Demon Muse

An ever-increasing segment of the population is becoming aware of and interested in the muse-based or genius-based model of creativity. More and more people are discovering the idea that creativity can rightly and fruitfully be viewed as an external or independent force that influences and works through a person in the manner of the classical muse, that divine spirit — or, for the ancient Greeks, the several divine spirits — whose function is to whisper inspiration directly into the human mind and soul.

And this all leads, eventually, to a crucial question: What exactly are we talking about? Is it more correct to say that creativity really is an independent and autonomous force, or that it can be viewed as such?

In short, is the muse real?

A brief review

Before addressing the question directly, let’s have a brief review of just how we got to this point.

The muse-view received a major publicity boost in 2009 when Elizabeth Gilbert, author of the galactic best-seller Eat, Pray, Love — which received a major publicity boost of its own in 2010 from the release of the movie adaptation starring Julia Roberts as Gilbert — gave a wildly popular TED talk in which she explained this ancient view of human creativity and commended it to our collective attention as a viable alternative to the modern tendency, born of historical-cultural transformations flowing out of the Renaissance and Enlightenment eras, to view genius as a quality that certain extraordinary people possess. In the ancient view, she reminded us, the word “genius” referred to an invisible and independent spirit that gave artists and thinkers their inspiration. Instead of being a genius, an artist or thinker had a genius. The distinction is crucial.

Gilbert’s talk went viral and is still being talked about today (the present article being a case in point). Legions of bloggers responded with enthusiastic links and comments. Every week sees one or more mentions of muse-ish creativity cropping up in the blogosphere and elsewhere. Excitement is obviously high. People continue to express new delight at being introduced to the notion that they can relate to their creativity as an independent force with which they work in collaboration. For my own part, I launched Demon Muse in early 2010 and have seen interest in it catapult ever upward with each passing week. This is all part of a cresting or still-swelling wave that I talked about in my article for Talent Development Resources, “Perspiration Meets Inspiration or, The Return of the Muse.”

So that’s how we arrived at this this situation where the question of the muse’s ontological status is a pressing one. To repeat: What exactly are we talking about when we talk about the muse, the daimon, the genius? Are we using such terminology as a metaphor for the unconscious mind? Or are we referring to something literal, something objective and self-existent?

If we say it’s a nothing more than a metaphor for the unconscious mind, then we’re just opening another can of worms and skirting the real question, because hardly any of us give any real thought to what we mean by “the unconscious.” We have fooled ourselves into thinking we know what that word refers to, simply because we have a word for it.

If we say the muse is objectively real, then we end up against the age-old and very real problem of establishing how we could truly know such a thing, and could prove definitively that such knowing isn’t just a subjective fantasy or delusion.

This demands some serious, precise, and level-headed reflection. Without presuming to wrap what follows into a necessarily codified exposition with a straight line of thought cutting through it, here are several considerations from a variety of thinkers and writers whose observations and ideas, taken piecemeal or collectively, may reward attention and reflection. Consider it a meandering route through a landscape marked by various signposts, all of which speak in one way or another about a common theme. At the end, I’ll present my own answer to the question — which, as you’ll see, may well stand as an anti-answer.

“The Enlightenment changed the senses”

The muse/daimon/genius is of course deeply associated with the sense of hearing — whether outer, as in a voice perceived by the physical ear, or inner, as in a voice perceived within a person’s mind or soul. Hold that thought as you consider the following.

In his highly regarded 2000 study Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment, Princeton religion scholar Leigh Schmidt examined the perceptual changes that were wrought upon the human psyche by the well-known and much-discussed program of disenchantment that was effected by the American enlightenment in the 18th century.

The Princeton Weekly Bulletin summarized Schmidt’s findings in researching his book:

Schmidt found that hearing has long been marked as a spiritual and emotional sense. However, experiences like hearing heavenly or demonic voices came under particular attack during the Enlightenment, a philosophical movement of the 18th century marked by a rejection of traditional social, religious and political ideas, and the embracing of rationalism instead. To men like Thomas Jefferson and Ethan Allen, reason was the only trustworthy oracle.

The thinkers of the Enlightenment were threatened by the unstable power that immediate revelation possessed, especially when combined with the unruly passions and proclamations of the devout. In order to establish a civil society governed by reason and not religious authorities, it was necessary for the natural philosophers to place sharp limits on divine speech.

In many ways, the campaign succeeded. Schmidt traces the ascendancy of sight and the fall of hearing as a reliable source of information, a process that produced phrases like “seeing is believing.” Hearing voices increasingly became associated with trickery or insanity.

– “Book explores hearing as a spiritual sense,” Princeton Weekly Bulletin 90.8 (Nov. 6, 2000)

Note well that Schmidt’s point wasn’t that the Enlightenment actually contained those “disruptive” voices, but instead that the voices continued to break through in ways that eluded, and that continue to elude, the new mainstream cultural filters built upon this reeducation of the ear. “What I wanted to do,” he told Princeton Weekly Bulletin, “is take seriously the myth that the Enlightenment destroyed the enchantment of the divine world but also to critique it. We can’t keep saying we live in a world in which the angels, prophets and oracles are dead quiet when one of the fastest growing religious movements is Pentecostalism. In that movement, people speak in tongues and receive special gifts to interpret the Spirit’s utterances. God speaks among them as a regular part of worship.”

Here’s a key passage from the introduction to his book itself, where Schmidt explains in compressed detail the motivation and implications of the Enlightenment project’s focus on hearing:

The Enlightenment changed the senses. Like any regimen of perception, it dulled and sharpened simultaneously. The honing was perhaps most apparent: it took, after all, a well-trained ear to know what to listen for through the stethescope, to diagnose pulmonary or respiratory disease from the subtly different sounds heard through this resonant device. In the advancing Baconian, Lockean, and Common-Sense enterprises, the external senses were to be constantly improved, corrected, and extended; the “good management” of them, the steady cultivation of their precision and delicacy, was a crucial part of establishing and preserving the right habits of mind. Hearing shared keenly in that reeducation of perception.

. . . . Natural philosophers dreamed as well of an exquisite purification of listening — the end of the credulous acceptance of all the hearsay about the miraculous, the marvelous, the revelatory. This, then, is the dulling: the quieting of all those heavenly and demonic voices by which “superstition” had for so long impeded the advancement of knowledge. Shamefully, the disease had often infected the learned themselves: witness Socrates, who followed the voice of a guiding spirit of daemon; or Augustine, whose conversion was sparked when he took a child’s singsong utterance as a divine command to open the Bible and read it; or even Edward Herbert, deistic progenitor, who heard a clear heavenly prompt to publish his streamlined credo. To spare themselves such embarrassments and to tame the endless effusions of religious enthusiasm, enlightened literati — whether Christian Baconians or freethinking anticlericalists — cultivated a markedly new acoustics.

– Hearing Things (2000)

A clear implication of Schmidt’s research is, obviously, that “hearing things” — divine voices and such — is normal in the overall scheme of human history (at least as gauged by the psychology and experience of Americans). The fact that it’s currently booted out of respectability in American public life is not an inherent factor in the experience itself, but is the result of a clear cultural-political agenda on the part of those who did the booting, .

So this is one signpost along the way. The hearing of voices, the receiving of what feels like and/or is taken to be direct and spontaneous communication from an invisible source, is not some bizarre deviation from the mainstream of human experience. Rather, it is the mainstream.

Up next: the strange cases of Robert Anton Wilson, Timothy Leary, and Aleister Crowley, all of whom famously experienced autonomous communications from what felt like or purported to be extraterrestrial or astral entities.

CONTINUED IN PART TWO

BOOKS REFERENCED IN THIS ARTICLE:

IMAGE CREDIT:

Angel of Fate used under Creative Commons from h.koppdelaney

Related posts:

1. In Search of Higher Intelligence: Aleister Crowley, Timothy Leary, Robert Anton Wilson (Theology, Psychology Neurology – Part Two)
2. Third Eyes and Unknown Entities: Mysteries of the Pineal Gland (Theology, Psychology, Neurology – Part 3.1)
3. Patience, the Muse, and Real Life