So I was reading Jack Faust’s fucking brilliant piece The Light in the Underworld:
A few months ago, a member of an email list that I at least read regularly (although my interactions remain distant to a certain degree, because I can be an ass and do not wish to inflict that upon members) brought up the topic of plugging Chthonic deities into the planetary spheres and treating them along the traditional lines of rulership. I want to make this clear right away: I have not taken the set I’ve put together from an archaic text, but rather attempted to find syncretizations or proper Chthonic deities that fit well enough with the spheres to be worked with. In other words: what you’ll eventually see is completely the byproduct of my own research and ideas and I made it all up. It is not a bonafide source of ancient magic, and it is quite possible that working with my setup may cause individuals problems.
When I got a strange sense of déjà vu – just a couple days before I’d encountered a very similar idea in Francisco Molina Moreno’s Non-musical Notes on the Orphic Lyra:
The aim of these notes is to make a contribution to the assessment of the evidence for a poem ascribed to Orpheus under the title Lyra. This poem seems to have dealt with the invocation of souls, and stated the necessity of the lyre in that connection. Besides, it is usually admitted that the Orphic poem Lyra mentioned the affinity between the seven strings of the lyre and the seven spheres corresponding to the Sun, the Moon, and the five planets that can be seen without a telescope. If so, the ascension of the souls alluded to by our source about that Orphic poem might have taken place through those seven spheres. But such an idea seems very strange in the Orphic realm, where the abode of the souls of the deceased was held to be underground. We think it is worthwhile to discuss this issue: did the Orphic poem itself deal with the cosmic lyre and the heavenly ascension of the souls?
Read Mr. Faust’s article with this context in mind; his associations make a lot of sense.
Tagged: haides, orpheus, spirits, thiasos of the starry bull
