A Defense of Mythology

As part of my school’s performing arts magnet program, I teach Music Theory 1 to a class of sophomores. Since the students in this program will go on to take Music Theory Honors the following year, and Advanced Placement Music Theory the year after that, I decided the students would be getting plenty of theory, and rewrote the curriculum to be more of a Music History class. We begin the year by studying some basic acoustics, move onto prehistoric music, quickly survey the music of early civilizations, and soon find ourselves in Ancient Greece.

While exploring this culture at this stage in the course, I recently took the time to tell the class the myth of Orpheus, the Greek musician whose great skill on the lyre charmed the god Hades into releasing his wife Eurydice out of the underworld.

A student raised her hand uncomfortably and asked, “Did this really happen?”

A bit surprised, I responded with my own question: “Do you mean was there literally a man named Orpheus who journeyed into the netherworld and used a lyre to lull the god Hades into returning his dead wife to the land of the living? Um, no.”

“Then why are you telling us this?” she asked. It was clear this was a genuine question, not a snarky remark. “Why are we learning about something that isn’t true?”

My first reaction was that public education has utterly failed this child. It has formed in her a mind so narrow that she can no longer enjoy a story. She cannot appreciate anything other than a recitation of brute fact. She has forgotten the joy of story-time. It has been utterly beaten, extracted, programmed, out of her.

My second reaction was to remember that I was a public school teacher and had the opportunity to remedy this. After all, she had been brave enough to ask the question. Part of her may have been hoping, longing for there to be an answer. Somewhere, deep inside, was the forgotten joy of story-time might still be lurking, begging for the intellect’s permission to resurface. That is natural enough. We accept things without understanding them when we are young; as we mature, the understanding has catching up to do.

So I tried to break the spell. I told her that the Greeks didn’t quite believe in their gods the same way a Jew, Christian, or Muslim believes in God. They didn’t think Zeus was the creator of the universe, the ultimate source of all reality. In fact, their myths explicitly said he wasn’t. When Socrates came too close to believing in that sort of God, the Athenians accused him of atheism. On the other hand, they didn’t actually think lightning struck because a giant man was throwing arrows of hot-forged iron out of the sky, either. Zeus was never literal for the Greeks. They believed in their gods symbolically.

The ancient myths may not have been true, but they were filled with truth. When a Greek sailor prayed to Poseidon, he didn’t actually believe there was a trident-wielding merman who would flip his boat if he was in a bad mood. The sailor’s prayers and sacrifices before the god of the sea were an acknowledgment, perhaps an unconscious one, that the ocean was more powerful party. He had no power over it. He was at its mercy. He needed to approach it with respect, even reverence, observing and obeying its laws, if he was to survive. There was a fair amount of wisdom in the practice. Thinking of the sea as a god put him into a more correct relationship with it.

Won’t true love do anything for the sake of the beloved, like Orpheus pursued Eurydice to the depths of hell? Does music not have power over the god of death? How many people have turned to music to rescue them from tragedy, letting it lead them of the netherworld of depression, anxiety, and grief? The fact that the story “isn’t true” does not mean there is no truth in it, and certainly does not mean it isn’t worth learning about.

In just a few minutes, we had lived out the myth. The joy of story-time, the beloved Eurydice, had been killed, taken to the underworld by the ill-formed “adult” intellect. The narrow, scientistic mind now ruled like Hades over the dead joys of childhood, making sure they stayed buried far beneath the surface; and I, Orpheus, was tasked with casting the magic spell of music (or at least a lesson in a music history class) to charm the god into releasing Eurydice back to life.

In the original story, Orpheus looked back too soon, and Eurydice was taken back to the underworld. It is too soon to know if the same will happen to my student, or any of the imprisoned souls we meet every day. All we can do is keep strumming our lyres as we try to lead the way out of Hades.