Commentary on The Orphic Hymn to Adonis, Part I
The Orphic daimon, lunar cycles, and the eroticism of non-binary Being
This Commentary is best read alongside my original translation of the Hymn, which is contained in my last post, “Haunted by Adonis,” from August 6, 2023. Part II of this commentary will be released in late August 2023.
Like my other commentaries, the bolded phrase at the beginning of each section refers to a line in the Hymn, with commentary following.
Consider yourself cautioned: Be prepared to let go of what you may have been taught about the nature of the universe, the gods, and other types of spiritual beings.
What the Orphics were trying to tell us is WAY MORE RADICAL than what most 20th century scholars, Renaissance interpreters, and perhaps even Plato, have thought. It’s more in line with Schrödinger’s cat and quantum mechanics than with most other philosophical, religious, or even magical/esoteric thought.
That is to say: If you read the Hymns the way they were intended to be read, in all their esoteric glory, you begin to see how they completely undo the paradigm that seems to divide heaven and earth, immortal and mortal, god and human. There is no “veil” or series of crystalline spheres that separates us from “the spiritual realm.” No “Great Chain of Being” with The One God at the top, and various levels of spirits below descending down to humans, then animals, plants, and stones. That’s the logic of feudalism and imperialism, not Orpheus.
Likewise (despite what you may read in older scholarly literature on the Orphics), the Orphic Hymns don’t present us with a cosmology that has “original sin” at its core, or that requires us to be purified in Hades after death. There’s stuff that is helpful or unhelpful for initiates to do, for sure, because it helps us remember who we are (and keep remembering, even after death). But there’s no base matter that needs to be disavowed before you can be gifted eternal life or (as New Age TikTok would say, “ascend.”)
That’s the whole point of Orphic initiation—to pound into our silly, forgetful heads that we ALWAYS ALREADY WERE children of Earth and Starry Sky, and that IT IS OUR BIRTHRIGHT TO BE ONE WITH THE COSMOS.
So fasten your seatbelts, kids, because if anyone undoes the stale binaries of dualism, it’s our dreambae the Orphic Adonis. Be prepared to jettison what you think you know and dive— nay, wallow!—in Their gorgeous Undead Unity.
Commentary
Best Daimon. Daimon here is used in the sense of “Ultimate God.” Some of us may be familiar with later Platonist and neo-Platonist (including Renaissance) ideas of the daimon as a lower-level spiritual being, as in, “there are the gods, then next down there are the daimons, then after that, the material realm.”