Living Magic with the Orphic Hymns
A personal story & invitation
Happy Jove’s Day, dear readers!
Today I am sharing a piece I wrote for a publication out of New York called The Ingress, edited by Howard Moore.
It is about how the Orphic hymns helped me activate my magical practice, and is written assuming you don’t know anything about the Orphic hymns, making it a great introduction if you’re unfamiliar with the brilliance of these ancient sacred texts.
I’d love to hear how the piece resonates for you or about any potent experiences you’ve had with the hymns so far. Sound off in the comments!
Brilliant translator of the hymns and my Orphic collaborator, Kristin Mathis and I have launched our class on the hymns, STAR: An Orphic Initiation. Here’s a little blurb about the class:
Grounded in 15 Orphic hymns, with cutting-edge translations by head instructor Kristin Mathis, STAR is an expert-curated initiatory journey to remember who we truly are.
Blending astrology & poetry, myth & magic, history & anthropology, STAR is a one-of-a-kind experience that will change your perspective on the godliness that is all around, and within.
STAR is designed to deep your relationship with the gods, intellectually, spiritually, and in your sensing body.
For more information and to register, visit archeastrology.com/star.
If you need to set up a payment plan, you can easily do so here: STAR Payment Plan
Feel free to email me with any questions about STAR at drew@archeastrology.com, although I’ll be off the grid starting Saturday until the end of the first week of May, so I appreciate your patience with replies.
Alright, without further ado, here is the piece. I hope you enjoy it, and it sparks something within your soul.
Meaning and Magic in Ancient Greece’s Orphic Hymns
By Drew Levanti
The Orphic hymns are a collection of 87 poems from the ancient Greek world, likely composed in the first few centuries BCE, but possibly earlier. They were written in ancient Greek and originally set to music, with each sacred song invoking a god or natural force. The hymns constituted the rite of initiation of the Mediterranean mystics known as the Orphics. Named after Orpheus, the esteemed Argonaut, psychopomp and, in some tellings, son of Apollo, the Orphics revered their patron’s divine powers of music and poetry. The ancient astrologer Manilius praised the supernatural song of Orpheus as follows:
“... with the rising of the Lyre, there floats forth from Okeanos the shape of the
tortoise-shell, which under the fingers of its heir (Mercury) gave forth sound only after
death; once with it did Orpheus impart sleep to waves, feeling to rocks, hearing to trees,
tears to Pluto, and finally, a limit to death.”
—Manilius, Astronomica, Book 5, 1st century AD, trans. G.P. Goold.
The powers of transcending death and magically orchestrating the natural world itself arecentral to Orphic mythology. The fallen poet’s severed head is said to have floated, still singing,to Lesbos, inspiring the first Sapphic lyric.
Like poetry, and indeed music, the hymns refuse singular interpretation and become potent assacred texts layered with esoteric meaning. Many of us know the feeling when we find out, after quite some time, that a beloved line of a favorite song is actually not the lyric we thought it was. When this happens, one doesn’t have to abandon the meaning of the misheard. After all, it was nourishing for so long — is that not the point?
Wordplay is characteristic of ancient Greek, so in their original language, the hymns are laced with double meaning that creates forked paths to divine understanding. If you have an ear for it, double entendre in the hymns can illuminate mysteries in the tradition.
The hymns were intended to be heard in multiple ways. For example, ta hiera is commonly translated as “holy things,” but it is also a homonym meaning “the snakes.” In an Orphic context, hiera refers to the mysteries themselves. Sacred and snake-like, the mysteries’ esoteric content unfolds in a serpentine rather than straightforward manner in the initiates’ awareness. The term’s double meaning may have only occurred to the initiate once they experienced the initiation rites, which deepened their sense of the mystery language. In the hymns, what starts as a mishearing can turn out to encode a divine idea.
While the original Greek’s facility for these layered significations makes the hymns exceedingly difficult to translate, it also enlivens them with esoteric depth. In the class that renowned translator Kristin Mathis and I teach on the hymns, the snake is revealed as an animating motif in the Orphic view of various gods and cosmological principles. For instance, the python-slaying Sun god Apollo is known for his temple cult at Delphi, where the Delphic Oracle deliveredcryptic prophecies. Alongside these “holy words” or “snake speech” (hieros logos), solar astronomy was also practiced at the temple, where the twists and turns of the god’s yearly motion across the horizon made the snake visible at the cosmological level. Once the initiate sees that everything is so interconnected, what could it possibly mean to mishear?
Tuning the Self: Magic in the Orphic Hymns
From their roots in the mystery tradition of the Orphics, the hymns have grown into a pervasive tool in the practice of astrological magic today.
In fact, I first encountered the hymns in my own adoption of magic. I discovered that reading them aloud could “attune” me to the planets each one called. I noticed how meditative it could be to read the hymns, how they put me in the state of mind as if I was the planet. For instance, when I read the hymn to Jupiter, my voice bellowed like thunder and I found myself laughinguncontrollably. When I read the hymn to Mars, a fiery fury crept in; to Venus, I would delight inthe sensuality of the language and the beauty of the images, and I would accompany therecitation with my own improvisation on piano.
In these ways, the hymns served as tools for putting up my antenna: The shifts in my consciousness amounted to receiving the embodied knowledge of the planets. It’s one thing to know the planets in theory, or at an intellectual level, versus knowing them in practice — as gnosis. The poetry of the hymns allows the reader to enter a gnostic trance.
For me, an obvious impact of Orphic magic manifested through the hymn to Helios, Greek Titan of the Sun. It was 2020, early into the Covid pandemic. The Chicago summer was hot, yet the atmosphere was cold. It was like the light of the world had gone out — our fire dimmed by fear.
The Sun overhead reminded me of another, fiery path.
Each Sunday, I invited the Sun “in” with the Orphic hymn to Helios. As I invoked the golden-eyed king, the front room of my apartment became a hearth, and I showered in cleansing light. White and golden as the god himself, simple offerings lined my six-candled table: bread, butter, honey.
Within that inner sanctum, sympathetic and warm, sunlight did to the air what sound can do tothings. Vibrating like the lyre, the space hummed with a frequency familiar yet strange — areminder of the heavenly order, ever tuning from the center. Sunbeams bent, somersaulted,accelerated, centrifugally lifting the chariot of my heart. Sol was rising.
And my light was growing in turn. Having recently transitioned to doing astrology full-time, I also spoke at two conferences that summer. In one talk, I traced the trickster figure of Mercurythrough culture — including M.C. Escher’s puzzled drawings and Bugs Bunny’s performance of drag. The other talk was about electional astrology, and I staked a claim to a cavalier approach.Everywhere, it seemed, I was daring — fearless and bold.
Looking back on this story, I hear my Aries Sun and stellium loud and clear, but at the same time I know this was the work of more than my birth chart’s wrote unfolding. Indeed, that thesevisible developments in my life came during a time of solar devotion was more than merecoincidence. Through my weekly time with the Sun, I was cultivating our kinship. I was trulyrealizing the solarity of myself, making manifest the Sun within.
The practice that the hymns helped me create is known as theurgy. This class of magic can beconsidered contemplative and “inner,” distinguishing it from thaumaturgy, an approach to magic that is outward-looking.
The object of theurgy is not the objective — that is, not the realm of causes and effects. Instead, theurgy takes as its object the subject: the work is the self. Translating as “god-work” or “god-working,” theurgy is a practice of making the self receptive to the divine. The gods are not requested or commanded, but revered and invited. Our purpose is not to impel the planets to do this or that; rather, we give the gods a very simple and potent gift: our attention. Through the simple act of being present with the god, their virtues seep into our being.
In thaumaturgy, on the other hand, relationships with spirits become instrumental — directed and focused on outcomes. It can be like asking, or petitioning, a powerful friend for a favor and— hopefully — receiving a benevolent answer. Within this practice, the Orphic hymns commonly serve as a source of empowerment, as hymnal praise pleases the god.
In my work with the Orphic hymn to Helios, solar effects were indeed produced in my life, butthis was not the result of a petition or a particular ask. I was just spending time with the Sun. It can be this simple.
Becoming a Star with the Orphics
Astrological magic is often like this. We can ask the planets for things, especially whensupported by an auspicious transit, but benefits don’t always have to come from waving theproverbial magic wand. Instead, we can use the contemplative space and hymnal practice toenrich our life with the planets’ virtues. Deeply rewarding on its own, this theurgical practicetends to bring desirable outcomes anyway, without the explicitness of thaumaturgy.
This idea of embodying the virtue of a planet can be traced through the Orphic tradition, which, from the beginning, has inspired initiates to “become” stars. We see this in the Orphic conception of the afterlife.
For example, instructions for navigating the Underworld were inscribed on Orphic funerary objects, notably the Lamellae, or thin sheets of gold. Just a few fingers tall, these tiny plates that were buried with deceased Orphic followers bear scripts for navigating underworld interactions. In one, Persephone appears as an embodiment of an underworld stream, asking “Who are you?” As translated by Kristin Mathis, the initiate replies, “I am a child of Earth and Starry Sky, and I belong to the family of the Heavens.” Speaking those holy, initiatic words, or hieros logos,readies the initiate to unite with sky-strewn kin — the stars.
This also gets to the Orphic conception of the soul as fire, the very substance of the stars. Thephilosophical currents that founded the Orphic tradition saw the cosmos as a dynamic balanceof the elements, with fire and water as its polar extremes. The pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus conceived of the stars as fiery amalgams within the amniotic ocean of the sky:
… [the stars are] bowls turned with their hollow side toward us, in which the bright exhalations are collected and form flames…. Brightest and hottest is the flame of the Sun… and the monthly phases of the Moon occur as its bowl is gradually turned.
Within this dynamic tension of cosmic light and darkness, of bright star and dark sky, Heraclitusconsidered the individual’s soul-fire as potentially eternal, but only if the life is exceptionallyvirtuous. This is not Platonic reincarnation in which the unique soul is immortal. Soul is immortal for Heraclitus — at the universal level where cosmic balance is always maintained—but individuality ends at death, with only those few virtuous exceptions. Most souls areextinguished en masse; then new souls are nursed from the water. Failing to join the stellar afterlife thus assures the dissolution of the individual’s unique character. An individual’s soul substance disperses across many other beings and incarnations, all composites, none the same. To maintain the soul’s ontological identity after death, its fire must remain fire, releasing directly to the stars.
Is it possible that the earliest conceptions of theurgy and astrological magic, as reflected in the
Orphic hymns, aimed to achieve the soul’s immortality? Maybe, but the point to take away is that this tradition views the air, the Sun, the stars and the Moon as one and the same with us.We are all One.
The Orphic hymns remind us that the planets and their spirits are not outside ourselves, butradiate from within, spiraling tendrils of earthly and heavenly wisdom, yoked in the double helixof life and death. This is not a magic of hierarchy or ascension, or of angels and pearly gates. It is the magic of reverent song, the chills down your neck when the music reminds you that you are not alone in your experience of beauty, or of pain, of love or of loss. And you never have been.
These hymns are about the unity of body, mind, spirit, and the whole cosmos. Or even better,they are about remembering that this unity has never been broken. It is always already now.