Pindar's Orphism and other pagan delights

The Season of Brideshead
Et in Arcadia Ego, Chapter 2

I was just free of the schools, having taken the last paper of History Previous on the afternoon before; Jasper’s subfusc suit and white tie proclaimed him still in the thick of it; he had, too, the exhausted but resentful air of one who fears he has failed to do himself full justice on the subject of Pindar’s Orphism.

I think this chapter is one of the greatest bits of writing Waugh ever did. Even if the rest of Brideshead had been lost somehow and this was all we had left, this chapter could stand on its own as an example of great writing.

Even if you just read the surface story, there is something very impressive about the way Waugh uses the two Remonstrances to tell the story. Without telling us the story in narrative, Waugh conveys an immense amount of information here. This is the sort of stuff you can read over and over again and keep finding something you missed before. But, before going into that, let me call your attention to something really neat that Waugh is doing underneath, there is whole underworld of characters and mythology playing around here. It all starts with Pindar’s Orphism.

Orphism comes from Orpheus who was believed to have founded the mystery cult. Now there are two things to know here.

1. Orphism was different from most ancient religions but very like Christianity in that it emphasized individual guilt and taught that the bad would go to Hades as punishment and the good be granted a release to the blessed. Orphism, consequently, featured a lot of purification rituals.
2. The second thing has nothing to do with Orphism per se but Orpheus was famous for making a trip to the underworld of Hades to try and retrieve his dead wife Eurydice. This descent to hell and return is important.

Okay, now on to Pindar. We only know sketchy details about Orphism because it was a mystery cult and was later mocked as a mere superstition. Pindar was a poet who wrote a series of odes where he took stories of great athletic achievements and wove the real life stories into great religious myths. He seems to have taken liberties with the myths and maybe even made up new mythology as he went along.

Pindar’s second Olympian Ode commemorates the victory in the Olympic chariot race of 476 BC by a guy named Theron. In the ode, Pindar weaves the Orphic mythology of life after death and retribution for an evil life into the story.

Note how closely this ties with the message that Jasper is offering Charles. He is saying, you have messed up but redemption is possible.

Okay, hold on to all that and let’s take journey with Anthony Blanche. He also offers Charles a chance at redemption that will spare him punishment; he also offers him new life, rebirth as an artist. Interwoven with this is this seemingly ludicrous story of Anthony being put in Mercury.

But let’s take a closer look at that story.

It begins on Thursday night. Anthony Blanche is alone and he has a meal of an omelet and a peach and a bottle of Vichy water. A mob appears and they chant, “We want Blanche, we want Blanche in a kind of litany. Such a public declaration.”

But they cannot do it and they ask Anthony’s friend Boy Mulcaster to play Judas. Next we see Anthony play a sort of mixed role. He sees that Mulcaster will betray him and yet he seems to help make it happen as if it were destiny or something.

Now Anthony is being held by the mob in his room and they begin to “blaspheme in a very shocking manner.” No one’s ear is cut off but, to avoid pointless violence and possible damage to some of his beautiful things, Anthony submits to arrest and marches down the stairs to get into Mercury.

Yes, the whole story here is a deliberate travesty on the passion of Christ. A carefully constructed travesty that gives whole different layer of meaning to the story of Charles’s bad life and his possible punishment.

And there is the final joke, very inside baseball this, the fountain was named for a statue of the god Mercury aka Hermes that had been in it. BUT, at the time there was no statue. The fountain was a place for a god but the god was absent. Anthony is a sort of substitute for the missing god or perhaps he is meant to be the son of the god.

Okay, final twist, Mercury/Hermes had a son by Aphrodite, the goddess of love, named Hemaphroditus. A nymph named Salmacis fell in love with Hermaphroditus but he rejected her. She grabbed him and held her body against his while praying the gods that they would entwine their two bodies into one another. And they did, and this is where our word Hermaphrodite to mean someone who has both male and female sex organs comes from.

Okay, let’s read on and consider this other seemingly pointless story about Anthony’s love with Stefanie Vincennes. Here is how he talks about how “close” they became.

My dear, I even used the same coloured varnish for my toenails. I used her words and lit my cigarette in the same way and spoke with her tone on the telephone so that the duke used to carry on long and intimate conversations with me, thinking that I was her.

Not such a random bit of detail after all was it? Anthony Blanche is being presented as a bisexual travesty of Christ. Not by Anthony but by Evelyn Waugh. And readers will no doubt remember that when Charles recalls the bit of The Waste Land that Anthony read out in Sebastian's rooms, it isn’t any old random bit that Anthony reads out but this:

And I Tiresias have foresuffered all

Enacted on this same divan or bed;

I who have sat by Thebes below the wall

And walked among the lowest of the dead.

Tiresias, of course, had lived as both man and woman. Anthony is offering Charles a redemption and resurrection and he is offering him the chance to come back as something different indeed.

Remonstrate means a forceful protest or condemnation but it also comes from the same root as "monstrance" meaning a way to show the thing. It comes from medical latin to mean to make something so plain that explanation isn't necessary. In this case a way to show the body of the man who is to be loved: Ecce Homo! (Keep that direct experience of something shown as opposed to merely explained because that will come back this afternoon when we talk about Sebastian and Charles' love for him.)

I’ll stop here. I’m sure you wouldn’t want me to rob you of the pleasure of finding more of the hidden level Waugh has placed here for us. Next we'll move along to the aesthetes, of whom Anthony is a prime example, and the philosophy that went with them.

The first post in the Brideshead series is here.

The next post is here.