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A Psychiatrist and Philosopher Interprets the Myth of Orpheus and Eurydice

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Everyone knows the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. And it means the exact opposite of what everyone thinks.

The earliest mentions of the supreme musician Orpheus date to the sixth century BCE. By the fourth century BCE, Plato was already commenting on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Today, the fullest accounts survive in Virgil’s Georgics and Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

The Story of Orpheus

Apollo gave his son Orpheus a lyre of gold and tortoise shell. Orpheus mastered the instrument so completely that no creature, and scarcely nature itself, could resist his playing and singing: the animals of the forest gathered around him, the trees bent toward him, and the streams and rivers came out of their beds to greet him.

Orpheus fell head over heels for Eurydice, and she readily returned his love. Hymen, the god of marriage ceremonies, presided over their wedding, but, in a terrible omen, his torch spluttered and spat and marred the feast with bitter fumes.

Eurydice ventured into the nearby woods, where the shepherd Aristaeus espied her dancing with the dryads. Enraptured by the scene, he began to chase her. As she beat back through the bushes, she tripped on a nest of vipers and died from a snakebite to the heel.

Orpheus sang of his grief from earth to heaven, moving the gods and all of creation. So empty did life seem without Eurydice that he resolved to go and see her in Hades—and, if possible, return her to the land of the living.

Orpheus entered Hades through a cave of poisonous vapours and, by his lyrical song, made it unhindered to the palace of King Hades and Queen Persephone. His lament entranced the ferryman Charon and the ordinarily fierce three-headed hound Cerberus, and even Hades himself, who, for the first and last time, shed a black and sooty tear.

With Persephone leaning heavily upon him, Hades declared that Orpheus could leave with Eurydice, as long as he did not look at her until they had both crossed into the land of the living—but should he break this one condition, Eurydice would forever remain in the underworld, where few of the living can enter, and none twice.

Orpheus led Eurydice back the way he came, resisting the urge to turn around and meet her doe eyes.

Then he realised that he could no longer hear her footsteps behind him, and began to fear that Hades had tricked him.

As soon as he saw the light of the sun, he glanced over his shoulder and glimpsed his beloved. But Eurydice had not yet crossed the threshold and was whipped back in a whirl into the bowels of the Earth.

Orpheus sat in a clearing and played mournfully on his lyre, spurning the many maidens who called upon him. According to Ovid, he was “the first of the Thracian people to transfer his love to young boys.” The scorned women threw sticks and stones at him, which fell back to the ground at the sound of his mesmerizing music. In the end, the Maenads, in a state of Dionysian frenzy, tore him apart from limb to limb.

Orpheus’ lyre and dismembered head, still dolefully singing, floated down the River Haebrus to the sea and washed up on the isle of Lesbos, which became famed for its poets. The Muses found his head and buried it in a cave, over which the nightingales sang more prettily than in any other part.

As for his lyre, it can still be seen in the constellation Lyra.

Orpheus and Eurydice before Hades and Persephone

Interpretation of the Myth

Orpheus is a personification of music, poetry, and art in general. In modern times, he has inspired countless paintings, poems, novels, ballets, operas, and films. More curiously, he became the patron of an ancient religious cult called Orphism.

In Plato’s Symposium, Phaedrus says that, rather than a great man, Orpheus was, in fact, a coward. In arguing that the mark of true love is the readiness to die for it, Phaedrus contrasts the chicanery of Orpheus in seeking to cheat death to be reunited with Eurydice with the willingness of Alcestis to lay down her life for her husband Admetus when not even his elderly parents would do so. Alcestis was permitted to return alive from Hades, a rare reward indeed, whereas Orpheus returned empty-handed to be torn apart by women.

Although Orpheus traveled through Hades like a hero, he missed the mark of a hero. His anxious doubting, his turning to boys, and his being torn apart by women all point, in the Ancient Greek mind, to a lack of virility.

The gaze objectifies the beloved: If Orpheus had truly loved Eurydice, he would not have needed to look back upon her. Indeed, he would readily have died to be reunited with her and would never have found himself in such a predicament.

The descent into the nether regions, or katabasis, is found in mythologies from all over the world. The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is strikingly similar to the Japanese myth of Izanagi and Izanami: Izanagi travels to the underworld to retrieve his wife Izanami, who warns him not to look at her. But so ardent is his desire that he lights a torch and casts his gaze upon her, only for it to be met by a rotting corpse.

By blurring the line between life and death, the katabasis explores themes of mortality and immortality. It is, by extension, a means of explaining natural cycles, especially the cycle of the seasons and the cycle of life, as symbolized also by the viper that undid Eurydice.

We might wonder whether Eurydice, beautiful but not much else, is something of a MacGuffin: an insignificant or irrelevant quest object that serves merely to motivate the adventure, like the Holy Grail in Arthurian legend or the ring in Lord of the Rings.

Far more fully realised than Eurydice is the power of art itself. No one and nothing remained unmoved by Orpheus’ song. For all his might, Hercules did not travel so easily through Hades. Even after his death, Orpheus’ severed head continued to sing, suggesting that art, besides being powerful, is immortal.

With such a gift, Orpheus had far more than most to be happy and, better than happy, useful. Yet he squandered it all for the mortal Eurydice, unable to understand that, for all her beauty, she was, like Izanami, never more than a decaying corpse.

How much better for him, and for all, if he had learnt to be happy on his own or with his one true love, music.

Instead of looking back on Eurydice, he ought to have been looking ahead, like a real hero, paying no heed to his own selfish, self-absorbed, self-indulgent happiness—the kind of happiness that, like Eurydice, dies in the moment that it is held.

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How the Serpent Came to Represent Life and Death, Poison and Cure, Fear and Wisdom

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 13 August 2026.

Few creatures carry as many contradictory meanings as the snake. Across cultures, the serpent has come to represent life and death, poison and cure, fear and wisdom.

A snake is an animal; a serpent is also an idea.

For thousands of years, snakes have slithered through our myths and dreams, sometimes as monsters or tempters, sometimes as healers, protectors, and teachers. Even today, more than two thousand years after Hippocrates, the snake remains the pre-eminent symbol of medicine and allied professions.

How did one animal come to represent so many apparently contradictory things?

Snakes and Seers

In myth, snakes, or serpents, are often connected to seers and oracles.

Teiresias is the most notorious seer in Greek myth. As a young man, he came upon a pair of coupling serpents on Mount Cithaeron and, in disgust, struck them with his staff. This offended the goddess Hera, who turned him into a woman.

Teiresias spent the next seven years as a priestess of Hera, and even married and had children in that time. After seven years as a woman, he once again chanced upon a pair of coupling serpents, but this time gave them a wide berth. Seeing this, Hera released him from her curse.

Later, Zeus and Hera dragged Teiresias into an argument about who has the more pleasure in sex: woman, as Zeus claimed, or man, as Hera countered. Teiresias averred that, ‘Of ten parts, a man enjoys only one.’ For this, Hera struck him blind, but Zeus compensated him with the gift of foresight and a lifespan of seven generations.

Already, the serpent is associated with transgression, gender, sexuality, punishment, and knowledge or wisdom.

Ancient Oracles

The ancients took divination extremely seriously. Leaders would consult an oracle or seer before any major undertaking. Aristotle, that paragon of logic and reason, even wrote a lesser-known treatise entitled On Divination in Sleep.

Oracles were considered superior to seers because they had a direct channel to God, or a god. They were, however, difficult to consult, each with their own seasons and capricious conditions, such that most of the demand for divination was met by seers like Teiresias.

The oracular tradition may have originated with the oracle of the Egyptian goddess Wadjet at Per-Wadjet, near modern-day Alexandria. Wadjet was depicted as a snake—usually an Egyptian cobra—or as a combined woman and snake. She nursed the infant Horus and protected Ra by coiling herself upon his head.

The snake goddess figurines excavated at the Minoan palace of Knossos may have been connected to Wadjet, as may the uraeus, the stylised upright cobra used as a symbol of sovereignty and divine authority, and mounted upon the crowns and masks of the pharaohs—including, famously, Tutankhamun.

So long before the serpent came to symbolise evil in the Christian imagination, it could represent protection, sovereignty, divinity, secret knowledge, and insight or wisdom.

The Fear of Snakes

But there is a more primitive reason for the snake’s hold upon our imagination: snakes frighten us.

Ophidiophobia, the fear of snakes, is one of the most common specific phobias. Whereas many anxiety disorders tend to take hold in adulthood, specific phobias such as ophidiophobia and arachnophobia often go back to early childhood, perhaps because they relate to the sorts of dangers that threatened our remote ancestors.

Today, man-made hazards such as motor cars and electric cables are much more likely to strike us down, yet our most primitive fears remain disproportionately attached to natural dangers. Unlike snakes, technological innovations have not been around for long enough to haunt us—sorry, ‘imprint themselves onto our genomes’.

The snake strikes our imagination not despite our fear of it, but in part because of that fear. What can kill us must command our attention.

Poison and Cure

Although the snake can kill us, it can also cure us.

Snake venom is a deadly poison, but its constituents can also have medicinal properties—having been used, for example, to control pain or stem haemorrhage. According to the Book of Numbers, Moses erected a bronze serpent upon a pole to save Israelites bitten by the ‘fiery serpents’ sent by God in retribution—thereby turning one snake against another, or others.

The same archetype recurs in the two symbols of the medical profession: the more traditional Rod of Asclepius, god of healing, with one snake; and the more commercial Rod of Hermes, or Caduceus, with two snakes. The rod or staff represents control over the dual nature of the snake, or the Moses-like harnessing of its powers.

It is one of medicine’s oldest truisms, that many a substance is a cure, until it becomes a poison. Like a sorcerer, a doctor is an expert at measuring poisons.

Death and Rebirth

It is for more than their venom that serpents came to stand at the threshold of life and death. Snakes live close to the ground and disappear into holes and crevices, connecting them in the imagination with the nourishing earth and the underworld. More strikingly, they shed their skins, seeming to cast off their old bodies and emerge anew. It is not difficult to see how they became symbols of rebirth and immortality—and, by extension, of creativity, culture, and wisdom.

The ouroboros—Greek for ‘tail eater’—depicts a serpent or dragon eating its own tail. Originating in Egypt and later passing into the Greek mystery cults, Gnosticism, and Hermeticism, it symbolises the circle of life: destruction continually giving rise to creation, death folding back into birth. The ouroboros may also symbolise sexual intercourse, with the tail representing the male organ and the mouth the female one.

The Serpent of Eden

The most notorious serpent of all is the one in Eden, at the foot of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

According to the Book of Genesis, the serpent is the most ‘subtil’ of all the beasts in God’s creation and, like Adam and Eve, has the ability to speak and reason. The only other animal that speaks in the Pentateuch is Balaam’s ass, and then only because God opened its mouth. Seduced by the serpent, Eve, and then Adam, ate of the tree, and ‘the eyes of them both were opened.’ As well as casting Adam and Eve out of Eden, as we remember only too well, God cursed the serpent to go on his belly and eat dust, and put enmity between the serpent and man:

And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life: And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.

The serpent introduces poison, death, and seduction into Eden, but, like the tree itself, it also brings knowledge and enlightenment. Unlike the lamb or the lion, the snake cannot easily be made to stand for one thing. Instead, it stands for the antinomies of the human condition: life and death, poison and cure, fear and wisdom. And so it endures.