Finding Life on the Road to Hell: Hadestown
by Marisa Buhr Mizunaka
Welcome to the world of Hadestown the musical! Our narrator, Hermes, introduces us to the tale of two loves: the young mortals, Orpheus and Eurydice, and the two immortals, Hades and Persephone. Hermes tells us upfront exactly the kind of journey we are to expect:
In this harsh, post-apocalyptic world, only two seasons prevailed: Scorching summers and frigid winters. The goddess Persephone was supposed to bring the equalizing seasons, but as she was forced to overstay her time with her husband Hades down below, all that existed in the earth above were the extremes. Eurydice, ‘a hungry young girl,’ lived her whole life in this world and slowly her vision became hardened against hope for a better reality. That is, until she met Orpheus.
Photo by Daniel Gregoire on Unsplash
Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash
Orpheus was in the midst of writing the song that would save the world. There was something special about his song… Flowers grew in the sun of his song, spring came to meet his voice, the wind changed to adore his melody. Eurydice falls for Orpheus, at last convinced: Perhaps there was hope to be found, perhaps there was a way out of the cold, perhaps her past experience of the world did not have to be their future.
In spite of the way that it is. 🔊
It is not long after this newfound perspective arises that the reality of hunger and cold again hits Eurydice. Orpheus is nowhere to be found. Eurydice calls his name but finds no answer. At this moment, Eurydice feels as if there is no other way out--She decides to make a deal with Hades, and reminiscent of Esau, she grasps the promise of a full stomach and a place to rest in exchange for her soul.
(EURYDICE) Strange is the call of this strange man,
I want to fly down and feed from his hand
Her fear drives her towards the appeal of a freer life in Hadestown. She couldn’t have known that not only was Hadestown a place of slavery, where its inhabitants were forced to labour forever, but her memory of being alive would quickly fade away into the blur of a nameless and faceless eternity. As she steps off the train into Hadestown, Eurydice realises that she made a mistake to choose the promise of death over the possibility of life.
What I wanted was to fall asleep
To close my eyes and disappear…
Come and find me lying in the bed I made. 🔊
Hadestown serves as a reminder that it is possible to die even while your heart is beating. Falling asleep, refusing to open eyes and ears to reality: This is death in life. Instead of being obsessed with what happens after death, maybe what we should concern ourselves with is what it looks like to be truly alive?
Yet we do not have the binding contract Eurydice drew herself into. The chains of death that bind our eyes and ears have been broken once--And they can be broken again. We have believed lie after lie that our chains are true freedom, but the life that Jesus offers requires us to forsake the comfort of our prison.
And the wall keeps out the enemy
And we build the wall to keep us free
We build the wall to keep us free 🔊
Goethe keenly comments from the perspective of Ottilie, “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. The truth has been kept from the depth of their minds by masters who rule them with lies. They feed them on falsehoods till wrong looks like right in their eyes.”[1]
The people of Hadestown believed in the wall and shelter they built. They forgot every other version of reality; they forgot life itself, stomachs full from the falsehood of their freedom in Hadestown. At the end of the musical, there is a brief light of hope that Orpheus would be able to lead Eurydice and the whole population of Hadestown back into the reality of life, but his doubt inevitably overcomes his ability to hope and all becomes lost once more.
We find bits and pieces of each of these characters within ourselves: The longing for the sleep of ignorance, the careful building of walls to shield from truth, the ability to see a better reality, the power of telling a truer story. In the epic of our faith, I hope we choose the latter. We indeed have the power to see what the world COULD be, who people COULD become, what we ourselves CAN contribute to the great play. Though the lives of Orpheus and Eurydice ended in tragedy, our own story is fundamentally different: We have the power to write a better ending.
Take your pen, Christian, and start putting it to work.
Further Reading
Works cited
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Die Wahlverwandtschaften, Hamburger Ausgabe, Bd. 6 (Romane und Novellen I), dtv Verlag, München, 1982, p. 397 (II.5).
“Hadestown serves as a reminder that it is possible to die even while your heart is beating. Falling asleep, refusing to open eyes and ears to reality: This is death in life. Instead of being obsessed with what happens after death, maybe what we should concern ourselves with is what it looks like to be truly alive?”
Resources
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