Muses are the Nymphs of the Greek Poets

Book excerpt: Thomas Taylor on the Muses that harmonise our triune energies by elevating them to the Noetic Unity of Spirit. Philosophy causes our psychical powers to be moved harmoniously, in symphony with real beings, and in accordance with the orderly motions of celestial orbs. Philosophy is the Greatest Music. Muses are the sources of the variety of harmonies. They impart to souls the investigation of Truth, and to bodies a multitude of powers. The Musagetes himself unfolds Truth to souls according to One Intellectual Simplicity. The Muses, the Celestial Spheres, the sensible world, the whole soul of the universe, and the souls of ordinary men, had a consubsistent progression. Ralph Emerson on Plato domesticating the soul in nature. George Mead on gods and their shaktis. Muses are intoxicated with the nectar of divine knowledge. They dance around Apollo, the splendour of one Invisible Sun. They are the powers of remembrance of spiritual knowledge enjoyed by the soul in past births. While Muses are the beneficent use of awakened spiritual powers, Sirens are the allurements of opened psychic powers. Madame Blavatsky explains how inferior goddesses emanate from superior deities.