2013 - Year of the Muse
~jimmypage.com, January 1 2013
Before all the sweat equity that a Mage must put into Magick - or a musician into music - there must be inspiration to provide the goal, the end point of that journey. But where does inspiration come from?
The neat, clean hard-wired explanation
Scientists today are discovering some incredible information on how communication and creativity work in our brains. They are getting a picture of how truly hard-wired we humans are for what we are capable of. The actual physical pathways of electrical pulses and brain structures involved during acts of creativity are being mapped. This is very exciting stuff - but what scientists are doing is confirming what many of us have already understood: Music is something that not only we all can do or at least appreciate, but is a basic and necessary part of the human communicative experience that evolution shaped the brain to do.
But as nice and neat as that sounds, that still doesn't explain the source of inspiration. Science is remarkably chary of addressing the hard questions: Why does life exist at all? What started it? What's it all for?
The mushy, non-scientific explanation
Like with Magick, music is a process and an experience. Like with Magick, the musical process requires desire and will and ritual (performance). And like with Magick, in spite of what science would say, the source of music is not ultimately to be found in the hard-wired world but in something much vaster than electrical pulses in the human brain.
Science has yet to venture into to the scary territory of the Mysteries and pretty much either pretends that part of the human experience doesn't even exist or that it's hogwash (although quantum physics is making that avoidance harder and harder to maintain). Even when attempting to categorize, quantify and otherwise pin down psychic phenomena science clings to the notion that there is no difference between the mind and the brain.
The ancients tackle the hard stuff
Some thinkers have always known better. To them - particularly the ancient sages of mythology and philosophy - the mind/brain sameness claim would have been considered ignorant in the extreme.
Which is not to say that human attempts to explain the unexplained (and likely unexplainable) have been 100% accurate either, but at least they tried, and so those of us today with broader vision benefit. There is much to learn from mythology, and thus we come to Muses, the goddesses who embody inspiration and the arts.
The Muses
In western mythology there were originally three muses: Practice, Memory and Song. However, traditional mythology gives us nine muses - either daughters of Gaia and Uranus, or of Zeus and Mnemosyne (goddess of memory, daughter of Gaia and Uranus). No matter what the genealogy, the Muse we are most interested in is Euterpe ("giver of delight"), originally the muse of music and later of lyric poetry. She is most often depicted holding a flute or sometimes a lyre.
Diodorus Siculus (Greek historian 1st century B.C.) said of Euterpe, "she gives to those who hear her sing delight in the blessings which education bestows." The bringer of musical inspiration bestows the blessing of knowledge. But we knew that.
The point of the mythology is not that there is a goddess named Euterpe hovering in the background tapping the head of a musician with a magic wand and knocking inspiration into the otherwise vacant mind, but that the inspiration is a connection from the human mind to another realm, one that is vaster than humans. It is a blessing of enlightenment and delight that appears to spring from outside the musician, in mythology from a Muse.
Truly, inspiration comes from and through the musician, as does Magick. The source isn't the human being exactly - the Mage or the musician opens the way, is a conduit of the infinite and, necessarily, a filter that cannot help but distort (that pesky infinite/finite issue).
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| Background mosaic of Euterpe appears on the front of a concert hall, "la salle Rameau", in Lyon, France. Click here for full image. |
Who needs a Muse?
So what's with the Muse, then? If a Mage or musician can do it without one, who needs an ancient goddesses of mythology? Well, to put it simply, there's the audience issue, too.
The Muse not only provides an explanation for the seeming Magickal blossoming of an idea but is also an audience to bounce ideas off. All artists, all creators, need an audience - someone impartial who will experience and validate the work. But while in the process of creation, an actual human and fallible audience can be a bad idea - an uneducated comment, or even a good comment at the wrong time, can squash the artist's creative flow flatter than a bug under the sole of a Dr. Martens boot.
While some artists and Mage have a living, breathing person as Muse who provides inspiration and feedback, those extraordinary individuals are rare. For the solitary artist or Mage, the work in progress must be bounced off of the vision of the heart and soul. It can be done, and must be done that way for the highest-level Mages of Magick, music or any of the arts or advancements in knowledge - new work means going where no Mage has gone before.
The Muse, then, is a metaphor for the artist's or Mage's process of tapping into the infinite and letting the light shine through. Jimmy Page has declared this is the year of the Muse: A year of inspiration, of creation, of new music and of Magick.
Listen for your own Muse, for you surely have one if you want one. If not your own, then Jimmy Page's will do.
Happy Birthday Jimmy Page January 9
