Sparking Your Muse with the Orphic Hymns

Or, Discovering the artist you always already were

My most recent collage, titled “Pluto.” Image ©2023 Kristin Mathis

Symptoms of the Orphic Spirit

Exhibit A: I’ve begun making collages after 25 years of letting my college visual arts minor languish. Other than the occasional vacation sketch, I haven’t done any serious artwork since I was in my early 20s. But something about working with the Orphic Hymns has unlocked the “art bug” in me. I’ve started with collages, since they reproduce well digitally, and I usually do them as I’m completing a translation, or sometimes when I’m stuck in the middle of one and need a way to think through what I’m discovering in the hymn.

Exhibit B: My dear friend and collaborator Drew Levanti recently began writing poetry as a result of the work we’ve been doing together co-creating our new class STAR: An Orphic Initiation. (He writes about that journey and gives a sample of his new Hymn to Aphrodite here on his IG feed.)

This type of creative burst is something Drew and I have come to expect when we engage with what we call the “Orphic Spirit.” Sometimes we mean “Orphic Spirit” literally—as in the spirit of Orpheus, who often feels present with us when we’re working with the Hymns. Sometimes it’s more metaphorical, like when I catch a moment of beauty outside on a busy street and send him a photo or video clip.

Three completely ordinary moments of beauty I recently shared with friends.

One thing is constant: whenever we feel something to be “Orphic” there is always a potent mix of nature and art. Sometimes the scene is so beautiful I nearly ache with joy. Sometimes it’s so sad I’m tempted to cry and turn away. (As when I encounter a dead bird on the sidewalk, or pass a couple fighting on the street, or an addict curled up on a doorstep, reminding me of friends lost to fentanyl’s claws.)

But always, went the moment recedes, I’m left with a desire to create. Both the beauty of the world and the pain spur us to creative expression.

An Invitation to Be Re-born

The ancient Orphics were, by all accounts, very interested in the afterlife. We have beautiful gold leaves on which they inscribed detailed instructions for navigating the landscape of Hades. (I’ve written about those in my essay “A Trippy Trip to the Underworld.”)

We know that the moment of truth for any initiate was when, after death, they stood before Persephone’s throne and uttered the phrase, “I am a child of Earth and Starry Sky, and my family is heavenly”—thus proving that they remembered who they really are.

This act of recollection, of remembering we belong to the cosmos and will be embraced by it, ensured that Persephone would let the initiate’s soul join its starry family in the heavens.

This is such a beautiful image that it is tempting to stop there, and believe (as many do) that the earth is a bad place from which we must escape. That we are somehow “ascending” to the stars and ditching all this messy earth stuff behind.

Or, in the language of the New Age, that certain of us are “star seeds” whose true mission is to save earth from itself and/or return to the star cluster that is our true home. (This New Age myth is particularly insidious, because it recapitulates the mind-body split of the Enlightenment, AND the earth=bad/heavens=good dualism of much modern Christianity.)

What is so gorgeous about the Orphic tradition is that in remembering we are the part of the heavenly family we are NOT invited to escape Earth and Starry Sky, but rather, to become more and more ecstatically “fastened” to it through creative practice.

Orpheus’ song and creative legacy didn’t begin after his death…it began here, on Earth. In the midst of his grief, as he sang to the trees and animals and stones after the death of his beloved boyfriend Kallais.

(Yes, you heard that right…Orpheus was much more famous in the ancient Greek world for his love of Kallais than for the heteronormative myth of Eurydice that Ovid popularized during the Roman period. If you want to hear more about this more ancient, queerer version of the Orpheus myth, you might want to check out this class recording on my Podia site.)

Through this image of the singing Orpheus, the Orphic Spirit teaches us to be reborn here, now. In the world, in this very moment. And to liberate our creative voice as we weave ourselves into the pattern of the cosmos.

A Roman-era mosaic of Orpheus singing in the forest after the death of his beloved Kallais. Note the presence of stones, plants, and both real and mythological creatures—signifying Orpheus’ connection to all the cosmic realms. Image Source.

Orphic Community

Ancient Orphics didn’t do this sort of cosmic “fastening” and artistic exploration alone. They formed groups of like-minded folks and received teachings, created poetry, performed rituals, and generally engaged in shared community devotional practice. Together.

That’s what Drew and I are inviting you to in STAR: An Orphic Initiation:

A chance to practice reading the Hymns together, using my new translations.

A chance to explore the wondrous beauty and terrible sorrows of the cosmos together, in collaborative conversation.

A chance to re-ignite your muse through engagement with practices of ecstatic, but also very ordinary, “fastening” to the world around us.

A chance to explore a cosmology (which is to say belief system) that brings you closer and closer to the stones, plants, animals, and stars.

A chance to understand how that cosmology relates to practices or beliefs you may already identify with—eco-spirituality, mythology, astrology, herbalism, Hermetic magic.

Please join us in this ground-breaking Orphic initiation journey. It’s the first time in literally more than a thousand years that the esoteric content of these Hymns will be fully explored in extended group study and devotional practice.

I promise you won’t leave the same as you came in. Because the Orphic Spirit and the cosmos itself never lets us down.

✨Yours in Earth and Starry Sky,✨

Kristin