Put Your Soul In the Water (Join Me For a Swim!)

or, "Orphic Hermeneutics & My Favorite Songs (Part One?)"

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Orphicaeum has been around for over a year (and over 100 subscribers) now! If you’re new here (or if it’s been a while since you’ve read it), please check out this oft-revised article to get an up-to-date understanding of what exactly Orphicaeum is and why I write.

What Orphicaeum Is

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I'm riding passenger in a twenty-six foot U-Haul, roughly midway through a cross-country move. The radio DJ announces a band I've enjoyed before, but says he's going to play a lesser-known early hit of theirs. It's starts quiet, just drums. Bass quickly follows. The singer belts out a chant that my body recognizes as ancient and purificatory, even though I am hearing this song right now for the first time:

In a previous essay, I wrote a bit about the “problem” of Orphic authorship and how it relates to divine inspiration. In it, I make the argument that it doesn’t matter who actually wrote the works that survive today in Orpheus’ name, because the communal acceptance of his authorship points to a recognition of divine inspiration (plus, I would argue now that it’s a little silly to suggest that Onamocritus codified Homer but forged Orpheus). This essay, anyway, will work in the opposite direction: Instead of starting from Orpheus and justifying divine inspiration, I will start from a position that assumes this song was divinely inspired, and show then how it has parallels to Orphism.

The anecdote that began this essay, of me hearing Pain Lies on the Riverside for the first time in a U-Haul, happened about a year ago. In the time since, it has become one of my favorite songs. Every time I hear it, I feel the same way I did that first time, and to have that is to be in rarified air. So, let us breathe in this rarified air, and let’s see what sort of knowledge we can collect as we do so:

Verse 1

I have never taken life,
Yet I have often paid the price.
And you, you are a victim of this hate,
And the guilt that hangs around your neck
Has got me locked up in a cage!
You’ve got to learn to live until no end, now,
But first you must learn to swim
All over again, oh no, because . . .

From the first word this song seems to reference Orphic notions of Soul and Salvation, as if to mirror the anonymous Derveni author’s exegesis that “[Orpheus] is telling a holy tale from his very first word right through to his last, as is clear even in the introductory verse”. In our case, this first verse could be read as being about the soul’s embodiment and subsequent blood-guilt. Though the singer himself has never taken life, he pays the penalty as if he had. This is exactly what we find in the Orphic beliefs of the cosmos and the Soul, wherein the Soul is “punished” or purified for its willful descent into matter. This necessary purification of one’s soul is what’s described in the mythology as an inherited punishment.

The singer, though, knows why he is being punished, and he instead flips it on the listener. He refers to “you” as a victim of hate, and the guilt hanging from “your” neck, even though he flips back again right after to say that this locks “me” in a cage. These lines are dense, so we will take them one symbol at a time. First, without beating a dead horse, the “cage” is the body. Next, the singer flip-flops between “you” and “me” in the same passage (even though the perspective seems the same from both angles) because all souls are ultimately One Soul. Moreover, the hate and guilt that victimize and lock up both “you” and “me” are ultimately self-imposed.

He flips perspective again to say that “you’ve got to learn to live until no end, \ but first you must learn to swim all over again”. To ‘live until no end’ logically means to achieve a state of being where there is ‘no end’ to ‘living’, i.e. to ‘become immortal’. The reason that you must learn to swim again before you can become immortal is because the soul must undergo a series of reincarnations before it is fully purified, at which point it finally achieves deification (variously called ektheosis, apotheosis, etc). This follows the previous lines because the process of purification strips away the Soul’s self-impositions. The very act of knowing that one’s limits (up to and including death and rebirth) are self-imposed serves as the first step on the path to removing them. There is more symbolism regarding swimming in the song, so let’s continue:

Chorus

Pain Lies on the Riverside, yeah!
And pain will never say goodbye, no, no!
Pain Lies on the Riverside,
So put your feet in the water;
Put your head in the water;
Put your Soul in the water,
Join me for a swim tonight!

“Pain lies on the riverside” because it is a unique type of longing, almost ineffable but akin to a great pain, to sit outside of experiencing the universe. The river, in which you must swim, is the “flow” of material being. Heraclitus famously said that “You cannot step into the same river twice”, and in another essay, we saw this view expanded in Porphyry’s On the Cave of the Nymphs where he says that the Naiads, or souls descending into matter, received that name from the word “they flow” (νάουσι). Porphyry also quotes Heraclitus as saying both “it is a delight, not a death, for Souls to become wet” and “we live their deaths while they live our deaths”, and this is all in agreement with the Orphic view. Thus, in the song, to swim in the river is a complex and multi-layered symbol for the Soul’s descent into embodiment. However, “pain will never say goodbye” because to swim in the river is to experience, and to experience is to experience pain. But again, “pain lies on the riverside” and not within the river because the Forms live outside of the material experience and are only reflected within it. We can also draw a parallel to the third Heraclitus quote from Porphyry, that “a dry soul is wisest”, which the song hints at in verse 2:

Verse 2

I have forever always tried
To stay clean and constantly baptized, oh,
I’m aware now that the river’s banks, they are dry,
And to wait for a flood
Is to wait for life!
I’ve got to learn to live until no end,
But first I must learn to swim all over again,
Yeah, yeah, yeah, because . . .

To stay “clean & constantly baptized” seems on the surface to be a good thing, but to stay constantly baptized would be to remain immersed in water, which we have just seen is to be embodied. Thus, as he says in the following lines, “I’m aware now that the river’s banks . . . are dry \ and to wait for a flood \ is to wait for life”, echoing Heraclitus that “a dry soul is wisest”. Only dry souls escape the cycle of reincarnation, and so the river’s banks are dry compared to the life-giving flood.

When I said earlier that my “body recognizes [the song/chants] as ancient and purificatory”, what I meant is that the physical feelings were accompanied by a sort of weird, overwhelming hunch (or inkling, or whatever) that this is what it felt like to participate in an ancient initiation. This song, it’s intense rhythm and the way the singer surrenders to it all, the haunting and beautiful chants, the calls to immerse oneself; while I’m sure it would’ve all been done differently, I have no doubts that the feelings inspired in me were the same as those felt long ago in awe of the Gods.

And while all of the symbolic things in this essay can still be true of the river in the song, there are some details that point toward a specific real river: the dry banks coupled with the life-giving flood which the singer awaits both point directly at the Nile. The Nile is known for its annual flood, and this flood was celebrated for bringing life each year. The ancient Egyptians even named their country, Kemet, “the black land”, after the sediment deposited by this annual flood. In ancient Egypt, in Kemet, this flood and its celebrations commemorated the dismemberment of Osiris, and the flood waters themselves were said to be the tears of Isis’ lamentation.

Herodotus, father both of History and of Lies, makes several connections between ancient Egyptian and Greek practices, a few of which (due to his secrecy surrounding them) we can infer are Orphic. For example, he speaks about festivals of Isis, the flooding of the Nile, and the Greek Thesmophoria, careful not to divulge any of the mysteries. I will make the same kind of argument here that I made in the essay on Authorship: it does not matter what the factual truth of Herodotus’ claims are, because their existence alone points to a communal acceptance of them (because Herodotus wasn’t writing history from scratch, he was trying to record it). In other words, yes, maybe Herodotus got everything wrong about the history of the religion, but that does not automatically relegate the spiritual, religious truths he shares to falsehood.

To get back to the lyrics, the singer flips the previous verse’s “you’ve got to learn” to say instead that “I’ve got to learn”, acknowledging that ‘the only way out is through’, i.e. the only way to escape embodiment is to live consciously and make good choices. This is mirrored in the Orphic verse which says “From water comes into existence earth, and from earth water once again, \ and from that, Soul, becoming Aether in its entirety.” ‘The only way out is through’ because water, the element of embodiment, is also the primordial element from which arises everything. Earth comes from water, but water from earth, and the soul, coming from that water, is entirely Aether. The singer himself said in the previous lines “I am aware now” to signify that he’s taking control of his self-impositions, and the river’s banks are dry because he understands that “a dry soul is wisest”. Souls that escape embodiment, are the ones which remain wholly dry, coming from the waters to be “Aether in its entirety” (echoing the Gold Tablets’ “I come Pure from the Pure” if we take water and Aether to both be symbols of purification, as a sort of ‘before and after’).

From there, the song mostly repeats, so there’s no reason to go over much else, but I do want to point out that the next time he says “swim all over again”, he repeats “all over” several times, as if to give another clue pointing toward metempsychosis and palingenesia. [Edited: I can’t believe that I missed this originally, but he literally says “live all over again” toward the end!]

To depart today, I’d like to play you another (or technically two) song(s). This second set, though, laser-focuses on one specific aspect of what we’ve touched on today, so if I may, I’d like to go back to these three lines:

And you, you are a victim of this hate,
And the guilt that hangs around your neck
Has got me locked up in a cage!

in relation to these three lines from the second verse:

I’m aware now that the river’s banks, they are dry,
And to wait for a flood
Is to wait for life!

to frame that focus. “You” and “me”, as victims of our self-impositions, locked in cages of our own design, must become aware that the ‘banks are dry’ if we wish to escape embodiment. If we don’t, if one falters or forgets the goal and succumbs to the ‘wet delight’ as Porphyry put it, we might just find ourselves in Porphyry’s Cave, trapped by other Naiads and by the pull of embodiment.

This version, the ‘worse’ outcome of Porphyry’s Cave, is perhaps better known to us as Plato’s Cave. This is what the second song is about; this cave is referred to by Phil Collins as a Home by the Sea, wherein lies only

Shadows but no substance, in the shape of men,
Round and down and sideways they go,
Adrift without direction, eyes that hold despair,
Then as one they sigh and they moan!

Help us, someone, let us out of here!
Living here so long undisturbed,
Dreaming of the time we were free,
So many years ago,
Before the time when we first heard
“Welcome to the Home by the Sea”