“The Mysterious Origins of Zagreus: How Ancient Myth Inspired the Music of Hades” by Sierra Schiano

We are delighted to present Sierra Schiano’s video lecture, “The Mysterious Origins of Zagreus: How Ancient Myth Inspired the Music of Hades.”

Sierra Schiano is a mobile educator for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art who holds an MA in Classical Antiquity from the University of Colorado, Boulder. A lifelong fan of Classical reception, Sierra’s research focuses on how the ancient Mediterranean is reimagined in contemporary pop culture and fandom media. 

Sierra provided us with the following abstract and content warnings:

“For the wildly popular 2020 video game Hades, Darren Korb composed the “Hymn to Zagreus” – a song dedicated to Hades’ protagonist and sung in-game by the legendary musician Orpheus. Though the game contextualizes this song as the result of an elaborate prank, the Hymn is in fact steeped in ancient myth. It evokes a lesser-known mythical tradition in which Zagreus was believed to be an earlier incarnation of the wine-god Dionysus. These “Orphic” myths are thought to lie at the heart of the “mysteries of Dionysus” – a secretive religious tradition in which ancient Mediterraneans worshiped Dionysus as a mediator between the worlds of the living and the dead. This lecture analyzes each verse of the “Hymn to Zagreus” to reveal how it was inspired by ancient Greek religion and influenced by modern scholarship on the Orphic tradition. Taking the Hymn together with the game’s plot and mechanics, I demonstrate how Hades invents an origin to the mysteries of Dionysus.”

Content warnings: discussion of sexual violence, cannibalism, and violent death.