Academy of the Muses – The Remembrance of Heavenly Olympus

On the day of the heliocentric alignment between the Sun/Apollo and the asteroid/Muse Calliope in Aquarius (see 2025 Solar Rituality and Ephemerides), we present the 1st chapter of the text The Academy of the Muses, taking up the closing of the Foreword published at Christmas 2024:

The Academy of Muses – Introduction

O YE, who in some pretty little boat,
Eager to listen, have been following
Behind my ship, that singing sails along,

 Turn back to look again upon your shores;
Do not put out to sea, lest peradventure,
In losing me, you might yourselves be lost.

 The sea I sail has never yet been passed;
Minerva breathes, and pilots me Apollo,
And Muses nine point out to me the Bears.

(Paradiso, Canto II, versi 1-9)

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1. The Remembrance of Heavenly Olympus

To plow the celestial Waters of the Muses, the supermundane Olympus of Ideas, that divine Sanctuary of the Good, the Beautiful and the True, requires a “second navigation” (Plato), a rebirth: without intuition (Beatrice) one does not ascend.

According to the theosophical vision, the Ascent to Paradise occurs through:

– the blazing fire of the abstract higher mind (“Minerva breathes …”: Pallas Athena, born from the head of Jupiter, from the spiritual Soul: it is Intelligence that must reveal its divine essence, Love-Wisdom; in Sanskrit, Manas revealing Buddhi),

– the Light of Pure Reason, intuition (“… and pilots me Apollo”: Apollo, the Sun-God, also the son of Zeus and brother of Hermes – Buddhi),

– the development of the 3 Triads of Soul Qualities, the 9 petals of the egoic Lotus (see next page), which ‘demonstrate’ the Sources of Spiritual Power – Atma (“… And Muses nine point out to me the Bears”).

The spiritual Triad is that ‘mountain’ next to heaven, which animates all things and human beings: “Next to heaven, on the peaks of the mountains, live the Muses…” (WFO)*

The Muses call to the High Heavens and ‘demonstrate’ it: between invisible and visible Fires, the Bears, to which the nine Muses report, are the two Constellations, Great Bear and Little Bear, which as driving propellers radiate Life from the Solar Peak.

The evidence of the Two Ursæ Major and Minor or Celestial Chariots^[1] (which for Esoteric Astrology move the Evolution of the entire Solar System together with the 3rd Chariot of the Firmament, the Pleiades) is indeed at the Abode of the Poles, not only because the present Polar Star of our Planet is part of Ursa Minor, but especially because their ‘asterisms’ demonstrate the Dragon (whose coils embrace the North Pole or Hyperborean Peak of the entire Solar System and the Sun).

 To such Heavenly Summit, Holy Mountain and Place of Government, Center of the Head of our Firmament, lead the nine Olympians:

“The Muses have a very high, indeed unique, place in the divine hierarchy. They are called daughters of Zeus, born of Mnemosyne, the Goddess of memory; but this is not all, for they, and they alone, bear, like the father of the Gods himself, the appellation of Olympians, an appellation by which men used to honour the Gods in general, but – at least originally – no God in particular, with the exception of Zeus and the Muses.”^[2]

Zeus, Jupiter, is for Esoteric Astrology the Solar Agent of the Second Aspect of the Soul or Spiritual Consciousness, of the Second Ray of Love-Wisdom, the Divine Ray, the Goal of the present Second Solar System; He is the BuddhiPrinciple, that electric Fire at the center of every atom and in the heart of every being, Love that moves the sun and the other stars: the ‘Universal Motive’.

Zeus, in addition to holding Olympus together with the Muses from the Second Monadic Plane (the Plane of the planetary Gods who express themselves precisely through the 3 central planes of the Triad: atmic, buddhic and manasico – see table p. 10), in the microcosm-man presides over the Auric Egg on the lower 5 planes (from the systemic atmic to the physical) and particularly over the spiritual Heart of the Monad on the abstract mental plane (higher Manas), that causal body focused in the egoic Lotus seat of the human Soul. Such monadic Heart at its Center protects the Jewel of Synthesis(the anchor of the Will-to-Good of the Monad), an Olympian Throne guarded by precisely nine petals, three triads of igneous vibrations, of the 3 fundamental Energies – Will/Sacrifice, Love and Knowledge: in our comparison, they are the reflections of the Nine Muses, which in essence are Three and are One.

The Olympian Powers of Thought substantiate by singing and dancing the World of Ideas and Gods, showing us the Highest Way …

To point the Bears, the Summit of the World of Ideas, the Heavenly Paradise, Dante needs at some point not only the Muses, but also their Guide, Apollo, the “Sun of Wisdom” Son of Zeus, god of music, medical arts, sciences, intellect and prophecy:^[3]

O good Apollo, for this final task
make me the vessel of your excellence,
what you, to merit your loved laurel, ask.

Until this point, one of Parnassus’ peaks
sufficed for me; but now I face the test,
the agon that is left; I need both crests.^[4]

And Lorenzo Lotto’s painting “Sleeping Apollo and the Muses” (1545-9) well delineates what could happen if the god Apollo Musagete fell asleep, if intuition fell silent; even the Muses would go astray, becoming Nymphs, leaving the world bereft of Order, of Music, Song and the meaning inherent in creation itself. It would be the advent of nihilism.

“As of the Nymphs, so also of the Muses they are said to grasp mortals, the difference being that while those who are grasped by the Nymphs (numf’lhptoi) run the danger of losing their reason, the folly that comes from the Muses involves the elevation and illumination of  spirit, in which the miracle of song and poetry becomes possible. He who is grasped by the Muses is the true poet, as opposed to the banal versifier (Plut. de virt. mor. 12).” (WFO)

Invoking therefore the Guidance of Apollo, we hear the supermundane song of the divine Muses through their Legend:

“The Muses are daughters of Mnemosyne [Memory] and Zeus, and are nine sisters, the fruit of nine nights of love [Zeus disguised as a shepherd, the Soul or group consciousness]. Other traditions make them the daughters of Harmony, or the daughters of Uranus (the Sky) and Gaea (the Earth). All these genealogies are evidently symbolic and relate, more or less indirectly, to philosophical conceptions about the primacy of Music in the Universe. For the Muses are not only the divine singers, those whose choruses and hymns cheer Zeus and all the gods, but preside over Thought, in all its forms: eloquence, persuasion, wisdom, history, mathematics, astronomy.”^[5]

According to Pausanias, Zeus begat in Mnemosyne three muses by lying with her for nine nights: Melete (practice, action), Mneme (remembrance) and Aoede (song), referred to as Mneiai.

“According to Plutarch (Convivial Matters 744), at the oracle of Apollo, the Muses could only be three, since they were worshipped as Ladies of the three worlds: the realm of the earth and moon, the celestial domain of the planets, and finally the upper sphere of the fixed stars where the gods are. And since the three worlds are united and connected by a harmony that is music and sound, the names of the Muses could only reflect this truth, coming to coincide with the three fundamental strings of the lyre and the three notes of the musical scale: Nete, the “lowest” string, Mese, the “Intermediate,” and Hipate, the “highest”.” (DSM)**^[6]

The Nine is the first power of the Three, the Triad, the triune One (1×3² or 1x3x3); the Nine Muses are irradiation of the one Muse of the primordial Waters:

“Mnemosyne … was included by Hesiod among the Titans, but the name shows how she belongs to the youngest generation of gods; in fact it alone can replace that of the Muses and appears on Attic vases as that of the one Muse, designating her as the goddess of memory … As the daughter of the very ancient goddess of memory and remembrance, the Muse herself is regarded by some as preceding all formation of the deity: Mnemosyne-Mnéme are akin to Moûsa. The Muses, sometimes called Mneîai, echoing the root of remembrance: mimnésko, memini in Greek and Latin; but the name also relates to the root of mystérion, mys-, from the ancient Akkadian voice musu, ‘night,’ signifying the arcane sacredness of darkness (my´stes is the initiate who watches over the whole night).

… The link between memory and song, between time and poetry, is, for the entire Greek culture, very close, and at least until Plato it remains mythically clear how the poetic function demands supernatural intervention and divine frenzy. “Possessed by the Muses, the poet is the interpreter of Mnemosyne, just as the prophet, inspired by the god, is the interpreter of Apollo”; clairvoyance, poetic or prophetic, has for its object invisibilia, that is, the two directions of time for which mortals do not possess eyes [present and future]. In fact, the poet is blind to the present, like Homer, and strives if anything to be prophetic, “before time” … Remembering constitutes his knowing and seeing: poetizing is for him the result of anamnesis, of mythical recollections: it is by proceeding to the unchanging heart of time, by touching Mnemosyne, that he will bring back a totally new song and up to the spirit of the time. …

Memory (like the Muse) evokes, is voice from a place to which it calls the poet – anámnesis traditionally means (both Hesiod’s poetic anamnesis and Plato’s philosophical anamnesis) initiation into distant knowledge; and Mnemosyne … is also the goddess of the Orphic ceremonial that celebrates the mystery of the great initiation into language, from which descend as the first exoteric product the images of the gods.

Mnemosyne is mother of the Muse who gives word to the real through formed creations: the worlds represented by the gods …

[“Memory is not only a mental faculty, but an “essentially creative power. In essence, it is an aspect of thought, and – along with imagination – is a creative agent, for thoughts are things…”].^[7]

Mnemosyne properly denotes a place of absolute beginning, in which time and events have not yet begun; goddess of radical emptying, absolutely initial memory (mnéme), she reaches back indefinitely to restore contingent phenomena to their nonexistence …

… [Who] does not have the imaginative power to suspend the cosmos to the nothingness that precedes its possible existence [‘nothingness’ is non-being for esotericism, the Space ‘full’ of Life but aformal], remains caught in the net of Necessity, a man of short destiny who cannot see beyond his own life.

… The reminiscence of the Muse, conducted to the point of “remembering” Mnemosyne, is revelation^[8] and initiation: but this remembrance is, properly, a remembrance of nothingness [non-being], it has no words, since every sphere of the sayable and the figurable (language, the gods themselves) is subsequent. It is difficult, therefore, for a word to be said to be “original,” when it necessarily belongs to time, to the order of remembrance, to cosmic life.” (WFO)

The one Muse of Memory thus seems assimilable to Mulaprakriti of Occult Philosophy, that Rootless Root motherof Cosmic Substance (Prakriti) and of every Creator/Logos: the first veil, as yet unmanifested, of absolute Life Parabrahman.

Specifically, at the level of the Solar System, occult Cosmogenesis teaches that the power of the divine Song or Creator Thought of the Solar Logos is embodied and retransmitted by the Creative Hierarchies, conscious and intelligent Lives presiding over the substantial planes of His manifestation and constituent parts of His Life Centers or planetary Logoi.^[9]

Humanity, still an imperfect expression of the Fourth Creative Hierarchy, central among the Seven of the ‘Solar Manifestation’ and associated with the Buddhic plane, with Language, with the “Word made Flesh,” must therefore remember this Olympian origin and destiny: it must be heroic, a conscious co-creator of the Gods and Muses, it must become a master of the “latent force in sound,^[10] in speech and music,” thus in turn supporting the evolution of the lower hierarchies and kingdoms:

(EA, 35)

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* Excerpts from Walter Friedrich Otto, “Die Musen und der Göttliche Ursprung des Singens und Sagens” (The Muses. And the Divine Origin of Speech and Song) (In the text labeled with WFO)

** From: Davide Susanetti, “Luce delle Muse – La sapienza greca e la magia della parola” (Light of the Muses. Greek Wisdom and the Magic of the Word) (DSM)

[1] Odysseus, too, follows the Seven Stars of the Heavenly Chariots to find the right direction to the Center of Centers: “For a duration of seven years – a symbolic number corresponding to the transition from latent potentiality to the fulfillment of actual manifestation – Odysseus has remained ‘hidden’ in this condition [by Calypso]. But it is time, as the seven precisely signals, for him to return to full existence. The gods have thus decreed and enjoin Calypso to depart the hero, returning him to life. Odysseus, with the art of a consummate carpenter, thus builds himself a raft and in it embarks, keeping his eyes fixed on the Pleiades and the stars of the Bear, to find the right direction.

… In the unfolding of that wandering and wholly involuntary course, swinging back and forth between east and west, Odysseus had struggled strenuously, step by step, to be and to find himself, and this is perhaps the greatest glory offered to a hero. He had struggled to get out of the baleful loops of that labyrinth into which his sea voyage had turned. To triumph over the deadly trap of that bewildering design: that was the very initiatory test he had been called upon to pass.

… And Pindar speaks of the “chariot of the Muses” that brings the poet inspiration, and Empedocles solemnly invokes:

To you, much praised Muse, white arms virgin,
I ask, as far can a mortal’s hearing,
To lead the nimble winged chariot
Out of the abode of wisdom.” (DSM) (TPS translation)

[2] Walter Friedrich Otto, Theophania.

[3] Apollo is the solar consciousness that sings and defends Truth, Good and Beauty: “Between the opposite tension of these two different strings [zither and bow], between the extremes of weapon and instrument, moves the power of Apollo. After all, it was he himself who had proclaimed it when he was still a tender infant. Stripping off the swaddling clothes and ribbons in which his mother had wrapped him, the divine child cried out radiantly, “Let the zither and the curved bow be my privileges.” (Homeric Hymn to Apollo 131).

However, there is not always someone who, like Latona, can disarm the god. Darts do not always yield to song. Especially since the two privileges, at times, seem to recall each other just in the dimension of sound. The same verb, psállein, denotes the vibration of the bow and the singing of the instrument when the string is plucked artfully. … Apollo, who knows how to heal every evil and eliminate every impurity, he who is lord of medicine, strikes the Greeks with the contamination of a plague that reaps the army. … If the Muses, if the maidens of Memory dispense sweet honey, the privileges of the masculine Apollo seem by contrast to intertwine, in an indissoluble nexus, the beauty of song and the ultimate horror of death: the sound of music and the cry of slaughter, the enchantment of the zither and the sinister hiss of the fatal dart.

… “The name of the bow (biós) is life (bíos), but its work is death (thánatos),” Heraclitus said, with allusive wisdom, pointing to the coincidence between that which kills and that which makes live (fr. 48). Bow and lyre are, in equal measure, symbols of a single hidden harmony that, along a tightrope, moves uniting the opposite ends of a conflict that is both life and death of all things (fr. 51).

… The winged nature of the word-dart would suggest both its swiftness and its effectiveness in conveying thought and eliciting response. But it is not only the spoken word that flies. Winged are also, and above all, the hymns and odes that the gods can inspire. An infallible dart, which is not lost in the void, is always the song shot from the “bow of the Muses”: “sweet arrow” that does not “fall to the ground” when a poet makes “the strings of the zither vibrate.”

… True poetry is an arrow that, combining unerring aim with instantaneous motion, pierces heart and mind. Like the bow, speech and song do not need the physical proximity and contiguity of bodies: launched from afar — without sometimes even being able to see its source or trajectory — they indefectibly reach the score.

… In this interweaving of bow and zither, the word and the dart, the figure of Apollo only evokes the trace of immemorial archetypes. In Vedic India, too, the goddess Vac, the sovereign “Word,” disposes of bow and arrow, as does the fearsome son of Latona. It falls to her, similarly, to guard the sacred and to strike down those who offend the priest. To her it falls, in addition, to guard the meters and songs that preside over the relations of men and gods, penetrating, like darts, all heaven and all earth.

… Everything that excels by stretching itself to its utmost limit, everything that becomes perfect — word, thought or action — is an absolute form that vibrates with light, a form that, precisely because of its perfection, is a dazzling epiphany of the divine nature. In the beauty of song as well as in the gifts of wisdom — in what is the domain of his privileges — Apollo is but the manifestation of this form and light to which mortals yearn to transcend the narrow confines of their condition: the dazzling gold of the zither, the sparks of the harmonious dance, the flashing dart that illuminates the target of knowledge, the light of song that celebrates every blazing success.” (DSM)

[4] Paradiso (Canto I, 13-18). Paraphrase: O good Apollo, grant me your inspiration for the last Canticle, as much as you require to grant the coveted poetic laurel.

So far only one peak of Mount Parnassus (the Muses’ inspiration) has been sufficient for me; but now I must set about the remaining work with the help of both (including Apollo’s).

[5] Translated from Enciclopedia dei miti (Encyclopedia of Myths), Garzanti editor (EDM).

[6] The Muses, sometimes 3, sometimes 9, sometimes 7 (in the cult at Lesvos), are associated with the three Charites, particularly at Delphi and Sicyon:
“Among the female deities, the closest to the Muses are the Charites, the goddesses who bestow grace and protection in nature and in the lives of men. Everything that is beautiful, desirable, rich in spirit received its splendor from them (cf. Pindar Ol. 14:3 ff.); even every song owes them its magnificence and sweetness … “They sang the sweet words, ‘what is beautiful, is worthy of love, what has no grace, is not worthy of being loved.’ These words came from the immortal mouth.” But already in the Homeric Hymn to Artemis (27:15) it is described how the goddess, after rejoicing in the hunt, goes to Delphi to her brother Apollo to lead there the splendid chorus of the Muses and Charites. In Hesiod (Theog. 64) the Charites dwell on Olympus very close to the Muses; “come now, sweet Charites and Muses with beautiful curls,” invokes Sappho (fr. 90).” (WFO)

[7] From: A. A. Bailey, “Esoteric Astrology,” Lucis Collection, p. 207 – EA.

[8] “The name of Μοῦσαι (in Aeolian, Μοῖσαι, by contraction from Μόνσαι) may go back, like “Mnen-” from which Mnemosyne is derived, to the root μεν–μαν, with the meaning of “those who meditate, who create with imagination.” (Translated from Wikipedia: Muse)

[9] The Six Forces of the Manifest Creative Hierarchies (on the 7th cosmic physical plane, the plane of manifestation of a Solar System) are: “The Six are the six forces of Nature.
What are these six forces? See S. D., I, 312.
1. They are types of energy.
2. They are the dynamic quality or characteristic of a planetary Logos.
3. They are the life force of a Heavenly Man directed in a certain direction.

These “shaktis” are as follows:—
1. Parashakti—Literally, the supreme force, energy and radiation in and from substance.
2. Jnanashakti—The force of intellect or mind.
3. Ichchhashakti—The power of will, or force in producing manifestation.
4. Kriyashakti—The force which materialises the ideal.
5. Kundalini shakti—The force which adjusts internal relations to the external.
6. Mantrikashakti—The force latent in sound, speech and music.

These six are synthesised by their Primary, the Seventh [the astral Light].” (A. A. Bailey, “A Treatise on Cosmic Fire”, Lucis Collection, note p. 395 – TCF).

10 “…the chief agency by which Nature’s wheel is moved in a phenomenal direction is sound. Sound is the first aspect of the manifested pentagon since it is a property of ether called Akas … In the opinion of our old philosophers sound or speech is next to thought the highest karmic agent used by man.
Of the various karmic agencies wielded by man in the way of moulding himself and surroundings, sound or speech is the most important, for, to speak is to work in ether which of course rules the lower quaternary of elements, air, fire, water and earth. Human sound or language contains therefore all the elements required to move the different classes of Devas and those elements are of course the vowels and the consonants …—Some Thoughts on the Gita, p. 72.” (TCF, p. 196, note 80)