[Greetings, friends, from Austin! Yesterday, I had the good fortune of, once again, co-hosting a quarterly men’s retreat outside of Austin. Following the creative spirit of Spring, we focused on two topics: (1) invoking the spirit of the Muses in helping us tell the story of our lives; and (2) how cultivating the archetypes helps us toward wholeness.
In today’s essay, I want to focus on the first of those two topics—the invocation of the Muses and how its practice puts us in the company of some of our most creative ancestors. Hesiod. Homer. Virgil. Milton. The unknown poet of the Green Knight… All started their infamous stories with a request for aid from above, as if these stories came from somewhere outside of them and their only duty was to relay to the world what memory relayed to them.
To this ancient practice of invoking the Muses, we devote the rest of today’s essay.]1
Since the beginning of the poetic tradition, writers have requested aid from the Muses—nine Greek goddesses of art and literature, daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne (Memory)—in telling stories. It’s how Homer begins his two epics (Iliad and Odyssey), and Hesiod begins Theogony. It’s how Virgil, following in Homer’s footsteps, started the founding epic of Rome (Aeneid). Dante does it in Canto II of the Divine Comedy…. Milton, in Paradise Lost.
Even Plato, who was skeptical of the instability that came with creative genius, recognized the Good that could come from this possession of the Muses he called divine madness. In the dialogue, Phaedrus, Plato’s Socrates defends love (despite the madness it can cause) by arguing that madness, when divinely given, can produce the Good (as when the Muses grant prophecy and art):
There is also a third kind of madness, which is a possession of the Muses; this enters into a delicate and virgil soul, and there inspiring frenzy, awakens lyrical and all other numbers; with these adorning the myriad actions of ancient heroes for the instruction of posterity. But he who, not beign inspired and having no touch of madness in his soul, comes to the door and thinks that he will into into the temple by the help of art—he, I say, and his poetry are not admitted; the sane man is nowhere at all when he enters into rivalry with the madman.2
What the best artists throughout the ages have recognized is that there is a force at work they cannot see, taste, or touch… at least not in the same way we experience material things in the physical plane. It is a force whose seat is not in this material sphere but very real nonetheless. At their best, the role of the artist—like Hermes—is to serve as a sort of mediator, delivering messages from the unseen world to the material world.
The ancients understood this. That’s why, when Homer wants to tell the story of Achilles, he starts the Iliad: “Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans.” Before telling the story of Odysseus in the Odyssey, Homer begins: “Tell me, O Muse, of that ingenious hero who traveled far and wide after he had sacked the famous town of Troy.” Following in the footsteps of Homer, Virgil opens the founding epic of Rome, the Aeneid, with the request that the Muses sing the song of Aeneas through him:
Arms, and the man I sing, who, forc’d by fate, / And haughty Juno’s unrelenting hate, / Expell’d and exil’d, left the Trojan shore. / Long labours, both by sea and land, he bore, / And in the doubtful war, before he won / The Latian realm, and built the destin’d town; / His banish’d gods restor’d to rites divine, / And settled sure succession in his line, / From whence the race of Alban fathers come, / And the long glories of majestic Rome. / O Muse! the causes and the crimes relate; / What goddess was provok’d, and whence her hate; / For what offence the Queen of Heav’n began / To persecute so brave, so just a man; / Involv’d his anxious life in endless cares, / Expos’d to wants, and hurried into wars! / Can heav’nly minds such high resentment show, / Or exercise their spite in human woe?
The best of the Medieval tradition built on this practice. Just before his journey into Hell in the Divine Comedy, Dante pays his respects and completes his call for assistance before setting about his work:
O Muses, O high genius, now assist me! / O memory, that didst write down what I saw, / Here thy nobility shall be manifest!
Milton carried the invocation into the Enlightenment in Paradise Lost, when he begins by asking for the aid of what he calls the “Heavenly Muse”—identified as the spirit of revelation which delivered the Law into the mind of Moses on the top of Mount Sinai:
Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit / Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste / Brought death into the World, and all our woe, / With loss of Eden, till one greater Man / Restore us, and regain the blissful seat, / Sing, Heavenly Muse, that, on the secret top / Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire / That shepherd who first taught the chosen seed / In the beginning how the heavens and earth / Rose out of Chaos: or, if Sion hill / Delight thee more, and Siloa’s brook that flowed
Fast by the oracle of God, I thence / Invoke thy aid to my adventurous song, / That with no middle flight intends to soar / Above th’ Aonian mount, while it pursues / Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme. / And chiefly thou, O Spirit, that dost prefer / Before all temples th’ upright heart and pure, / Instruct me, for thou know’st; thou from the first / Wast present, and, with mighty wings outspread, / Dove-like sat’st brooding on the vast Abyss, / And mad’st it pregnant: what in me is dark / Illumine, what is low raise and support; / That, to the height of this great argument, / I may assert Eternal Providence, / And justify the ways of God to men.
By calling on the Muses, our ancestors started their works by humbling themselves at the feet of something greater and higher… inviting that Eternal Spirit to tell a story through them, not in service of themselves but in service to the Truth that needed a vessel to make itself manifest. Truth, here, is not limited to things literally true but includes things that express something about the nature and energies of reality.
There is a deep wisdom in pledging ourselves to the service of something greater… ancient magic we have forgotten how to tap into, a lost art in a world convinced it needs nothing outside of itself, its reason, and its scientific method.
But it is precisely these times when the world has let an eternal truth lie dormant for too long, that the true artist goes to work excavating it once again. The true artist knows that the flourishing of the creative spirit is far less about what things the artist wants or what stories they want to tell and more about serving the stories and art already within them. It’s not really an act of creation at all … as all acts of attempted creation hit a block better known as the ego. True art is simply the act of bringing forth what wants to come out. It’s an emptying of Self so the light of the Spirit can move through unobstructed.
That’s what the invocation is about and why it remains as essential today as ever. The world must be reminded that there are forces at work greater than us. Forces trying to deliver messages of Hope through those with ears to hear… trying to give us windows into the world of Beauty from where we came and to which we are going hence.
“[G]ive me beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and inward man be at one. May I reckon the wise to be wealthy, and may I have such quantity of gold as none but the temperate can carry.”3 May Your Will not mine, be done. May Your song, not mine, be sung.
Forever and ever. Amen.
With the exception of the Phaedrus quotation, all of today’s citations are taken from the translations available online for free through The Project Gutenberg to make them easy for the reader to source for themselves.
Plato, Phaedrus.
Plato, Phaedrus.