Orpheus is the mythical master of music, whose playing on the lyre was so surpassingly beautiful that it charmed wild beasts, moved stones and trees, and stilled rivers. His central story is one of the great myths of love and loss: when his wife Eurydice dies of a serpent's bite, Orpheus descends alive into the underworld and so moves its rulers with his song that they grant her return, on the one condition that he not look back at her until both have reached the light. At the threshold, in doubt or longing, he turns; and she is lost a second time, forever. He himself is later torn apart by the frenzied Maenads, and his severed head floats on, still singing.
Beyond the myth, Orpheus gave his name to Orphism, a current of Greek religious thought that circulated poems under his name and taught a distinctive doctrine: that the soul is divine and immortal, imprisoned in the body, and subject to a cycle of rebirths from which ritual purity and secret knowledge could free it. This made Orpheus not only a poet-hero but the legendary founder of a mystery tradition, and a bridge between Greek myth and the ideas of soul, purification, and afterlife that would run through Pythagoreanism and Platonism.