hero Orpheus/ was believed to still be performing his valorous deeds in the present on another plane of existence in heaven which was not necessarily separate from the world of the living necessarily in an abrupt way. Since knowledge was associated with light, which was itself seen as a sign of divine mission, the role of Orpheus/ as the bringer of the secret knowledge of immortality was connected to the myth of Orpheus as the first person to worship "Apollo" (the solar ) as a god of the Sun, where he would climb Mount Pangaeum every morning to be the first to greet the Sun. Although Orpheus was a member of the according to myth, his cult was practised on Mount Pangaeum and Mount Piereia, as well as by the Black Sea and elsewhere, meaning that every Thracian tribe worshipped a similar hero. Iconography Unlike for other Thracian deities, there are no known Thracian depictions of Orpheus. The Hero The hero was a central figure of Thracian religion, and generally Thracian heroes followed the same pattern: the hero was the son of the Great Goddess, and he fought against the forces of evil to protect the Tree of Life and maintain order in the world. The concept of the hero existed at multiple levels of the Thracian cosmology: the omnipotent and universal god was himself the divine all-seeing and all-hearing Hero; and as the tribal ancestor, was also an ancestral hero who was believed to protect nature's fruitfulness, thus being a protector deity to whom the tribe demanded help, and was given a local name by each tribe. Similarly, the god's son Orpheus/ with the Great Mother Goddess was similarly a hero. The dead in the present were also believed to rise in body and spirit and acquire immortality and thus become heroes as well. Since the Thracians did not perceive the world in terms of linear time, and therefore conceptualised their religion and myths not as histories of ancient pasts, but as occurring in the present, and there was no difference between the mythical and heroic past and the present in Thracian religion, these various divine, semi-divine, and human heroes were believed to still be performing their valorous deeds in the present on another plane of existence in heaven which was not necessarily separate from the world of the living necessarily in an abrupt way. The mythology of the