Mythology & Classical Reception
Classical Mythology in Hozier’s Unreal Unearth
Three Greek myths that show the depth and brilliance of the poetry on Hozier’s latest album
Hozier is well known for mixing the cerebral with the earthy: highly literate lyrics that do not bog down the accessible R&B/folk/pop-rock of his music. His third album, Unreal Unearth (2023), draws heavily from Dante’s Inferno to construct an elaborate meditation on death and what it means to live. Though Dante predominates, Hozier draws on many other sources for references, especially Irish history and classical mythology.
There are plenty of modern songs out there that make references to classical mythology, but Hozier is one of the rare breed of artists who engage fully with the themes of the ancient myths. Hozier’s songs wrestle with the puzzle of mortality in a way that reflects and augments the work of ancient storytellers and scholars. Studying them side by side enhances both. Here are the three most important mythological references in Hozier’s Unreal Unearth.
1. Icarus
Track 5 on Unreal Unearth is “I, Carrion (Icarian),” whose title tells us it is about Icarus. Hozier takes the first, euphoric feeling of Icarus’s flight and uses it as a metaphor for the feeling of falling in love. Of course, we the audience know that Icarus’s flight is doomed, that he will fly too close to the sun and come crashing down — but, cleverly, Hozier does not portray the famous fall of Icarus, leaving the audience to supply the ending themselves. Throughout the song, he tinges the joy of the flight with dark portents of the fall, but he lets it remain implied rather than stated.
The Myth:
Daedalus, brilliant inventor and builder of the Labyrinth, was locked inside it with his son Icarus. To escape, Daedalus built wings out of wax and feathers for himself and his son. He warned his son not to fly too close to the sun, or risk melting the wax and falling into the sea. Hozier himself made light of the myth while introducing the song at a pop up show:
“the story of Icarus, whose dad strapped him up in a death trap and said, ‘Off you go.’”
Icarus got carried away with the joy of flying and flew too close to the sun. His wings melted and he fell into the ocean, leaving his father in grief. The myth is often interpreted as a warning against mortals trying to become too much like gods. Flight is an unnatural thing for humans to do, and trying to transgress our natural limits will lead inevitably to tragedy.
The Song:
“I, Carrion”’s speaker rejoices in the feeling of flying, of ridding himself of the burden of weight:
I feel lighter than I have in so much time
I’ve crossed the border line of weightless
One deep breath out from the sky
I’ve reached a rarer height now that I can confirm
All our weight is just a burden offered to us by the worldAnd though I burn, how could I fall
When I am lifted by every word you say to me?
If anything could fall at all, it’s the world
That falls away from me
He acknowledges the danger, but dismisses it in the same breath. When he burns, he burns metaphorically with love, not literally from the heat of the sun — and though he burns, he says he cannot fall because he’s lifted by every word his love says. If anything falls, it’s the world that falls away from him, not he who falls toward the world.
Just after Hozier’s speaker talks about burning but not falling, he invokes a familiar image from Ovid’s version of the story. He says “You have me floatin’ like a feather on the sea,” echoing when Daedalus looked down after Icarus’s fall and “saw feathers in the waves” (“pennas aspexit in undis,” Met 8.233). But just as earlier, Hozier subverts the image of doom: the speaker isn’t burning off his wings, he’s burning with love. He isn’t dead with only feathers floating on the water to show where he fell, he’s floating with joy like he himself is a feather on the sea.
The written title of the song has two meanings spelled out: “I, Carrion” meaning I, dead meat, food for scavengers, and “(Icarian)” meaning like Icarus. When the title is sung toward the end of the song, a third meaning becomes clear. Hozier sings it to sound like “I carry on” — indeed, if not for the written title, the listener would have no reason to suspect he isn’t just singing “I carry on, carry on” as it makes perfect sense in context:
If these heights should bring my fall
Let me be your own
Icarian carrion [or: “I carry on, carry on”]
If the wind turns, if I hit a squall
Allow the ground to find its brutal way to me
This verse shows the speaker at his most circumspect — perhaps the wings have started to fail and he sees the fall coming by now. He speaks in hypothetical, but remains firm: if what he’s doing leads to his downfall, he wouldn’t change it. He makes only one request in the song’s final lines:
If I should fall, on that day
I only pray, don’t fall away from me
Read without the context of the myth, “I, Carrion (Icarian)” is a story of reckless love without regret that allows for the possibility of pain but does not express it. But read alongside the myth, the song perfectly mirrors the tragedy of the ancient version. Hozier exploits the audience’s assumed knowledge of Icarus to leave the fall unspoken. The fall haunts the song, rears its head in imagery and in the imagination of the speaker, but doesn’t occur. We know the love will end in tragedy and that the speaker will become carrion (as the title says). Just like many of Ovid’s retellings, Hozier’s Icarus succeeds both through what it tells us and through what it playfully withholds.
If the ultimate theme of the Icarus myth is hubris, that humankind must not transgress its bounds or humans will suffer, “I, Carrion (Icarian)” rejoices in the transgressive power of love. The song’s Icarus experiences limitation-shattering heights not because of an invention, but because of love. And even as his doom approaches, he insists that it was all worth it. This is a leitmotif of the album: that even the mistakes we make are worth it, that even the people in a tragedy would go back and do it all again. (“If someone asked me at the end/I’ll tell them put me back in it/Darling, I would do it again,” from “Francesca.”) Thus Hozier pulls the myth from the ancient world to the 21st century. Because I can’t help but agree with the Icarian narrator. If a fall is the price I must pay for the euphoria of love, then I will pay it with my eyes open.
More music:
2. Psychopomps (Hermes & Charon)
Several of the songs on Unreal Unearth show a fascination with the role of a psychopomp, a figure who meets mortals at their deaths and leads them to the afterlife. Hozier, in his focus on Dante’s Inferno, mostly credits Charon as psychopomp, though Hermes also fills this role in classical mythology. In any case, Hozier reflects on the care and kindness of a psychopomp: a figure who meets a mortal at the scariest possible time and shows them the way. A bridge between one life and the other who brings not a sense of doom, but of compassion and warmth.
The Myth:
When a mortal dies, they are first met by Hermes, god of messengers, travel, commerce, etc. In all his roles, Hermes protects travelers and others in motion; in his role as psychopomp, Hermes protects and guides those who travel between life and death. Hermes leads the soul to the underworld, where they eventually meet Charon, the ferryman of the dead. Charon takes the dead on board his boat and rows them across the River Styx, but only if they can pay him. For that purpose, Greeks and Romans buried their dead with a coin in their mouth to pay for their passage. In Vergil’s Aeneid (and in Dante’s Inferno, which drew its inspiration from Vergil and in turn inspired Hozier), Charon is depicted with a grotesque appearance, gnarled and dingy, with fire in his eyes and a gruff style of speech. He barks orders at the dead and sweeps them on and off his boat with no ceremony. Charon is guardian as much as ferryman: he demands that those that don’t belong in the underworld (Aeneas and Dante) must leave, refusing to carry them across and shouting at them to leave. But even if his personality is rough, Charon still performs a vital kindness as psychopomp, carrying souls from limbo to their true destination.
The Songs:
A psychopomp first appears in the instrumental “Son of Nyx.” Charon was (according to some sources) among the sons of Nyx, the Greek personification of night. “Son of Nyx” is a collaboration between Hozier and his bass player, Alex Ryan, who sent Hozier a voice memo of himself playing piano just after the death of his father. Hozier and Ryan layered a haunting orchestra and heavily processed vocals on top of that original phone recording. Ryan’s father whose death inspired the piece was named Nick, so the song’s title has a double meaning: Charon is the son of Nyx, and Ryan is the son of Nick. The song’s origin after the death of a loved one sheds light on the reference to Charon: it can serve as a sort of prayer to ease the departed’s journey into the next world.
The feeling of the song is of a descent into the underworld, as beautiful and comforting as it is haunting and strange. One feels transported to another realm after it. “Son of Nyx” transitions into “All Things End,” a song without obvious classical references that is, nonetheless, the album’s most moving reflection on death and the impermanence of all living things as a vital component of their beauty. These songs together convey one of the primary themes of the album: death as a natural change to be met and experienced, not to be feared.
A psychopomp makes a specific appearance in “Abstract (Psychopomp),” a touching song about one of Hozier’s childhood memories. He witnessed a person running into the street to retrieve someone else’s pet who had been hit by a car.
The speed that you moved, the screech of the cars
The creature still moving, that slowed in your arms
The fear in its eyes, gone out in an instant
Most likely the person was attempting to save the animal’s life, but in the eyes of a young Hozier they became something far more beautiful. They cradled the creature to ease its suffering as it died, to make sure its last moments were as comfortable as possible. This stranger became the animal’s psychopomp.
This is the psychopomp I would associate more with Hermes than with Charon. Hermes is the one who comes to the freshly dead and eases their journey downward, an act of the highest compassion. Whether a mythical being who appears to escort our soul or a stranger who runs into traffic to hold us during our final moments, we can all hope to leave this world with a little help from a psychopomp.
A more playful psychopomp appears in the upbeat “Anything But.” This song is an eff-you track, which plays with phrases to make it sound like the speaker is doing the addressee a favor while actually telling them that he wants nothing to do with them — such as “if I was a rip tide, I wouldn’t take you out,” and “if I was a stampede, you wouldn’t get a kick.”
The third conceit of the song casts the speaker as a psychopomp:
I wanna be the shadow when my bright future’s behind me
I wanna be the last thing anybody ever sees
I hear he touches your hand, and then you fly away together
If I had his job, you would live forever
This, again, could easily be Hermes — the last thing anybody ever sees, who touches your hand and you fly away together. Then comes the punchline: if I were the psychopomp, you’d live forever. If we were to take it to an extreme, we could say that the speaker is cutting the addressee off from the sublime beauty of flying away with a god. But in the context of the song, the predominant meaning is much simpler: If I were death, you’d live forever, because I don’t want you near me.
More classics:
3. Kronos
The lead single for Unreal Unearth was “Eat Your Young,” a song about eating children that is deeply rooted in many traditions. Its most obvious antecedent is Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” — Irish history is another constant motif of the album, so this famous protest against what the British were doing to Ireland fits well. But the song is far more expansive than “A Modest Proposal,” touching on a rich tradition of protest songs against the old and wealthy exploiting the younger generations. The central cannibal image, along with the mythological references throughout the rest of the album, begs comparison to the various child-eating classical myths: Tantalus, Lycaon, Atreus, Procne, and most famously, Kronos.
The Myth:
Kronos was king of the Titans — a title he got by overthrowing his father, Ouranos. But he received a prophecy that one of his children would someday overthrow him and become king, just as he himself overthrew his own father. So Kronos proceeded to eat each of his children as soon as they were born, guaranteeing none could grow up to overthrow him. But Rhea, his wife, tired of the destruction of her children and hid her sixth son, Zeus, feeding Kronos a rock instead. Zeus grew up, drugged Kronos into vomiting up his brothers and sisters, and waged a war to remove Kronos from dominance. The gods won the war, and the prophecy was fulfilled.
The story of Kronos is the ur-myth of intergenerational violence, of the older generation trying to protect their dominant status by crushing the younger one.
The Song:
I’m starving, darling
Let me put my lips to something
Let me wrap my teeth around the world
Start carving, darling
I wanna smell the dinner cooking
I wanna feel the edges start to burn
The song begins with the speaker delighting in his anticipation for the meal — the meal that we find out in the chorus is his children. But as shudder-inducing as this thought is, Hozier makes it clear quickly that selfish motivations drive the meal:
I won’t lie, if there’s something to be gained
There’s money to be made, whatever’s still to come
The chorus makes the satirical target of the song clear: the wealthy members of the older generation who exploit the young for their own gain.
Get some
Pull up the ladder when the flood comes
Throw enough rope until the legs have swung
Seven new ways that you can eat your youngCome and get some
Skinning the children for a war drum
Putting food on the table selling bombs and guns
It’s quicker and easier to eat your young
Just as Kronos ate his children to keep one of them from rising up to overthrow him, Hozier’s speaker harms the young to guarantee his own selfish gain. “Pull up the ladder” is a common phrase referring to people who get themselves on top and then destroy anyone else’s ability to use the same means they did — combined here with a coming flood makes for a highly evocative image, that of a parent boarding a boat in rising water and pulling up the ladder before their children can follow. Perhaps you might picture the Biblical Noah’s flood or the similar Greek flood that destroyed the world in the time of Deucalion and Pyrrha. But the most urgent world-destroying flood Hozier references is the one that’s yet to come, the one the young are desperately begging the older generations to help avert…
If the flood references global warming, “skinning the children for a war drum” harkens back to a slew of Vietnam War-era protest songs about sending the young off to fight pointless wars for the enrichment of the powerful. Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War” and Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” come to mind. But the ’60s song that forms the most powerful parallel is Leonard Cohen’s 1969 song “The Story of Isaac.” Cohen’s song is a haunting retelling of the Biblical story in which God tells Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, which he is willing to do because of his full trust in God. God spares Isaac after Abraham has proven his willingness to go through with the sacrifice. The Biblical story is about how Abraham passed his test of perfect faith; the Cohen song reflects on the trauma Isaac must have felt watching his father about to kill him for his God. Near the end, Cohen addresses the leaders of his time:
You who build the altars now
To sacrifice these children
You must not do it anymore
A scheme is not a vision
And you never have been tempted
By a demon or a god
He does not bring up war, but the context of 1969 makes it more than clear. Sacrificing your children for a “scheme” is even lower than doing so for a “vision,” and the leaders sending the young to die in war are not inspired “by a demon or a god,” but working for their own gain.
Whether we’re talking about the older generation creating an environment in which future generations cannot live or sending the young off to war to die, we’re talking about Kronos. We’re talking about someone who would prefer to destroy his own children rather than risk losing his position in the world. It is a powerful myth of intergenerational violence, and a fitting metaphor for Hozier’s protest song.
Honorable Mention
There are a few references to classical mythology on the album that don’t go as deep as the others on this list. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention them.
In “First Time,” which is about the speaker’s life changing when he met his lover: “And the first time that you kissed me/I drank dry the River Lethe.” The Lethe is the river of forgetfulness in the underworld; souls drink from it to forget their former life before being reborn. Hozier uses the image of the Lethe to cast the speaker’s lifechanging romance as a more literal rebirth. (The same song makes earlier reference to a “nameless… river undiscovered underground,” supporting the underworld river imagery.)
“I, Carrion (Icarian)” has secondary references to Atlas supplementing its central story of Icarus.
While you’re as heavy as the world
That you hold your hands beneath
Once I wondered what was holdin’ up the ground
But I can see that all along, love, it was you all the way down
Leave it now, I am sky-bound
If you need to, darlin’, lean your weight to meSoarin’ over a world you are carryin’
The idea of Icarus romancing Atlas is one I can’t quite wrap my head around (not to yuck anyone’s yum, I suppose), but the idea of one figure as earthbound as Atlas while the other flies like Icarus is evocative.
The richness of Hozier’s poetry repays relistening and rereading infinitely. He is not a tourist in the world of classical literature, grabbing images like photographs to sprinkle into his songs. He taps into the full depth of expression and insight into the human experience that mythology can offer, even as he twists the myths to ends that the ancients could never have anticipated. Hozier is Ovid, he is Dante, he is an artist that anyone interested in classical reception must give their attention.
Disclaimer: I claim no ownership of the lyrics quoted here, which belong to Hozier, his collaborators, and their publishers (except the Leonard Cohen of course, which belongs to his estate).
