Meditations on Orpheus: Love, Death, and Transformation

This book includes over fifty full color images and a new translation of Rilke’s poem “Orpheus, Eurydice, Hermes.” Scalambrino primes our philosophical meditations on Orpheus with discussions ranging from Platonic philosophy to Jungian psychodynamics, philosophical alchemy, and existentialism. Taking the myth of Orpheus & Eurydice as a point of departure, Scalambrino examines the presence of Orpheus in the Western philosophical tradition, while guiding our meditations regarding love, death, and transformation. Scalambrino invokes a number of poets (including Keats, Rilke, & Valéry), painters, and ancient myths (including Dionysus, Persephone, Cupid, & Psyche) with a focus on providing philosophical insight into the more mysterious metaphysical dimensions of death from the perspective of the soul’s journey through life.