This work was a reply to the attack on Christianity by the Platonist Celsus, also of Alexandria, in which he declared Orpheus more worthy of worship than Jesus Christ. The vehemence of Clement's reply is itself a witness to the continuing potency of the Orphean figura:

"A Thracian, cunning master of his art (he also is the subject of a Hellenic legend) tamed the wild beasts by the mere might of song, and transplanted trees - oaks - by music ... How, let me ask, have you believed vain fables, and supposed animals to be charmed by music, while Truth's shining face alone is looked on with credulous eyes? ... To me that Thracian Orpheus seems to have been a deceiver ... enticing men to idols ... But not such is the song of Christ, which has come to loose the bitter bond of tyrannising demons. It alone has tamed men, the most intractable of animals; the frivolous among them answer to the fowls of the air, deceivers to reptiles, the irascible to lions, the voluptuous to swine, the rapacious to wolves. The silly are stocks and stones ... Behold the might of the new song! It has made men out of stones, men out of beasts. Those that were as dead, not being partakers of the new life, have come to the true life, simply by becoming listeners to this song."

I'm interested in this image of the 'song of Christ', especially the moment where Clement says 'Behold the might of the new song!'

fraudulent voices

Even the fraudulent image of the crucified Orpheus can be thought of as an utterance - a sort of iconographic and textual lie. And, because a particular collector believed the lie, the seal ended up in the archive - more specifically, the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin, where it was studied by Otto Kern and transcribed in his collected edition of orphic fragments published in 1922. In fact, I'm really *very* interested in this. It foregrounds the materiality of voices - the fact that they exist in records which may be real or may be forgeries, which may survive or be destroyed, that may be transcribed and translated more or less accurately. And all of these processes are, of course, functions of the practice of archiving voices.

orpheus and odysseus

This is just a quick note to gather together some of my thoughts on this pair of Siren-heroes: Odysseus and Orpheus. What strikes me is that they fulfil different symbolic functions for Early Christian commentators. Odysseus is the *human* figure, in exile in the world, avoiding attachments that would enmesh him too closely in the texture of earthly life. Orpheus is the *Christ*, entering the underworld to bring back his bride, herself a symbolic representation of humankind, exiled in a dark place and in need of redemption. But if the patterns of identification here are different - Odysseus and humankind, Orpheus and Christ - they are not simple, because the figure of Odysseus at the mast evokes the figure of Christ on the Cross, and Orpheus, in fact, failed to bring Eurydice out of the underworld, thus manifesting as a human shadow of Christ, the divine.

I suppose this complexity shouldn't be surprising because, in Christianity, Christ is both human and God, both the same as and different from us. What is more, the interaction of Christian and pre-Christian material draws out a kind of exilic dimension in both bodies of narrative. And, as I've said before, there are voices everywhere - the voices of the Sirens, the songs of Orpheus, bodies of narrative moving back and forth across languages and interpretive traditions, narratological layers in both the classical and the Christian texts, a layering of voices that might perhaps be thought of as an archive.

forgery

I've found a website that discusses the image of Orpheus crucified. It refers to an article which was published in Aγγελος as early as 1926 and which asserts that the seal is fake. This judgement was made on the basis of the iconography. Interestingly, one of the key points is that the 'sagging' figure (with bent arms and legs) is characteristically medieval and not attested in late antique images of the crucifixion. The page is here:

http://www.bede.org.uk/orpheus.htm

Christ/Orpheus

I wanted to find an image of the 'iron cylinder' with the representation of Christ as Orpheus Bacchicus. (It's mentioned in the quotation from Rahmer I posted here.) I found an online copy of a book called Orpheus - the Fisher: Comparative Studies in Orphic and Early Christian Cult Symbolism by Robert Eisler, published in London in 1921, and it includes an image answering to the description Rahmer gives. Eisler says that the object in question is a 'seal cylinder' and that it is made of hematite, that is iron oxide. This is the engraving that appears in Orpheus - The Fisher:






While this is quite an intriguing object, I've come across suggestions on the web that it is a fake and, at the moment, have no way of knowing whether that's true or not. So... not necessarily authentic but kind of interesting even if it isn't. What would like behind the faking of an artifact like this?

serpent on a pole

OK, I may be showing my ignorance here but I wasn't entirely clear about the reference to the 'brazen serpent on a pole' in the hymn I've just quoted. For the record, it's a reference to the story in Numbers 21, 8-9, where God tells Moses how to protect the people from serpents:

And the LORD said unto Moses, Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole: and it shall come to pass, that every one that is bitten, when he looketh upon it, shall live.
And Moses made a serpent of brass, and put it upon a pole, and it came to pass, that if a serpent had bitten any man, when he beheld the serpent of brass, he lived.

There is a reference to this passage in John 3, 13-14, where the serpent on the pole is identified with Christ on the cross. It is the sequence where Jesus speaks with Nicodemus, the Pharisee:

And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up:
That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life.

So the hymn that I quoted alludes to two exilic experiences, one Jewish - the wandering of the Israelites in the wilderness - and one Greek - Eurydice's exile in the underworld. This makes me think of Levinas and Derrida, but let's not go there this morning :o)

the figure of orpheus

I don't want to keep rendering the mythological theme more and more complex just for the sake of it. But, given that Orpheus is the other great mythological figure to survive the Sirens, I thought I'd look to see how he was perceived by the Early Church. And the answer is that he seems to have been very important. In a different section of Rahner's book (a chapter called 'The Mystery of the Cross') he says:

Christ crucified is "the true Orpheus" who brought home his bride, mankind, out of the depths of dark Hades; he is Orpheus Bacchicus and is so described on a well-known early Christian representation of the cross upon an iron cylinder.

[Note: Cf. Dictionnaire d'archéologie chrétienne, XII, Paris, 1936, col. 2735-55, where also see illustration of the Orpheus cross, Fig. 9249; A. Boulanger, Orphée, Rapports de l'orphisme et du christianisme, Paris, 1925, p. 7.]

The Middle Ages still had an intimation of this and a hymn on the mystery of the cross runs as follows:

Brazen serpent on a pole—
Serpent once did make men whole,
Cured the poisoned sting.
Orpheus of the latter day
Dauntlessly his bride away
Out of Hell did bring.

[Note: Anonymous author (twelfth century) of the Easter sequence, Morte Christi Celebrata. Text in A. Mai, Nova Patrum Bibliotheca, I, 2, Rome, 1852, p. 208.]

I haven't yet seen anything to suggest that the voyage of the Argonauts was understood in terms of exile and I can't honestly see any reason why it would have been. But, on the other hand, Eurydice's time in the underworld is clearly a kind of exile and is used in this hymn to figure the unredeemed state of humankind. And that, of course, is reminiscent of the material in which Persephone/Proserpina is exiled to the underworld, a story in which, as Despina pointed out, the Sirens are involved. (I'll try to find a good version of that story and post it so that it shows up when we follow the relevant keywords.) So maybe some reasons to think of Odysseus and Orpheus as a pair...